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March 30, 2023
Sorry, College Dems: George Mason University Won't 'Silence' Glenn Youngkin
This article has been updated to reflect how ridiculous the change.org petition against Youngkin speaking is, as well as to highlight how many of the petitioners are not even from Virginia, where Youngkin governs and where GMU is located.
As woke as university administration, there's been something of a glimmer of hope as of late that they will at least stand for sanity. Then again, what they must contend with is nothing sort of insanity from both students and faculty. As Leah covered earlier on Wednesday, a professor at Wayne State University was referred to the police and suspended for quite the threatening social media post. And, at George Mason University (GMU), the administration is standing by its decision to have selected Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) as commencement speaker, despite outcry from Democrats at Mason.
While one wouldn't expect the Democrats on campus to have selected the Republican governor as their first choice for their commencement speaker, he is the governor of Virginia, where GMU, the largest public university in the commonwealth, is located. It's within the realm of possibility to believe that the university would have invited Youngkin's Democratic opponent, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, to speak if he had been elected, but he was not. McAuliffe did address the class of 2016, though, when he was in office.
A Monday statement from President Gregory Washington, "What it means to be a patriot," highlighted such a distinction of it being the largest public university in the commonwealth and also referred to GMU as the "most diverse public university" in Virginia. Diversity, as these students evidently refuse understand, also applies to diversity of speech, expression, and politics.
His statement went on to raise several more thoughtful points:
Is [Youngkin's] inclusion in commencement a betrayal of our core identity of diversity, and commitment to inclusivity? Or are his presence and the passionate objections it has inspired actually the purest reflections of who we are as Mason Patriots?
Mason students come by their objections to the Governor authentically, and their rejection of his positions are rooted in very real, deeply personal, often painful life experiences. It is my sincere hope that our students use this opportunity to share their stories, challenges and triumphs, and that the Governor will hear their opinions, respectfully consider and reflect on them, and consider that feedback when making, amending or changing his administration’s policies.
This discourse highlights one of the fundamental purposes of a university. It is a place to engage, debate, and educate on topics where we agree and disagree, sometimes profoundly. If the Governor’s speech were to be cancelled, it is unlikely that such public attention would be paid to the policies students so passionately oppose.
This is vital because our students must prepare to inherit and lead a world with endless conflicts and divisions. Would we really be preparing them for that world if we removed the opportunities for them to safely engage in debate and discourse?
Or is it better to expose them to people and ideas that may offend or challenge them, but in an environment of steadfast support and safety, so they may develop the agency to effectively express and advocate for themselves once they leave the university environment?
I believe it is the latter. If we teach that the only way to deal with opposition is to suppress it, we rob students of the very tools they will need to build an effective society.
Such points are lost on the angry students, though. Since Washington's statement, the Democrats at Mason's Twitter account has posted pictures and coverage of their protests against Youngkin. One tweet declares they "won't be silenced," though it's worth noting Washington in his statement acknowledged he had "heard from both" those opposed to the governor speaking and those opposed.
The group's retweets also suggested the students believe that Fairfax, where the university is located, is the only part of Virginia that matters in elections. Fairfax is heavily populated, and is one of the most democratic localities not only in the commonwealth but the country. That ought to be irrelevant to the governor speaking at the university, but it's also worth pointing out that Youngkin actually overperformed in the area as part of his victory in 2021. Such facts don't fit the students' narrative, though.
The account also tweeted and retweeted mockery of Washington's handling of the matter.
While the students may appear to have a loud and hyped up response, the numbers of those protesting represent a very small amount of the student body. Fox 5 highlighted about 100 students, but the student body is over 36,000 students.
Worse than the students who can't handle true diversity is that many of those who have signed the change.org petition appear to be non-students. Many are even from out of state, and thus had no business in voting to elect Youngkin or not to the state office he holds.
Many comments from those who signed are unfortunately about as immature as you'd expect. "F**k that hoe," Kiva Brazier from North Carolina wrote, though the expletive was spelled out. Nancy Hawkins from Maryland inexplicably claimed "Youngkin does not believe in free speech." Cathy Knights from Florida made a particularly bold claim that "It's spreading through all red states and is just racism and hatred dressed up as freedom." Virginia has been considered a purple or even blue state.
The petition, created by Alaina Ruffin, who describes herself as a "prospective alumna," further highlights how insufferably aggrieved and entitled college students claim to be, and how tiring it all is, as it's worth wondering how these ill-equipped young people will be able to function in the real world. A significant portion of the petition doesn't even have to do with Youngkin. One paragraph, for instance, laments:
Preceding this announcement, GMU has neglected to meet the needs of students. From allowing homophobic, transphobic, racist, and/or anti-abortion groups to regularly occupy campus and harass passersby, to ignoring students and student organizations requesting assistance or support in their endeavors, GMU administration has taken pride in the diversity of the student body. At the same time, however, the administration has failed to protect and defend those same students from harm.
Commencement is a celebration, and it's not mandatory. Rather than just staying home, though, these students seem to be suggesting that they will cause a disruption and potentially ruin the ceremony for their fellow graduates, with it being quite chilling that they think such warnings would be acceptable.
The concise and cordial statement from Gov. Youngkin's spokeswoman Macaulay Porter could not stand in more stark contrast to the disruptive students. "Governor Youngkin looks forward to addressing the 2023 graduates of George Mason University and celebrating their tremendous accomplishment," she told Townhall.
"Youngkin" was trending on Twitter throughout Wednesday, in part to the news about him indeed speaking at GMU's commencement in May, but also because of chatter he may run for president in 2024. On Wednesday, RealClearPolitics (RCP) featured a POLITICO column from John F. Harris, who wrote that "Why Glenn Youngkin Would Be Crazy Not to Run for President." Youngkin remains committed to doing the best job he can as governor of Virginia.
When asked by press last August about potential plans for higher office, the governor emphasized his "top priority is to make Virginia the best state to live work and raise a family" and that "2024 is a long way off." Reiterating his focus being on the present, he also said that "I am focused on delivering on promises made last year that have been kept. We've got a giant agenda for the rest of this year and into next year. And 2024 will happen when 2024 gets here."
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Virginia School District Boots 14 Sexually Explicit Books to County Libraries
A Virginia school district’s new superintendent decided Wednesday to remove 14 sexually explicit books from school libraries and donate them to the county government’s public library system.
The 14 “young adult” novels to be removed from libraries in Spotsylvania County Public Schools by order of Superintendent Mark Taylor, on the job since Nov. 1, include:
“All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto” by George Johnson
“Like a Love Story” by Abdi Nazemian
“Dime” by E. R. Frank
“Sold” by Patricia McCormick
“Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Perez
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison
“America” by E. R. Frank
“Looking for Alaska” by John Green
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
“Water for Elephants” by Sarah Gruen
“Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe” by Preston Norton
“More Happy Than Not” by Adam Silvera
“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison
“Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult
It is not clear whether the Spotylvania County government’s library system would accept copies of the 14 books from the school system, or place restrictions on minors’ access to them if it does. A committee of school district staff consulted by Taylor had defended the 14 titles.
A detailed complaint filed by local parent Jennifer Petersen outlines excerpts from these 14 novels that include questionable content for a school library.
“All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto” includes a detailed scene in which the author (age 13) is molested, both receiving and giving oral sex to his cousin (age 17 or 18). The author also describes several other obscene sexual scenes.
