Randi Chaverria: The Rise and Fall of a High School Teacher

     In 2005 Randi Chaverria (her future married name) graduated from Baylor University with a degree in fashion design. Upon graduation she studied abroad in Florence, Italy. When she returned to the United States Chaverria acquired a job as an assistant designer at Dillard's corporate office in Little Rock, Arkansas. While working in Little Rock she met and married Eric Chaverria. After five years in Arkansas the couple and their two children moved to Paris, Texas where Randi worked as a store manager for a retailer called Maurice's. In 2013, after six years in retail management, Randi Chaverria began teaching fashion design at a Paris, Texas high school.

     In 2016 Randi Chaverria and her family moved to Round Rock, Texas, a city of 100,000 within the Austin, Texas metropolitan area. At Round Rock High she taught fashion design as a Family and Consumer Science teacher. Two years later her husband joined the school's teaching staff.

     In May 2018 Randi Chaverria at the annual Round Rock School District banquet, was named the 2019 secondary teacher of the year. Upon receiving the honor the 35-year-old teacher told the audience that "The most important role of a teacher is to help shape future generations to become successful members of the community. More than any curriculum I teach my students," she said, "I hope that they will walk away from my classroom thinking of ways that they can make a difference in their community and impact the lives of others for the better."

     On November 18, 2019 officials with the Round Rock School District were informed that the local police department had received an e-mail from the parents of an 18-year-old male student who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with his teacher, Randi Chaverria. According the teen the relationship had gone on for several weeks.

     The school was also informed that the fashion design teacher and the student had exchanged text messages that suggested a sexual relationship that included, on two occasions in October 2019, the teacher performing oral sex on the student in her classroom. The student also told detectives that Chaverria had called him several times to arrange sexual encounters. When questioned about this she reportedly did not deny the affair.

     On November 19, 2019, the day after the school learned of the police investigation, Randi Chaverria resigned from Round Rock High School.

     A few days after her resignation a Williamson County prosecutor charged her with conducting an improper relationship with a student, a felony that carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

     The disgraced teacher on November 26, 2019 turned herself into the police. After being booked into the Williamson County Jail she posted her $25,000 bail and was released. (There is no disposition of this case posted on the Internet. In all probability the charges were dropped.)

     While female teacher sexual encounters with male students is fairly common, the Chaverria case was unusual because of the age of the teacher. In most of these cases the women are in their early twenties. Randi Chaverria was 36. 

Professor Jessica Krug's White Lie

     In 2012, Dr. Jessica A. Krug began her career at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. teaching in the History of African-American and Latin American Studies program. Earlier that year she had earned her PH.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although Dr. Krug was born white, she was hired at the university as a black woman.

     After masquerading for decades as a black person, Assistant Professor Krug, in an essay she published for the blog, Medium.com, admitted that she was not black. In the piece, entitled, "The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies," posted on September 3, 2020, the professor wrote: "To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white-Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then U.S. rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness..."

     Dr. Krug's revelation begged the question, did her family and childhood friends know she had changed races? If so, why didn't someone, over the years, expose her fraud?

     In explaining, or perhaps providing a rationale for her identity deception, Dr. Krug also revealed that since childhood she suffered "unaddressed mental health issues." She wrote about her problem this way: "Mental health issues likely explain a false identity, as a youth, and why I continued and developed it for so long. I know right from wrong, I should absolutely be canceled."

     Dr. Krug's prolonged identity deception is more symptomatically related to a personality disorder than mental illness. (This personality disorder could be called "The Rachel Dolezal Syndrome." Dolezal, the former N.A.A.C.P. president in Spokane, Washington, was exposed in 2015 as a white person impersonating a black. Unlike Dr. Krug, Dolezal was unapologetic, defiantly maintaining that regardless of her race, she "identified as black.")

     In the wake of Dr. Krug's shocking disclosure, M. Brian Blake, GWU's provost, announced that "while the university reviews this situation, Dr. Krug will not be teaching her classes this [fall] semester. We want to acknowledge the pain this situation has caused for many in our community and recognize that many students, faculty, staff and alumni are hurting."

     The day following the publication of Dr. Krug's essay, the chairman of the university's History Department called for her to resign. According to a statement released by the department, faculty members were "shocked and appalled by Dr. Krug's admission that she has lied about her identity her entire career." The departmental statement went on to say: "With what she has termed her 'audaciously deceptive" appropriation of an Afro-Caribbean identification, she has destroyed the trust of current and former students, fellow scholars of Africana Studies, colleagues in our department and throughout the historical discipline, as well as community activists in New York City and beyond. The discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past. With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching."
   
     Dr. Krug, in 2018, published a book with a title only a university press (Duke) could love: Modernities: Politics and Identity Outside the State in Kisama, Angola and the Americas, c. 1594 to Present.

A Generation of Semi-Literates

     Can you tell a pronoun from a participle; use commas correctly in long sentences; describe the difference between its and it's?

