I was going to post this in General stuff & Tabloids . . .

[ex-khobar Andy]

. . . but I really think it belongs here in Politics.

A schoolteacher in Mississippi has been fired because he read a book called 'I Need a New Butt' to second graders. (7 or 8 year olds.) Apparently it's about a boy who discovers his butt is cracked and seeks to replace it. It's one of Mr. Price's children's favorites. Apparently the book mention farts which typically second-graders find hilarious. (At this point I will admit that I don't know much about second graders - my daughter never was one as she jumped straight from first to third grade. I digress.).

Mississippi ranks #46 among the 50 states for its education program. You'd think that anything which encourages kids to read would be lauded.

[Crackpot]

it mentions Butt-cracks which is akin to sodomy

[BoSoxGal]

What a weird coincidence I was just reading a story about this in the NYT and then logged in here to find this thread.

Unbelievable example of the idiocy in public education. His firing, I mean.

[Long Run]

Mississippi ranks #46 among the 50 states for its education program.

Rankings are always about the criteria used, which includes a lot of subjectivity. The two most objective criteria are graduation rate and SAT scores. MS is in the bottom half of graduation rate, but nowhere near the bottom, and is top ten for SAT scores. Kind of unrelated to the story as there are plenty of examples of bad decision making by school boards in most any state (see e.g. San Francisco). Mark Twain's words are still apt: "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

[TPFKA@W]

I read of this elsewhere and out of curiosity I bought and downloaded the book. It is a most innocuous book. I hope he wins a ginormous lawsuit.

[ex-khobar Andy]

From a NYT piece 26 years ago: (3/27/1996)

In Mississippi, only the top 4 percent of seniors take the S.A.T.; that makes the state's average score artificially high when compared with states in which large numbers of students take the test, according to the report, which is published in the current issue of the Harvard Educational Review. While Mississippi is 16th in raw-score rankings, it is last in the adjusted rankings.

That'll do it. It's rather like TFG's approach to reducing the apparent incidence of covid-19 - just stop doing the testing. He was, of course, right about that.

[Burning Petard]

I was once offered a very substantial financial bribe to go to college in Louisiana (Tulane) Due almost entirely to my adolescent, self-righteous moral ignorance about race in America in general, I turned it down and worked my way though college in Iowa and Michigan. The GI Bill helped. I do not regret it.

snailgate

[Sue U]

Some of my kids' favorites from when they were that age, banned in Mississippi, probably:

Apparently the book mention farts which typically second-graders find hilarious. (At this point I will admit that I don't know much about second graders - my daughter never was one as she jumped straight from first to third grade. I digress.).

Farts and fart jokes will never not be funny. Eight-year-old humor is the best.

[Burning Petard]

Stonekettle Station for Mar 11 makes alot of sense for me. It takes him a while to get wound up but his delivery is right down the middle:

"We have quite literally reached the point where we as a people, as an ideology, as a society, seemingly can only find self-worth in outrage.

"This is about an ideology that claims to revere freedom, but is daily reduced to seething yellow-eyed violent rage over the idea of someone else choosing a pronoun. Over someone learning that their ancestors were property. About the idea of actually trying to make the world a better place. 
This is about a people who see themselves as victims, who literally liken themselves to Jews being pushed into Nazi gas chambers, even as their own endless privilege allows them the freedom to take a month away from work and drive their trucks across country to protest an oppression that exists only in their own fevered brains -- while some of them are literally flying the Nazi swastika and how the fuck does that even make any sense?" 

Indeed, it makes none. Personality cults rarely do, but they usually affect every aspect of life anyway.

snailgate

later edit: change really to rarely in last sentence.