“Dime” contains explicit scenes describing the statutory rape and prostitution of a 13-year-old, who expresses joy at losing her virginity to her pimp, “Daddy.”
“America” contains several disturbing scenes in which the 15-year-old main character is raped, describes his erections and how excited he gets by seeing both boys and girls naked, and relishes how no one can stop him from imagining rape:
“The Bluest Eye” contains several instances of characters fantasizing and experiencing incest, rape, and pedophilia. Morrison spends considerable time with many scenes intimately describing sex with children.
The effort to ban sexually explicit content from public school libraries isn’t unique to Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which is about 67 miles south of the nation’s capital. Parents and teachers around the country recently have questioned the placement of explicit books in school libraries that romanticize sexual abuse and describe or picture intimate sexual acts.
Picture books in which small children question their sexuality and express a different “gender identity” have flooded libraries around the nation in the past few years as LGBTQ+ activist groups reach out to younger audiences.
Missouri, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all recently passed measures limiting sexual content in public school curriculum and pedagogy.
Virginia law specifically states that local public schools must notify parents of “sexually explicit instructional material,” permit parents to review the material, and provide an “alternative to instructional material and related academic activities that include sexually explicit content, nonexplicit instructional material and related academic activities to any student whose parent so requests.”
Taylor, the superintendent, reasons in a memo issued Wednesday that the definition of instructional materials “includes library resources” in Spotsylvania County Public Schools libraries—and so those books are subject to parental and committee review.
Following the parental complaint made by Petersen, the Spotsylvania school district appointed a committee of school staff members to review the 14 books.
Taylor notes in his memo that, regardless of the sexually explicit content, the staff committee suggested that all 14 of the books remain in school libraries.
But Taylor disagreed with those findings, writing that it is “indisputable” that the 14 books contain graphic sexual content as defined by Virginia law:
As used in this new law, ‘sexually explicit content’ means (i) any description of or (ii) any picture, photograph, drawing, motion picture film, digital image or similar visual representation depicting sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity, as nudity is defined in § 18.2-390, sexual excitement, sexual conduct or sadomasochistic abuse, as also defined in § 18.2-390, coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism.
The superintendent also noted the difficulty of creating controlled spaces in each school library to store “sexually explicit books” that would be reviewed and curated from among over 300,000 books in the Spotsylvania school system’s library for students to check out upon request with parental permission:
The full control over sexually explicit books that is required to comply with the law would necessitate setting aside secure, controlled space in each library to store the sexually explicit books and a system to make them available to students only upon request and after checking for any parental prohibition. This would be a cumbersome and time-consuming process at best. We have no funds budgeted for the creation of secure, controlled spaces in our libraries for sexually explicit books. I am concerned also that our SCPS librarians are already stretched thin and lack the workload capacity to provide the mandated notifications, track objections, and implement parental prohibitions.
Critics have claimed that removing any book from a public school library is tantamount to book-banning, fascist practices.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, has called efforts to ban explicit books a “culture war designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time.”
Weingarten apparently has defended the “young adult” graphic novel “Gender Queer,” which contains illustrations of a child giving oral sex to an elderly man. The union president accused Republicans of “banning books and bullying vulnerable children,” also blaming them for the number of teachers leaving the profession.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in January 2022 against the Wentzville School District in Missouri for removing Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” One month later, the Wentzville school board voted to reinstate the novel. The school district previously removed over 300 books after the Missouri Legislature passed a bill banning sexually explicit books from schools.
Taylor’s proposed solution in Virginia’s Spotsylvania school district is to move all copies of the 14 sexually explicit books from the school libraries into the county government’s public libraries:
Moreover, it is also apparent that no law requires SCPS [Spotsylvania County Public Schools] to keep books that include sexually explicit content in our school libraries. To the contrary, the only mandated sexually explicit instructional content in the Commonwealth of Virginia is (or is supposed to be) the Family Life Education curriculum materials prescribed by the state. Clearly, there is no information suggesting that any of the 14 books listed above is part of the Commonwealth’s Family Life Education curriculum.
I find that none of the 14 books listed above truly needs to be included in any SCPS school library. So, having met with the complainant [Petersen], it is my decision and direction on our further course of action as a division … that all 14 of the books listed above are to be excluded from our SCPS school libraries. All copies of these books are to be removed from our libraries and delivered to the School Board Office, and I will recommend that they be declared surplus property and donated to a public library.
This move appears to provide access to students whose parents grant permission to read the 14 explicit books, while keeping sexually explicit content out of Spotsylvania County’s school libraries.
Given the chaos of prior Spotsylvania County school board meetings, this memorandum is almost certain to make the next one quite the battle.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/29/virginia-school-district-removes-14-sexually-explicit-books
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NYC: The UFT should stop trying to close excellent public schools
Relentless in its war on public charter schools, the United Federation of Teachers is suing to evict two Success Academy schools from spaces the city Department of Education awarded them last year.
This particular brand of UFT lawfare goes back over a decade.
The courts have tossed well over a dozen similar suits brought by the union or its allies, dating back to 2011.
The new cases are based on a pure technicality, a claim that DOE didn’t adequately consider the new (UFT-engineered) class-size mandate when it designated the space for SA.
Yet both buildings clearly have plenty of room. One site, in Rockaway Park, is more than a third empty, and the other school that’s there has seen steadily falling enrollment. The other building, in Sheepshead Bay, is more than half empty.
This is nothing but harassment: filing endless nuisance lawsuits in the hopes that someday one of them will manage to triumph — and so prevent a few dozen kids from escaping to a public school that actually teaches.
Despite the union’s best efforts, Success Academy keeps growing; if it were its own school district, SA would be one of the state’s largest — and by far the most successful.
Its scholars regularly beat the results of some of the state’s most affluent districts on state math and English exams
That, though enrollment at SA is overwhelmingly from low-income black and/or Hispanic families.
The disastrous performance of DOE schools during COVID, and the evisceration of the city’s once-selective middle schools, has enrollment plummeting in the regular public school system.
The middle class, lured back under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, is fleeing.
Success and other charters now represent the best hope for saving public education in New York City.
But the UFT doesn’t care, because charters don’t serve its needs.
To ensure that future members actually have jobs, the union would do far better working to restore excellence in the regular system, rather than trying to shut down schools that work.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/29/the-uft-should-stop-trying-to-close-excellent-public-schools/
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March 29, 2023
Florida sets shining example on school choice. Here's how
Florida Gov. DeSantis expected to sign school choice bill
Arizona Director of American Federation Steve Smith and Director of Leadership Institute Bridget Ziegler joined 'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss the importance of school choice.
Florida has long been a pioneer in ensuring that families can choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children. Now its lawmakers have cemented the state’s status as a national leader in education freedom and choice.
Last week, the Florida Senate passed House Bill 1, which expands the state’s groundbreaking education savings account (ESA) policy to all K-12 students "regardless of race, income, background, or zip code," said House Speaker Paul Renner. Until now, only students with special needs were eligible.
With an ESA, families can customize their child’s education. They can use ESA funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculum, online learning, special-needs therapy, and more. Florida was the second state, after Arizona, to enact an ESA policy.
Florida will now be the sixth state nationwide to make an ESA or ESA-style policy available to all K-12 students.
Due in no small part to its robust education choice policies, Florida ranked first in the nation in The Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Education Freedom Report Card last year. "Florida’s schoolchildren are thriving because we invest in our students, and we empower parents to decide what learning environment is best for their kids," explained Gov. Ron DeSantis at an event launching the report card.