     If not, you have plenty of company in the world of job seekers. Despite stubbornly high unemployment, many employers complain that they can't find qualified candidates.

     Often, the mismatch results from applicants' inadequate communication skills. In survey after survey, employers are complaining about job candidates' inability to speak and write clearly….

     Experts differ on why job candidates can't communicate effectively. Bram Lowsky, an executive vice president of Right Management, the workforce management arm of Manpower, blames technology. "With Gen X and Gen Y, because everything is shorthand and text, the ability to communicate effectively is challenged," he said. "You see it in the business world, whether with existing employees or job candidates looking for work."

     Others say colleges are not doing a good job. In a survey of 318 employers published earlier this year by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and conducted by Hart Research Associates, 80 percent said colleges should focus more on written and oral communication….

Kelley Holland, "Why Johnny Can't Write, and Why Employers are Mad," CNBC, November 11, 2013

Choosing a "Good" School Over a Good Education

     In terms of acquiring a college education there is nothing more fraudulent than a so-called "prestigious" university. George Orwell, in 1941, said something to the effect that intelligent mechanics would make better leaders than dimwits with fancy degrees. Unfortunately, graduates of prestigious universities dominate the higher levels of business and government. The primary mission of the prestigious school is not teaching. These institutions are all about research and faculty publishing. While the ambitious professors are researching and writing books and journal articles, their classes are taught by graduate students and newly hired professors afraid to give any student a grade below an A. Moreover, many of the courses taught at the top schools are stupid, silly and useless.

     The book Higher Education? (2012) by Andrew Hacker, a retired Queens College professor and Claudia Dreifus, a New York Times journalist, is based on the idea that what goes on in higher education is not education. The authors blame our failed university system on the over importance of research and publishing. They are also critical of tenure.

     In a 2012, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviewed Andrew Hacker for The Atlantic Magazine. According to the author of Higher Education?, "There are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't mater what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. The second reason to go to college is to get a good liberal arts education. We argue that you can get a better education at second or third tier colleges."

     According to Professor Emeritus Hacker, the problem with professors being pressured into publishing is "there are just too many academic publications and too many professors publishing. Not only that, most of the books are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count on how many pieces have been published on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer was several thousand. Really? Who needs this?"

     "Academics," said Hacker, "typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from ages 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. So the pursuit of tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. And even people who get tenure really don't change. What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have tenure. What that means is these people never leave. There's hardly any turnover in the senior ranks. You go to a campus and over two-thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate. They become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking."

     Another critic of modern academia was Martin Russ who taught creative writing in several college and university English Departments. A published novelist, he wrote, in 1980, Showdown Semester: Advice From a Writing Professor. This is one of the most entertaining, informative and helpful books on the subject of teaching college students how to write.

     In his book, Professor Russ provides a professor's take on college administrators (mostly idiots) and gives the reader a peek inside the ivory tower. Professor Russ says this about tenure: "I have the impression that it is the untenured in most English Departments who are the most effective teachers. This is largely due to the anxiety arising from job insecurity, which forces them to work at full capacity. The tenured professor is never forced to justify his classroom work to his students, and can go on year after year in a take-it-or-leave-it way in which arrogance overrides the kind of teaching that has to do with helping, sharing, giving."

     Professor Russ, back in 1980, realized that too many professors were taking time away from their teaching to write books nobody reads: "English professors are always turning out extraneous textbooks or collecting other people's writing and publishing them as anthologies."

The Big Con

We convinced everyone college was 100 percent necessary, and then we made college unaffordable. It mostly started in 1978 when more loans and subsidies became available to greatly expand the number of students. The cost of college tuition has risen by six times the rate of inflation since the 1970s.

Jake Novak, CNBC Feb 23, 2020

Feeding Students Junk History

The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.

Gary DeMar, author, 2019

Should Rutgers University Throw Out Standard Grammar or Professor Rebecca Walkowitz?

     The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of "anti-racist" directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.

     The initiatives were spelled out by Rebecca Walkowitz, the English Department chair and sent to faculty, staff and students in an email...

     Titled "Department Actions in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter," the email states that the ongoing and future initiates that the English Department has planned are a "way to contribute to the eradication of systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color."

     One of the initiatives is described as "incorporating 'critical grammar' into our pedagogy."

     It is listed as one of the efforts for Rutgers' Graduate Writing Program, which "serves graduate students across the Rutgers community. The GWP's mission is to support graduate students of all disciplines in their current and future writing goals, from coursework papers to scholarly articles and dissertations." [So, this is who we can blame for all of that unreadable, jargon-laced academic babbling produced by dissertation writers.]

     Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, "This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard 'academic' English backgrounds at a disadvantage," the email states. "Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them with regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on "written accents." [Good heavens, has it come to this?]

Alex Frank, "Rutgers English Department to Deemphasize Traditional Grammar 'In Solidarity With Black Lives Matter' " The College Fix, July 20, 2020

Online Education

What happens when kids learn that online classes are superior to in person? The scam of colleges and universities might be over soon.

