1) 🚨BREAKING: Parents file lawsuit against Villa Duchesne High School for "intentional racial discrimination" against white students, and using "coercion, intimidation, and threats" to indoctrinate students into Critical Race Theory.

2) Students were told that all white people are racist because they're white, and that black students should "be free from discipline regardless of their behavior."
3) Plaintiff's daughter was subjected to "verbal attacks, and physical threats, social ostracism, false imprisonment, permanent damage to her reputation, and severe and continuing emotional and psychiatric injury."
4) In October a student claimed that the Plaintiff's daughter had stood up in class, pointed to a black student and said "Black Lives Do NOT Matter!"

However, the class where this vent allegedly took place was videotaped, and upon review no such event had occurred.
5) Following the accusations, the plaintiff's daughter was "subject to enormous social ridicule and threats of personal violence."

During a meeting, the principal and a faculty member allowed a black student to aggressively verbally berate the daughter, without intervention.
6) Daughter had a Thin Blue Line sticker on her laptop that students mistook for a Blue Lives Matter sticker.

Faculty told daughter the sticker was racist and "made to crush the BLM movement," and that "simply having that sticker, you should expect to be treated like a racist."
7) At another meeting, the principal told the daughter that "she was, in fact, a racist, that everyone who is white is a racist, and that 'we are all racists, we are white.'"

Other faculty insisted that the daughter "declare that she 'felt safe'" and "it was all in her head."
8) After the daughter repeatedly refused to "admit" to falsehoods, the Dean of Student Excellence—an ardent BLM supporter—stated that they would not discipline the black students who has verbally abused, physically threatened, and defamed her on social media.
9) During this meeting, the daughter was "held against her will" and denied the opportunity to speak with her parents, to be represented by counsel, or leave, all the while being "verbally abused, coerced, and intimidated" by the Dean with the acquiescence of the principal.
10) After the meeting, the daughter endured more threats of violence from students, none of whom were disciplined.

"I'm gonna throw hands on this bitch"
"That bitch needs to get punched in the face"
"She needs to be beaten up"
"I'm sick of that racist bitch—we need to end her"
11) Lawsuit claims the daughter's treatment violated the school's contract with parents to "provide a safe, supportive environment for learning" and to not discriminate based on race.

Instead of protecting the daughter from threats and violence, the school subjected her to more.
12) Lawsuit claims that the acts by the faculty were meant to "coerce, intimidate, and threaten daughter into accepting and acknowledging a racist political ideology commonly referred to as 'Critical Race Theory,' unrelated to any scholastic purpose." And more:
13) The lawsuit claims that the meeting where the daughter was held against her will and subjected to abuse "constitutes false imprisonment in that they acted with the intent to confine Daughter within the principal's office against her will, to her detriment and damage."
14) The lawsuit further claims that the school's actions, by discriminating against the Plaintiff based on her race, violate The Constitution of Missouri, which states "that all persons are created equal and are entitled to equal rights and opportunities under the law."
15) Source: https://t.co/bk3CGjKfy5
16) DISCLAIMER: Just because one side has filed a claim with some facts in court, does not make those facts necessarily true. We will need to follow the details of the case as it progresses to get the whole story.

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OK I am going to be tackling this as surveillance/open source intel gathering exercise, because that is my background. I blew away 3 years of my life doing site acquisition/reconnaissance for a certain industry that shall remain unnamed and believe there is significant carryover.


This is NOT going to be zillow "here is how to google school districts and find walmart" we are not concerned with this malarkey, we are homeschooling and planting victory gardens and having gigantic happy families.

With that said, for my frog and frog-adjacent bros and sisters:

CHOICE SITES:

Zillow is obvious one, but there are many good sites like Billy Land, Classic Country Land, Landwatch, etc. and many of these specialize in owner financing (more on that later.) Do NOT treat these as authoritative sources - trust plat maps and parcel viewers.

TARGET IDENTIFICATION AND EVALUATION:

Okay, everyone knows how to google "raw land in x state" but there are other resources out there, including state Departments of Natural Resources, foreclosure auctions, etc. Finding the land you like is the easy part. Let's do a case study.

I'm going to target using an "off-grid but not" algorithm. This is a good piece in my book - middle of nowhere but still trekkable to civilization.

Note: visible power, power/fiber pedestal, utility corridor, nearby commercial enterprise(s), and utility pole shadows visible.
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x