However, as DeSantis conceded during his remarks, Florida did not take the top spot in every category. The Sunshine State ranked third for education choice behind Arizona and Indiana due to their more expansive education choice policies. "We’re going to be working hard to make sure we do even better going forward," DeSantis declared.
With the imminent signing of the universal education savings account program into law, DeSantis has done just that.
Governor Kim Reynolds on school choice bill: 'This gets us to universal school choice'Video
Florida faces some tough competition, though. In the last two years, Arizona and West Virginia have also made ESAs available to all students. This year, Iowa, Utah and Arkansas all enacted new ESA or ESA-style policies that are either open to all K-12 students or will phase-in to universal eligibility over the next three years. Several other state legislatures, most notably in Texas, are also considering bills to create robust education choice policies.
What explains the meteoric success of states in finally adopting universal education choice options? Two shifts: connecting choice to the issues about which families care most and making sure every family can benefit from the policy.
Parents care about academic outcomes. But more than that, they care about the values schools are inculcating in their children. When a survey asked Florida families using tax-credit scholarships to list the top three factors that influenced their choice of school, the only factors selected by a majority were "religious environment/instruction" (66%) and "morals/character/values instruction" (52%).
Parents want schools to teach their children to be good students, good citizens and good workers, but most of all they want their children to become good people.
This is apparent from the issues that have been driving parents to turn out in droves at school board meetings. They’re not there because of low test scores or a lack of rigorous instruction. Parents are raising concerns about classroom lessons that teach children to divide people along racial lines, pornographic books in public school libraries, and school policies that keep parents in the dark when their children are struggling with their "gender identity."
DeSantis and the Florida legislature have tackled these issues head on while recognizing that school choice policies are a vital part of the solution. School choice gives parents an immediate escape hatch if their child’s school is pushing an ideology that runs counter to their values. But equally importantly, school choice policies empower families who want to push back against radical policies in their schools.
This is one reason why education choice options should be open to all children. With school choice, families are no longer a captive audience of their assigned school. School officials and school boards are less likely to be dismissive of parents who are raising concerns when they know that unhappy parents can take their children elsewhere – and the money will follow them.
Making school choice policies universal is also more popular among voters. In a 2022 survey, barely half of the respondents favored making school choice available based on financial need, but 75% favored making it available to all families. State policymakers nationwide are achieving greater success advancing universal choice proposals than ones that are limited to particular populations.
For setting the standard for empowering all families to choose the right learning environments for their children, Florida lawmakers deserve an A+. Lawmakers in other states would do well to follow the Sunshine State’s shining example.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/florida-sets-shining-example-school-choice-heres-how
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Law school grad says he was suspended, forced to undergo psych eval for questioning school's COVID policies
A Georgetown University law school graduate claims he was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for questioning the school’s COVID policies.
William Spruance, currently a practicing attorney, said he was suspended, forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and threatened by administrators in August 2021 for questioning the law school’s COVID and masking policy.
"So after I was encouraged to give a speech to a student council-type group at Georgetown, I received an email that I was indefinitely suspended from the school, that I'd have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and waive my right to medical confidentiality," he alleged Monday on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"During the psychiatric evaluation – It would start with kind of innocuous questions like, ‘Do you ever get angry?’ Followed by ‘Do you get angry about masks? And then do masks make you want to hurt anybody?’ So it was an ongoing cycle of questions that were designed to make me seem unhinged for being willing to question their COVID policies."
Host Tucker Carlson expressed shock and questioned if any of the law school administrators were willing to have a "rational" conversation with him about the masking policy.
"I found that individual professors were willing to have the conversation with me behind closed doors, but they wished to remain anonymous. As for the administrators, there was no such luck," Spruance responded.
"While ostensibly this was about COVID, it was really part of a much larger cycle of events at Georgetown Law. We had people like Sandra Sellers and Ilya Shapiro, who were thrown out of the institution just for being willing to question campus orthodoxies. And it was part of an ongoing double standard where if you're progressive and you regurgitate the proper slogans, then there's an indemnity built into shouting down speakers," he explained.
"If you're willing to question the orthodoxy of campus, then they'll bring the whole horde of administrators against you and work to professionally and socially and reputationally destroy you."
Spruance added that the whole alleged ordeal has not left him optimistic about the future of the school.
"I think in the long run, it's hard to be optimistic about future judges and administrators and unimpressive bureaucrats because Georgetown Law is really just an incubator for an unimpressive ruling class of tomorrow," he said.
"These people won't stay on campus and just make the people there miserable. They'll be running institutions like Georgetown Law. They will be at various government agencies. They'll be judges. And that, to me, is the more alarming aspect."
"I made it out of this process relatively unharmed. I mean, it was about a week that was difficult in my life. But going forward, people have come out to me since my piece was released about similar stories, and they're going through far worse than me," he continued. "At the root of this is the administrators. And that's where these students and these professors and these administrators will go on to inflict more damage."
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Drag queen straddles girl at North Carolina public school
A new viral video shows a drag queen straddling a young girl during an LGBTQ pride event at a North Carolina school that enrolls students as young as 14.
A video obtained by Libs of TikTok showed multiple adults laughing and watching a drag performer appearing to give a lap dance to a student at Forsyth Technical Community College last Wednesday.
The public college has two on-campus high school programs that begin enrollment in ninth grade. Photos posted by the school’s official Instagram account showed drag queens posing with young girls.
The school told Libs of TikTok that the event was open to students of all ages.
"These students, like all college students, are open to attend any student event," the school said. "Forsyth Tech is committed to being a place of promise for our students. In order to fulfill that promise, we have clearly spelled out our mission, vision and equity statements."
Promotional materials for the 2023 Pride Festival, which was held at a restaurant on campus, advertised four drag queens, a "drag performance" and "free food, drinks, music & activities."
At least one Christian church, Parkway United Church of Christ, attended the event, according to photos posted by organizer Forsyth Tech PRIDE Club on Facebook.
A program of the Forsyth County Health Department, Prevent Ongoing Spread of STIs Everywhere (POSSE), set up a free HIV and STI testing station at the event and repeatedly promoted it on its Facebook page.
Forsyth Public Health Director Joshua Swift issued a statement to Fox News Digital Tuesday evening saying POSSE had spent $58 in taxpayer funds for supplies for the event, but he also disavowed "the actions that allegedly took place."
"P.O.S.S.E, which stands for Prevent Ongoing Spread of STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections) Everywhere is an outreach section of Forsyth County's Department of Public Health," Swift said. "Our staff is committed to meeting the people we serve where they are. We believe we assign an appropriate amount of attention on the LGBTQIA community around education and prevention of sexually transmitted infections."
"Our staff was aware that there would be drag performances but was not involved with planning the event and had no information regarding the age of the attendees," he continued. "We spent $58 on supplies from the department's operational budget which is funded locally and in-part by the State of North Carolina. We do not condone the actions that allegedly took place during the event."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/drag-queen-straddles-girl-north-carolina-public-school-video-shows
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March 28, 2023
Judge Kyle Duncan Gives Free Speech Lecture at Notre Dame After Being Shouted Down at Stanford
A U.S. judge delivered a speech at a university on March 24, a few weeks after students and a top staffer prevented him from doing so at Stanford University.
U.S. District Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee, told listeners at the University of Notre Dame that there’s a “vital tradition of free speech in this country” and that students have the right to protest him.