Mike Cernovich, tweet, March 12, 2020

College Education: Overpriced Dreams and a Life of Debt

     Today, the cost of college tuition runs from $16,000 to $60,000 a year. And that's just the tuition. There is no such thing as a cheap college education. If colleges were car dealerships, the cheapest cars on the lot would be Cadillacs.

     The ridiculous cost of a college degree has resulted in 45 million Americans owing a collective debt of $1.6 trillion. It will take many of these college graduates decades to pay off these loans. In many cases, these graduates paid for a Cadillac and ended up with a Pinto.

     According to a recent Sallie Mae survey, 70 percent of parents say they want their children to go to the best school they can get into, regardless of price and affordability. 

Where Free Speech Goes To Die

     On Tuesday, September 25, 2015, a student at the University of Delaware saw pieces of metal hangers dangling from tree limbs by pieces of string. The concerned student, obviously finely tuned to such things, interpreted the objects as miniature nooses, symbols of the lynchings that occurred during the early decades of the 20th century. The sighting came the day after a Fox News contributor named Katie Pavlich delivered a talk at the school. Pavlich's appearance created an uproar among members of the student body and faculty who objected to Pavich's earlier condemnation of the Black Lives Matter Movement. (Most universities and colleges do not take kindly to people who deviate from left-wing orthodoxy. The views of these apostates are considered toxic to the ivory tower environment where any idea outside progressive thinking could adversely affect the mission of political and cultural indoctrination. Examples of this are everywhere.)

     The president of the university, calling the suspected nooses a "deplorable act," and a "hateful display," sprang into action by launching a hate crime investigation. (The school must have a hate crime investigation department or committee. Are these trained investigators? Are they like the religious police in the middle east?) Without waiting for the results of that inquiry, President Nancy Targett issued the following statement: "We are both saddened and disturbed that this deplorable act has taken place on our campus. This hateful display stands in stark contrast to Monday night's peaceful protest and discussion [pertaining to the Katie Pavilich appearance]. We ask everyone in our community to stand together against intolerance and hate." Targett called for a student rally to impress the point the follow afternoon. (Question: If a student studying for an exam skipped the rally, is that student a part of the problem?)

     While the university president wrung her hands over the offending symbols of racism, Delaware students expressed outrage and concern on social media.

     On Wednesday, September 23, the day of the scheduled student rally, the hate crime police determined that the objects that had been hanging from the trees were the remains of lanterns left over from a previous social event.

     When the inconvenient truth hit the fan, President Targett, rather than apologizing for her knee-jerk reaction, proclaimed that the "incident," and her response to it, revealed just how sensitive the campus was to the potential issue of racism. Moreover, it showed a need for "continuing dialogue" on the subject.

     In reality, this "incident" revealed how politically oppressive student life had become on some university campuses. Most students, I would imagine, simply want to improve their lives through higher education. They are not incurring serious debt to be told what to think, what not to say, or how to live their lives. After residing four-years in a bubble where no one can be offended and free speech is out the window, real life must come to these students as a tremendous cultural shock.

     Since I first published this piece in September 2015, America's so-called elite universities, principally in response to the 2016 presidential election, have cracked down even harder on free speech. This has gotten so out of control and undemocratic that older liberals, once the vanguards of free speech, have spoken out against it.

College Freshmen Are Depressed

     Every year for half a century UCLA has surveyed freshman classes at schools across the country to get a reading on their mental health. The latest findings aren't encouraging: The emotional health of 2014's crop of college freshmen is at an all-time low. Nearly one in 10 students in UCLA's study said they frequently felt depressed, and their assessment of their overall emotional health is at the lowest level since UCLA started asking the question.

     UCLA surveyed more than 153,000 first-time freshmen who entered 227 four-year private and public colleges and universities of different types and selectivity. When students were asked to rate their mental health compared to their peers, they gave themselves  a score of roughly 50 percent, which is an all-time low. Previous UCLA surveys have highlighted students' declining mental health over time and its connection to lower student success. This phenomenon can certainly explain a growing reliance on campus mental health facilities.

     According to a different study by the American College Health Association, more than half of college students have said they experienced "overwhelming anxiety" in the past year. Depressed students were also more likely to express boredom with their classes and be less likely to study with their classmates.

     While students reported higher rates of depression in the UCLA study, another worrisome sign is the reduced amount of time they're spending with friends, which also hit an all-time low for the annual survey…

     While it's clear that college students still drink significantly, students are arriving on campus with much less experience consuming alcohol than their peers from 20 to 30 years ago. In fact, in the current UCLA study, freshman reported the lowest rate of alcohol and cigarette use in high school than at any point over 30 years.

     Unfortunately, students quickly discover alcohol when they reach college--when 40 percent of them say they've participated in binge drinking within the past month, according to a study from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism….

"College Freshman's Mental Health Hits New Low," CBS News, February 6, 2015