Toronto district school board

A Wisconsin school district has banned a first grade class from singing Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton’s duet “Rainbowland” because it was deemed “controversial” and conflicting with school policy. Melissa Tempel, a teacher at Heyer Elementary in Waukesha, tweeted on March 21 that her first graders were “so excited” to sing "Rainbowland" for a spring concert, but it was vetoed by the administration. The 2017 song talks about working together and living in harmony with lyrics including “Cause I know if we try, we could really make a difference in this world” and “Living in a Rainbowland … Where we’re free to be exactly who we are / Let’s all dig down deep inside / Brush the judgment and fear aside.” Venting her frustration over being barred from using the song, Tempel tweeted, “When will it end?” Waukesha School District said in a statement on March 24 that there's an approval process for instances like these. In this case a teacher suggested “Rainbowland” to the music … [Read more...] about Wisc. school district bans first graders from singing Cyrus-Parton duet ‘Rainbowland’ at concert

On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.” Bush’s Woodridge … [Read more...] about What It Takes to Make a Student

The roads surrounding the Jerusalén-San Luis Alto Picudito Indigenous reservation in Putumayo, Colombia, are treacherous on a good day. Made mostly of gravel and mud, they narrow to barely the width of a small truck in some places, and in others, especially after a storm, they yield almost completely to the many rivers with which they intersect. They also twist and turn and bump without stop. So, in the most difficult months of her pregnancy, when everything tasted like cardboard and it hurt even to sit or stand, Marleny Mesa avoided traveling altogether. This meant skipping checkups at the clinic in Villagarzón, which could take two hours or more to get to. But Marleny wasn’t overly worried. A nurse had assured her early in her pregnancy that her blood work was good and that everything looked fine. As a midwife herself, Marleny knew that making the trip would be riskier than missing a few doctor’s visits. But now, in the final days of her pregnancy, she could not shake the feeling … [Read more...] about The Incredible Challenge of Counting Every Global Birth and Death

The coronavirus pandemic has been defined by so much loss. Of lives, jobs, relationships. Of normalcy. But amid that upheaval, there have been occasional moments of hope, small positive changes borne from the chaos of the past three years. Hundreds of you wrote to us about the ways that pandemic disruptions surprisingly reshaped your lives for the better. Some of you found time to start a new business venture or fall in love. Lockdowns allowed you to spend more time with your children or parents, or prioritize your own happiness through daily morning walks, new recipes or oil painting. In June 2020, I adopted a sickly kitten, a responsibility I wouldn’t have been able to take on had I not been newly working from home. Now she’s almost 3 years old and a lovable companion for whom I feel immensely grateful. Reading your pandemic silver linings genuinely improved my week. I hope you enjoy them, too. Here’s some of what you shared, lightly edited for clarity. “In the spring … [Read more...] about Californians Share Their Pandemic Silver Linings

I. A Broken Economy As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working. The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems … [Read more...] about Obamanomics

Crime has spiked in Washington, DC, in recent months after Biden-appointed United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, refused to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested who would have been put on trial in the D.C. Superior Court, according to 2022 District statistics. Among those Graves declined to prosecute were some 52 percent of all felony arrests, along with 72 percent of misdemeanor arrests, the U.S. Attorney’s Office Annual Statistical Reports revealed. Graves, who was nominated by President Joe Biden on July 26, 2021, and confirmed on October 28, 2021, admitted to the Washington Post the lack of prosecutions has mostly applied to those arrests for gun possession, drug possession, and burglaries. He said he mostly prosecutes those who were charged with homicides, armed car-jackings, assaults with intent to kill, and first-degree sexual assault cases. As the Biden crime wave surges across the nation, police say a father was fatally shot … [Read more...] about Biden-Appointed DA Declined to Prosecute 67% of Those Arrested in DC

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place. In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand , a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington , then a PhD. candidate , conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.” Appropriately titled “ Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States ,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates. Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees … [Read more...] about Do You Live in a ‘Tight’ State or a ‘Loose’ One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a Bit.

Every year at this time, viral college-acceptance videos start making the rounds, passed along from student to student, parent to parent, racking up views in the tens of millions. The videos—which have expanded their reach from YouTube to TikTok—follow a formula that goes like this: A teenager looks nervous and might even be crying, claiming that she’s absolutely, positively certain she won’t get in. Next comes a monologue about how she’s shaking so much, she can’t move or even breathe. Somehow, she manages to log in to the admissions portal and see that the decision is available. There’s more freaking out about how she won’t get in. Finally, she clicks a button and—OH MY GOD—she got in! Expressions of utter shock and piercing screams ensue. One can spend hours watching thousands of videos like these, and many teens do. Some people might find these videos harmless or even uplifting, but that has not been my experience, nor does it resemble what I have heard from other teens around … [Read more...] about Stop Sharing Viral College-Acceptance Videos

Following is the transcript of Barack Obama's economic speech at Cooper Union in New York, as provided by CQ Transcriptions Inc. Thank you so much for being here. Let me begin by thanking Dr. Drucker and Cooper Union for hosting us here today. I have to say that the last time an Illinois politician made a speech here it was pretty good. So... (LAUGHTER) ... the bar is high. And I -- I want everybody to know right at the outset here that this may not be living for generations to come, the way Lincoln's speech did. I want to thank all our elected supporters who are here. I want to -- there are a couple of special guests that I'm very appreciative for being in attendance: Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board... (APPLAUSE) We appreciate his presence. William Donaldson, the former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We thank you. And finally I want to thank the mayor of this great city, mayor Bloomberg, for his extraordinary … [Read more...] about Obama on ‘Renewing the American Economy’

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more -- a view of the planet's ultimate limits, a vision of humanity's destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era. They lead two intellectual schools -- sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters -- that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain … [Read more...] about Betting on the Planet