“It’s a great country, where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad will happen to you. You might even get praised or promoted,” he said. “But make no mistake. What went on in that classroom on March the ninth had nothing to do with our proud American tradition of free speech. It was rather a parody of it.”
Duncan started to deliver a lecture at Stanford Law School earlier in March when students began heckling him so loudly that he was unable to continue.
Multiple staff members did not intervene.
Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez later said the way the event unfolded “was not aligned with our institutional commitment to freedom of speech.”
After blowback from some students and staffers over her statement, Martinez offered a lengthy letter reiterating her stance. She noted that protests are allowed, but not ones that disrupt events.
“The president of the university and I have apologized to Judge Duncan for a very simple reason–to acknowledge that his speech was disrupted in ways that undermined his ability to deliver the remarks he wanted to give to audience members who wanted to hear them, as a result of the failure to ensure that the university’s disruption policies were followed,” Martinez said.
She said that the apology, and the policy it defended, was “fully consistent” with the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and that apology, and the policy it defends, is fully consistent with the First Amendment, which protects the right to free speech, and California’s Leonard Law, which bars private colleges from imposing rules that would curtail First Amendment rights.
Students calling for officials to restrict the Federalist Society, which hosted Duncan, and the speakers the organization can invite to campus “are demanding action inconsistent not only with freedom of speech but with rights to freedom of association that civil rights lawyers fought hard in the twentieth century to secure,” Martinez added later.
Philip Munoz, a professor in political science and a law school professor at Notre Dame who invited Duncan to talk after the disrupted Stanford event, opened by telling attendees not to interrupt the judge.
“Notre Dame is especially good at doing free speech,” he said.
Duncan said that most federal judges are reclusive and he accepted the invitation due to the “unusual event” at Stanford. Munoz, he said, “promised I wouldn’t be silenced during this talk.”
‘Not Free Speech to Silence Others’
Duncan, after praising Martinez’s apology and new letter, said that the Stanford students weren’t engaging in free speech when they prevented him from speaking.
“It is not free speech to silence others because you hate them. It is not free speech to tear and heckle a speaker who has been invited to your school so that he can’t deliver a talk. It is not free speech to form a mob and hurl taunts and threats that aren’t worthy of being written on the wall of a public toilet. It is not free speech to pretend to be harmed by words or ideas you disagree with, and then use that feigned harm as a license to deny a speaker the most rudimentary forms of civility,” Duncan said.
“Some of the students were apparently convinced that what they were doing was, ‘counter speech.’ Wrong. Counter speech means offering a reasoned response to an argument. It doesn’t mean screaming ‘Shut up, you scum we hate you,’ at a distance of 12 feet. Other students claimed this was nothing more than the ‘marketplace of ideas in action,’ again, wrong. The marketplace of ideas describes a free and fair competition among opposing arguments, with the most compelling one we hope emerging on the top. What transpired at Stanford was no marketplace. It was more like a flash mob on a shoplifting spree.”
The students that attended the talk to protest “had no interest in my talk at all,” the judge said. “They were there to heckle and to cheer and to shame.” What was carried out amounted to intimidation, he added.
“And to be clear, not intimidating me. I’m not intimidated by any of this. I’m a life tenure judge. I’m going to go back to my court and keep writing opinions,” he said. “No, the target of the intimidation was the protesters’ fellow students. The message could not have been clearer, ‘woe to you if you represent the kind of clients that Judge Duncan represented, or you take the same views that he has.'”
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Judge Deals Blow to Regents’ Scheme Against NYC Jewish schools
A trial court at Albany, after a battle between yeshivas and New York’s department of education, ruled that new regulations governing yeshivas had gone too far in their prescription for schools that didn’t meet their standards.
The regulations would have closed down Orthodox Jewish schools whose secular offerings the state deemed insufficient, forcing parents to transfer their children. Fervently Orthodox Jews across the state challenged such rules as a violation of their First Amendment right to religious free exercise.
Judge Christina Ryba shrank from the First Amendment challenge, but ruled that such penalties for violating the state regulations were beyond the scope of the mandate given to regulators.
The Agudath Israel of America, America’s largest grass roots organization representing fervently religious Jews, said in a statement that Thursday’s ruling provided “important protections for Orthodox Jewish education in New York.”
“While not the complete victory many were praying for, Agudath Israel is grateful that the court recognized the egregious overreach the Regulations sought,” the Agudah said in its statement. “The prospect of forcibly shutting down schools, and of the state mandating which schools children should be re-enrolled to, is not something one would typically associate with 21st century America.”
The regulations, first adopted this fall, set forth a framework in which non-public schools were to be evaluated in accordance with the state’s compulsory education law — which requires all students receive instruction that is “substantially equivalent” to the education given in their public counterparts.
In October, yeshiva advocates and organizations representing the Orthodox Jewish community banded together in a lawsuit against the regulators, alleging that the new rules “single out yeshivas” for evaluations under greater scrutiny.
The regulations offered schools several mechanisms by which to prove they were “substantially equivalent” — Regents examinations, accreditation, international baccalaureate programs, among others.
The Orthodox Jewish institutions of learning were the only group of non-public schools that did not fall neatly into one of the “pathways” and would therefore be subject to regular review by local public school districts.
After review, if schools failed to meet the standards set forth by the local school district, they would be given an amnesty period in which they would be required to shift their curricular offerings — possibly to include even profane subjects that some believe their religion prohibits them from teaching to their children.
If a school failed to meet standards after additional review, the school would be shut down, and parents whose children continued to attend could face jail time.
In Thursday’s ruling, following oral arguments earlier this month, Judge Christine Ryba struck down the penalties for schools found to be in violation of substantial equivalency — penalties that, she said, were outside the scope of the state’s compulsory education law.
Judge Ryba noted that the burden of the compulsory education law falls on parents — not schools. The state, therefore, has no compelling interest in closing a school that fails to meet substantial equivalence.
Judge Ryba also noted that parents may not be relying on the school to fulfill the law’s requirements. If a school falls short of meeting requirements, it is not necessarily true that a child’s education is not substantially equivalent to that of a public school.
“Rather, the parents should be given a reasonable opportunity to prove that the substantial equivalency requirements for their children’s education are satisfied by instruction provided through a combination of sources,” Judge Ryba wrote.
In her ruling, the judge wrote that the Regents “lack authority” to enforce punitive measures on schools. Judge Ryba wrote that it was beyond the scope of the Regents’ mandate to “direct parents to completely unenroll their children from nonpublic schools” and “to direct the closure of such schools.”
The ruling, for the time being, preserves the autonomy of parochial and independent schools who are no longer at risk of closure for failure to comply with the regulatory regime.
The court, however, dismissed the constitutional merits of the case — saying the rules were “entirely neutral” and that the plaintiffs did not merit an injunction on First Amendment grounds.
The plaintiffs had alleged that the regulations constitute an “invasive secular oversight” that threatens to “hamper and interfere with religious education,” which Judge Ryba dismissed.
If, however, the regulations are applied unevenly upon yeshivas, the judge left open the possibility of an “as-applied” free exercise challenge.
https://www.nysun.com/article/judge-deals-blow-to-regents-scheme-against-yeshivas
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‘No Legitimate Basis’ for DOJ Targeting of Protesting Parents, House Panel’s Report Concludes
A House committee has found that there was “no legitimate basis” for the Biden administration to use Justice Department resources to target supposed “threats” to school boards across the country.
“From the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas, it is apparent that the Biden administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes,” the House Judiciary Committee report concludes.
For those who have followed this story, the conclusion of the report, released on Tuesday, might seem obvious, but it’s still important to catalog how government agencies have been weaponized for partisan ends.
In 2021, a series of protests erupted at Virginia school board meetings due to the adoption of the teaching of critical race theory, as well as transgender policies and COVID-19 restrictions.
Parents were fed up with radical policies being foisted on their children and showed up en masse at school board meetings to voice their concerns. The trend repeated itself across the country, but it was particularly noteworthy in Virginia due to the tightly contested governor’s race at the time between a former governor, Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, seeking to return to office, and the eventual winner, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.
McAuliffe went with the campaign message of what amounted to “sit down and shut up, let the experts—well, actually self-interested teachers unions—do whatever they want with your children.”
It wasn’t a winning strategy.
While the race was ongoing and parents were showing up at meetings, Attorney General Merrick Garland released a memo calling for a Justice Department investigation into “threats” to local school boards, despite having no evidence that any such danger existed. That followed a National School Boards Association letter to President Joe Biden asking for the administration to crack down on parents.
The House report found that the Justice Department’s “own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof.”
What it looked like was a highly partisan operation to smear domestic political opponents as criminals and terrorists and to scare parents away from exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.
Democracy is a threat to democracy, you see. That appears to be a favorite tactic for Biden, our great uniter-in-chief.
On top of the partisan interest in silencing parents, Garland appeared to have a conflict of interest, as his son-in-law was running a multimillion-dollar operation to bring “culturally responsive training” to Virginia schools.
The House Judiciary Committee report concluded that the Biden administration’s goal seemed to have been “silencing the critics of its radical education policies and neutralizing an issue that was threatening Democrat Party prospects in the close gubernatorial race in Virginia.”
It did so with little pretense. In fact, the report concluded that the Biden administration unleashed the Justice Department to simply “quell swelling discord over controversial education curricula and unpopular school board decisions.”
“This weaponization of law-enforcement powers against American parents exercising their First Amendment rights is dangerous,” the report said. “The Justice Department subjected moms and dads to the opening of an FBI investigation about them, the establishment of an FBI case file that includes their political views, and the application of a ‘threat tag’ to their names as a direct result of their exercise of their fundamental constitutional right to speak and advocate for their children.”
So, the next question is: What will the House do, given the evidence that the administration is using federal agencies to assault the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens? The FBI seems to have been thoroughly politicized, but the problem seems to be bigger than any single agency.
The report said that the committee will continue investigating the matter. That’s good, but the American people need to be assured that this sort of abuse will be corrected and won’t happen again.
At the very least, Republicans in Congress should be doing everything they can to prevent the expansion of other agencies. One of the biggest concerns about the massive IRS expansion is how it will be used to harass and threaten the average American.
After all, an administration that’s spent the past few years spending huge sums of money we don’t have has every reason to shake down Americans and get them to pay more than they owe. In using the Justice Department for its own partisan ends, shouldn’t we expect this administration to use other agencies in a similar manner?
The Garland memo represented the predictable intersectionality of ideological enforcement and partisan—and perhaps even personal—interests.
This type of governance is common in Communist China, where you can have your tyranny pure. We used to expect better in the United States.
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March 27, 2023
NYC teachers union hosting seminar on ‘harmful effects of whiteness’
This is a typical Leftist inversion of reality. It is blackness that has harmful effects. Just look at black crime to see it
The New York City teachers union is sponsoring a virtual workshop on fighting back against the “harmful effects of whiteness in our lives.”
The United Federation of Teachers’ online seminar, dubbed “Holding the Weight on Whiteness,” is scheduled for Monday, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., and will be hosted by Queens-based psychotherapy consultant and self-proclaimed “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Leader” Erica Sandoval.
UFT members who are licensed mental health professionals can earn two hours of credit toward their continuing education credentials, which can eventually result in a higher salary.
The workshop costs $25 to attend and will focus on “key cultural themes … related to the Latinx/e communities,” including “internalized racism, privilege, [and] white identity,” according to the union’s website and an Instagram post.
“Participants will leave the workshop with a better understanding of how to center ourselves as a form of resistance against the harmful effects of whiteness in our lives, the organizations we work for or direct, and the communities in which we serve,” the post says.
News of the event has some seething — including Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli, who said he was contacted by many fuming teachers and parents wondering why fighting so-called “toxic whiteness” has become a top priority for a lefty union representing a school system plagued by poor performance in the classroom.
“Why is it important for employees of the New York City Department of Education to serve as a form of resistance against the effects of whiteness in their lives, the Department of Education, and the diverse communities in which they serve, which may consist of white students and families?” wrote Borelli (R-Staten Island) in a letter Friday to Tina Puccio, director of the UFT’s Member Assistance Program.
“To be clear, I don’t actually care what your speakers tell your members in an optional and private seminar.
“I care how members will implement the ‘resistance’ against these ‘harmful effects of whiteness’ when dealing with students and parents as part of their employment with the department.”
About 150,000 students — or 14.7% percent of the overall school population — are white, according to the DOE.
In recent years, the DOE itself has come under attack from critics for openly pushing an anti-white agenda that included distributing a book to students as young as 2 claiming the concept of race was created by white people who thought they were “better, smarter, [and] prettier” than others.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/25/uft-sponsoring-seminar-on-harmful-effects-of-whiteness/
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University President Cancels Student Drag Show, Issues Fiery Rebuke Of Drag
A public university president canceled a student drag show on campus Tuesday, and gave a fierce rebuke of drag.
Walter Wendler, the president of West Texas A&M University, canceled the drag show on Tuesday. He also sent an email to students explaining the reasoning behind his decision, which he also shared as a post on his blog. In the message, Wendler blasted drag shows, saying that they are degrading and misogynistic by their very nature.
“West Texas A&M University will not host a drag show on campus,” Wendler stated in the post, entitled, “A Harmless Drag Show? No Such Thing.” The event was scheduled for March 31 and intended to raise money for The Trevor Project, and LGBTQ advocacy group which claims to work to prevent suicide among LGBTQ youth. Wendler said the cause was noble, and that it is a tragedy for any person to consider self-harm.
Wendler went on, saying that each and every person has human dignity, and that idea is foundational to American Life; and that drag shows violate that dignity. “Does a drag show preserve a single thread of human dignity? I think not,” he wrote. “As a performance exaggerating aspects of womanhood (sexuality, femininity, gender), drag shows stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood. Any event which diminishes an individual or group through such representation is wrong.”
“WT endeavors to treat all people equally,” the university president continued. “Drag shows are derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny, no matter the stated intent. Such conduct runs counter to the purpose of WT. A person or group should not attempt to elevate itself or a cause by mocking another person or group. As a university president, I would not support ‘blackface’ performances on our campus, even if told the performance is a form of free speech or intended as humor. It is wrong. I do not support any show, performance or artistic expression which denigrates others—in this case, women—for any reason.”
Wendler commented that the West Texas A&M community should live by the Golden Rule, which he also called the law of reciprocity; he quoted examples of this rule from the Gospel of Matthew, a Buddhist text, and the Book of Tobit in the Hebrew Bible. He also compared it to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “each action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
“Mocking or objectifying in any way members of any group based on appearance, bias or predisposition is unacceptable,” Wendler continued, noting that equality between the sexes took centuries of work. He also pointed out that the stated purpose of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and common sense reject acts of prejudice. “No amount of fancy rhetorical footwork or legal wordsmithing eludes the fact that drag shows denigrate and demean women—noble goals notwithstanding.”
“A harmless drag show? Not possible,” he concluded. “I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it.” Wendler again said that supporting The Trevor Project was a good idea; instead of attending the drag show, Wendler suggested that students donate to the organization instead.
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The School Choice Juggernaut Marches On
Incredible as it may seem, less than one year ago, not a single state offered universal school choice to its citizens. That was then, this is now. Today, four states (Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah) have universal school choice laws on the books, with several more considering bills that would vastly expand education freedom.
Although there are many factors that have led to the school choice movement gaining more momentum than ever before, one should not discount the behavior of public school leaders and teacher union officials during the pandemic in moving public opinion decidedly in favor of school choice.
According to recent polling, school choice is more popular than ever before. And, more significantly, school choice is one of the rare issues that receives widespread support from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents as well as across racial, socioeconomic, and even generational lines.
This month marks the three-year anniversary of the widespread shutdown of public schools throughout the country, under the guise of the pandemic. Of course, as most Americans witnessed with bewilderment, while most public schools refused to offer in-person learning throughout the duration of the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of private and charter schools remained open for in-person learning over the same period.
On top of this, as government-run schools refused to offer in-person learning and opted for inferior remote learning, droves of parents were absolutely shocked at the radical curriculum that the public schools were pushing on their children. From critical race theory to explicit sexual content, parents finally got a first-hand account of what public schools are up to these days.
Moreover, as the months went by and the public schools kept moving the reopening goalposts, parents became infuriated that their children were falling behind academically as well as becoming increasingly isolated, depressed, and dysfunctional after months of being stuck at home in front of a screen for eight hours per day.
Needless to say, most parents were at their wits end with the education industrial complex, which exists to serve adults, specifically teacher unions and public education bureaucrats, not students.
So, as would be expected, a major exodus from public schools began. While parents were pulling their children from failing public schools, they chose to enroll their kids in private, parochial, and charter schools. This trend was exacerbated when public schools refused to drop mask mandates and required vaccinations, even though the evidence showed that both of these policies were misguided at best and downright harmful to most children.
Yet, even as the writing was on the wall, public school officials and their partners in crime ignored the pleas by parents to address, or at least consider, their valid concerns. In fact, for the most part, these unaccountable bureaucrats doubled down on their position, berating parents for having the audacity to question their omnipotence over the education system.
In one classic example, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said during a debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe’s opponent, took the inverse position, saying, “What we’ve seen over the course of this last 20 months is our school systems refusing to engage with parents. In fact, in Fairfax County this past week, we watched parents so upset because there was such sexually explicit material in the library they had never seen, it was shocking. And in fact, you vetoed the bill that would have informed parents that they were there. You believe school systems should tell children what to do. I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
In many ways, this was a tipping point. The eyes of the nation were cast on Virginia in 2021 because it became ground zero in the battle for parental rights and school choice, in general.
Fortunately, Youngkin defeated McAuliffe in a landslide. However, this race was a microcosm for the bitter battles that were to follow. After Youngkin’s unexpected victory, more and more Republican governors began to embrace school choice. On the other hand, more and more Democratic governors began to take the opposite stance and became full-fledged enemies of the increasingly popular school choice renaissance.
And so, this is where things stand today. Among the general population, school choice is a commonsense policy that places parents, not education bureaucrats, in charge of their children’s education. As we continue to see, education choice is being embraced in red states, which are offering parents education savings accounts so that they can choose whichever school their child should attend. Yet, most blue states remain obstinate, reluctant to heed the wishes of the parents who prodigiously advocate for more school choice.
Eventually, I expect that freedom will win the day. It will likely be a long, drawn-out fight, but if the current trend continues, the left’s monopoly on education could be on the verge of extinction sooner rather than later.
https://redstate.com/heartlandinstitute/2023/03/22/the-school-choice-juggernaut-marches-on-n719762
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March 26, 2023
These Schools Removed Cops to Appease BLM—It Didn't End Well
Two years after a high school in Denver, Colorado, removed all law enforcement officers from school grounds based on the belief that arresting "Black and Brown students for minor school infractions" perpetuates the "school-to-prison pipeline," a black gunman, who was an expelled student, shot two school administrators Wednesday. Sadly, it's a disturbing yet predictable trend we're seeing in schools across America that have rid themselves of on-campus police to appease Black Lives Matter activists.
As Julio covered, during the height of the violent BLM-Antifa riots, the Denver Public Schools Board of Education passed a resolution in June 2020 that eliminated the presence of all school resource officers (SRO), a unanimous 7 - 0 vote that ended its contract with the Denver Police Department and nixed all SRO positions within a year, over concerns that the "outsourcing of school discipline to police disproportionately impacts Black and Brown students." According to the SRO Transition Project's report, the resolution was driven by the district's "commitment to dismantle racism and become an anti-racist organization."
The board's vice president Auon'tai M. Anderson, who introduced the resolution, celebrated its passage. "WE DID IT!" Anderson tweeted. "#BlackLivesMatter." In a recent Medium article, titled "Removing SROs from Schools: A Step Towards Justice and Safety for Students of Color," Anderson asserted on Feb. 16: "While there have been concerns about the safety and well-being of students, it’s important to acknowledge the negative impacts that SROs can have on students, particularly students of color."
Now, two armed officers will be stationed at Denver East High School for the remainder of the academic year in the wake of Wednesday's double shooting that injured two deans. DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero sent a letter addressed to the school board, informing its members that at least one armed cop will also be posted at each of the district's comprehensive high schools.
The city's Democrat mayor agreed and "strongly" backed Marrero's move. In a statement posted to social media, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock admitted the decision to do away with SROs was "a mistake" and that "we must move swiftly to correct it."
Shortly after, the board issued a response, saying it supports the police's return for the rest of this school year.
17-year-old Austin Lyle was identified as the shooter who wounded the pair of faculty members, leaving one in "serious condition" following surgery. Lyle was under "a safety plan" that was specifically designed for him to be patted down each day before entering the school, but during the daily search Wednesday, the student pulled out a weapon, shot the two deans, and fled. As Matt pointed out, the now-deceased black suspect's race is actively being omitted from the mainstream media's coverage.
Denver7 reports that DPS has a "discipline matrix" in place, which measures student misconduct on six varying levels of severity. The objective is to "disrupt bias, fight disproportionality, and apply the Discipline Matrix in [an] anti-racist and trauma-informed manner," explains a document outlining the disciplinary ladder, intended to "make a difference in breaking historical inequity!"
Lyle's "safety agreement" was individually tailored from a threat-level assessment, educators told Denver7 News, but Marrero declined to specify what may have prompted it other than "past behavior." According to the Cherry Creek School District, Lyle was a former student there "previously disciplined for violations of board policy" at nearby Overland High School, prior to expulsion.
This week marked the second shooting at Denver East High School, which is reportedly shaken by frequent lockdowns and violence, in the span of weeks. Last month, a 16-year-old classmate was shot dead in his car outside of the school on Feb. 13. Two teens—both DPS students—have been arrested, per KDVR. The slain student's brother is speaking out on Wednesday's shooting, asserting that the removal of police begets gun violence. "It could have been avoided if there was a cop there to prevent anything like this from happening or at least just scare the people that are committing crimes like these," the victim's sibling said.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2023/03/25/school-police-removed-violence-ensued-n2621048
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Bullies Rule Under Woke Discipline Policies
The term wokeness, now in common usage, is elusive, as language is evolving. For the left it’s an indication of one’s cultural sensitivity, a positive ethical stance. For the right, the term has moved from the realm of race-based discrimination to encompass a range of topics. In this latter vein, the term wokeness implies a consistent spirit of inverting truth and trying to get a population to swallow it.
The assertion that race is biologically determinative while biological genders mean nothing are two of the most scrutinized manifestations of the inversion technique. The left often declares that those who broach these topics are fueling a culture war, in a derogatory sense. The response to this should always be, “what is a culture war, and how do you know when somebody is engaging in one?”. It’s time for some honest introspection.
Another ongoing casualty of the spirit of inversion involves woke discipline polices, often presented under the guise of “restorative justice”. When the inversion is pure, injustice is justice, and bullies reign supreme, with the backing of the regime. While we have seen echoes of this play out in policing practices, I believe we are on the cusp of seeing a new parental movement emerge because of injustice playing out in schools. Indeed, numerous videos of terrible acts of violence at schools have been on the upswing in social media posts.
While youth behavior emerges from an ecosystem involving many variables, discipline policies represent a category of ideas which come about from adult leaders in charge. Sadly, many leaders still in charge of our K-12 school systems put their narrow ideological frameworks before evidence, sound reasoning, and the pleas of parents.
In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd murder, radicals in “edu-power” decided to move forward with the policies of their pseudo-sociological dreams, which may have otherwise been temporarily kept at bay. Following the “rules for radicals” playbook they didn’t waste a good crisis to further their goal of effectively playing God, whereby they name something into creation, say it is so, regardless of the realities bombarding their senses that suggest otherwise. Under the pretense of equity, it has been declared that disparities in discipline outcomes among black and brown students are the result of an all-pervasive societal racism. Furthermore, their imagined pre-societal state of nature for every person is sheer goodness.
Absent from this conception is the notion that individuals can choose bad things of their own volition. For these radicals, the disparities in suspensions and expulsions by any group can only be explained by the evils of society imposing a vision on a member of a group i.e., to suggest otherwise is merely a result of a mind corrupted by mainstream American culture. These pseudo-sociologists are effectively gnostic in this sense, declaring themselves to be the possessors of a hidden, and elite knowledge, which the hoi polloi need to be coached into.
The incidents of violence related to these policies are too many to name, but some stand out as particularly grave. Recently, a parent of a 6th grader in San Diego says her son was beaten and put in a chokehold unprovoked, and that this incident was completely preventable as the assailant had previously brought a bb gun on campus and was also found researching how to shoot students with a gun on a school issued computer. Her testimony in front of the San Diego Unified School Board goes, “This [restorative justice] policy has enabled and encouraged students’ behavior to become violent and aggressive… If you have not yet had someone, be a victim of this policy yet it will be happening soon and when it does you all of you can proudly look them in the eye and tell them you chose equity over their safety”. The testimonies surfacing appear to come from new groups of parents, many a-political, who never planned or imagined they would be speaking out at a school board meeting.
In February, a 14-year old new Jersey girl named Adriana Kuch took her life 2 days after a video of her being beaten surfaced and was widely distributed. The bullies had conspired to beat her well ahead of the incident, and simply targeted her while she was walking down the hall, several of them laughing as they approached her, watching her body crouch into a fetal position after being struck and dragged.
The human mind is so powerful that we can conceive of things as totally other than they are, and run away with these ideas, creating other worldly schemas. Perhaps something like this happens with the woke mind opiate. To respond in kind with reason has proven suspect, and rattling someone who is confused out of a trance through high level discourse often fails.
Rather than confront these issues strictly in the realm of theory and philosophy, perhaps the most fertile ground to bring others to confront these ideas takes place in the practical realm i.e. we need to get the confused to see the consequences of their ideas in action. For many, the denial will be ongoing, regardless of the evidence presented. Yet, there is always hope as the intellect is eternally ordered to truth, despite all attempts to kick and scream at it. What is called for is a shock back into reality. Here I’m reminded of the genius of the author Flannery O’Connor,
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it: when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing YOU SHOUT, and for the almost-blind, you DRAW LARGE AND STARTLING FIGURES.”
Large and startling figures are emerging in schools where the bullies have realized that nobody is coming for them. Now it’s time for parents to shout and draw them.
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Australia's national curriculum substitutes emotion for hard learning
Occasionally our political representatives will say things which stand the test of time, but more than often, they do not. One example which springs to mind is a comment made in 2004 by the then federal education minister Julie Bishop, who optimistically proposed that the creation of a national curriculum would wrestle education out of the hands of the left-wing ideologues occupying state bureaucracies and give it to a national board of studies comprised of educators from the ‘sensible centre’.
Unfortunately, the Institute of Public Affairs’ new report on the latest iteration of the National Curriculum, De-Educating Australia: How the National Curriculum is Failing Australian Children reveals beyond a shadow of doubt that the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is now irreversibly stacked with utopian activists who know that in order to change the world, you have to change what children are taught.
What is currently being unleashed in classrooms across this country is about as far away from a traditional curriculum as you can possibly get. Rather, it is an anarcho-political manifesto which seeks to dismantle the entire edifice of the modern state of Australia by undermining its values and institutions.
Children taught according to the dictates of this curriculum will finish school with a set of beliefs, a worldview and a sense of what it means to be Australian that are at odds with those which have previously been passed on to generations of Australians.
This document is indoctrinating the young and impressionable with radical theories about race and gender, which were once marginal academic ideas but have now become the pedagogy favoured by the progressive educationalists employed by the state.
Take critical race theory, for example. This American import is now interwoven into the arts, history, civics and citizenship learning areas. In the health and physical education syllabus students will ‘gain insights into the impact systemic racism and discrimination have had on Australian First Nations Peoples’.
The progressive educationalists are using their considerable institutional power to bring forth and legitimise radical ideas such as the notion that Australia is a fundamentally racist country, and that all of its institutions are smokescreens for racial domination. It introduces children to the fiction of ‘systemic racism’, as well as the racist concept of ‘whiteness’ being problematic.
Students studying Australia’s history will leave school convinced that Aboriginal Australians were not, and never have been, beneficiaries of the universal rights afforded to all Australians that were brought by the British to this country in 1788. In year 9 history, students will study ‘potential barriers to equality of access to justice, such as education and literacy, location and proximity to legal avenues, financial constraints, race or ethnicity especially for First Nations Australians’. At the same time, the curriculum teaches that the source of Aboriginal Australians’ rights is different from that of non-Aboriginal Australians, the implication being that Aboriginal Australians are in some way legally separate from other Australians. In the years 7 to 10 arts syllabus, for example, students are informed that, ‘First Nations Australian cultures have internationally enshrined rights to ensure that these diverse cultures can be maintained, controlled, protected and developed’. They will also be taught about ‘rights relating to Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and how these rights can be protected through respectful application of protocols’. We should hardly be surprised that in a recent YouGov poll, 64 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds were in favour of establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament.
In the meantime, the ‘Sustainability Cross Curriculum’ priority is doing significant damage to Australia’s youth. It has become the gateway through which children are being introduced to concepts and ideologies that have nothing to do with looking after the environment in the true sense. They are schooled in environmental determinism, which is the concept that humans and their natural environment are interrelated, and that environmental factors such as climate change presuppose the success or failure of civilisations. The priority promotes the idea that a sustainable world cannot be achieved without a socially just world, and that the two are inextricably linked. Children are repeatedly asked to ‘recognise that the interdependence of Earth’s systems and values of diversity, equity and social justice are essential for achieving sustainability’.
In every learning area, they are bombarded with the view that society is not progressing towards greater wealth, prosperity, and improvement in the human condition, but that because of our attachment to plastic straws and bad recycling habits, we are careering headlong towards an environmental cataclysm. We should also not be surprised that young Australians are suffering from severe bouts of ‘eco-anxiety’.
This is placing an extremely unfair burden on young Australians. On the one hand, they are being fed the current prognosis of the ‘scientific consensus’ that every day of inaction brings us closer to catastrophe, while on the other they are being told that only they can avert that catastrophe through activism. In ‘foundation arts’, we see four-year-olds rapping about climate change. Eight-year-olds are ‘identifying ways they can change their behaviours to support the sustainability of the Earth’s systems’ in health and physical education. Students of French are organising real protests and rallies to ‘raise awareness of environmental, social or ethical issues’, and year 7 science students are writing letters to editors of newspapers to ‘express a view about an environmental issue affecting local ecosystems’.
Children are repeatedly informed that they are global citizens and that the global problems are theirs to solve, yet the curriculum does not even give them the basic literacy and numeracy skills they need to flourish and live fulfilled lives, let alone tackle imagined problems of a global nature.
There is no doubt that the bureaucrats at ACARA have deliberately jettisoned the acquisition of knowledge and replaced it with pure, unadulterated emotion. They have created a curriculum that will elicit feelings of guilt about the past, anger about the present and sheer terror about the future. In this way, they are manipulating children for political gain. As Thomas Sowell notes, ‘there are few things more dishonourable than misleading the young’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/misleading-the-young/
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March 24, 2023
Debate Over Parents’ Rights in Education Shifts to Capitol Hill From State Houses
Later this week, the House of Representatives will consider a “Parents Bill of Rights,” catapulting an issue pioneered in states like Virginia and Florida onto the national stage and solidifying its position in the GOP’s platform.
According to the bill’s sponsor, Representative Julia Letlow, the legislation is aimed at giving parents more control over what students are taught and what their children do while at school.
“As a mom of two and a former educator, I believe for a child to succeed, they need families and schools to work together as partners throughout the learning process,” Ms. Letlow said.
The bill would federally guarantee parents many rights that are already enjoyed in most states and set new federal requirements for school districts and state education departments.
The bill represents the legislative culmination of an issue that has become a core issue for Republicans after Governor Youngkin was swept to victory in 2021 touting a platform of “parents’ rights.”
Speaker McCarthy has hailed Ms. Letlow’s legislation as a “milestone.” In his 2022 Commitment to America, the speaker promised to introduce a bill addressing parents’ rights.
“It doesn’t matter [what] the color of your skin [is] or your wealth, when you have a child that is the most important thing in your life…. One thing we know in this country, education is the great equalizer,” Mr. McCarthy said. “We want parents to feel empowered and that’s what we’re doing here.”
Some Democrats in Congress, such as Representative Frederica Wilson, have called the bill a mostly redundant “waste of time” that would cultivate an oppositional relationship between parents and teachers.
“You are crafting a ludicrous, fake waste of time, a bunch of bull that you call a Parents Bill of Rights to monitor the most dedicated sacrificial workforce in our nation with some cheap stunt, pretending like you really care,” Ms. Wilson said at a hearing earlier this month.
The bill would guarantee parents the opportunity to meet with teachers twice a year and the right to address the school board. It would also require parental consent for medical exams that happen at school, something already required for students under the age of medical consent in a state.
The bill of rights would also impose new requirements on school districts, including that districts post their curriculum publicly and provide parents with a list of books available in the school library. It also would require states to notify parents of any changes to the state’s academic standards and require public disclosure of school district budgets.
The bill would also guarantee parents “the right to know if a school employee” refers to a minor by an alternate set of pronouns, a preferred name, or if there is a change to a “child’s sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”
A parent would retain the right to know if a student is receiving help with cyberbullying, an eating disorder, mental health issues, and suicidal ideation, among other things.
The bill would also guarantee “parents and other stakeholders the right to assemble and express their opinions on decisions affecting their children and communities.”
If passed in the House, the bill is almost certain to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate without a filibuster-proof majority, of which there is currently no sign.
In addition to opposition from Democrats, the bill has been panned by the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.
One critic, a dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education, Leslie Renwick, has argued that the push for parents’ rights is comparable to the outcry that followed Brown v. Board of Education.
“White parents burned books, physically threatened White teachers who tried to teach the more inclusive curriculum, and pressured school boards not to adopt books and curriculum that featured anything Black, by asserting that doing such was a divisive and communist trick,” Ms. Renwick told the Washington Post.
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Alliance Defending Freedom Sues After Arizona School Board Ousts Christian Student Teachers
Our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom report that for more than a decade, Arizona Christian University had a partnership with a nearby school district that helped student teachers gain valuable experience and provided quality teaching for elementary students in the district.
But in February 2023, the district school board abruptly—and unconstitutionally—ended that agreement, harming both students in the district and student teachers from the university.
Background
Arizona Christian University is a private Christian university in Glendale, Arizona. It seeks to “educate and equip followers of Christ to transform culture with the truth.” It educates every student through a biblical worldview, and it encourages students to “serve the Lord Jesus Christ in all aspects of life.”
ACU has partnered with Washington Elementary School District, the largest elementary school district in Arizona, for the last 11 years. The partnership has allowed ACU students in the Elementary Education program to student-teach and shadow teachers in the district.
This partnership has benefited both Arizona Christian and Washington Elementary School District. ACU students have gained valuable teaching experience in the classroom, which they need to complete in order to graduate, and the district has enjoyed excellent service from student teachers. In fact, the district has hired multiple Arizona Christian student teachers to full time positions over the last 11 years.
But the district school board recently voted to bring this partnership to an end.
What Triggered The Lawsuit?
In February 2018, ACU and Washington Elementary School District signed their most recent partnership agreement. It was meant “to enable an educational experience for student teachers at [Washington Elementary schools] that may qualify for University academic credit as determined by [Arizona Christian].”
The agreement noted that student teachers needed to meet the standards of the district and follow all written policies at the schools where they were teaching. It also allowed either the elementary schools or Arizona Christian University to dismiss student teachers if they were not performing as they should be.
The agreement had a term of five years, with the option to be renewed on a year-to-year basis. Both Washington Elementary School District and ACU agreed to the renewal each year, up until this year.
Following that tradition, the School District sent ACU a notice earlier this year asking it if it wanted to continue the partnership. ACU signed that document, stating it would like to continue the agreement. But in February 2023, the district school board unanimously voted not to renew the partnership simply because of ACU and its students’ religious character and beliefs. During the meeting, multiple board members disparaged ACU’s Christian beliefs.
One board member suggested the university’s Christian beliefs would prevent ACU student teachers from properly caring for and respecting students and would make people feel “unsafe,” citing Arizona Christian’s “Core Commitment” to “be committed to Jesus Christ – accomplishing His will and advancing His kingdom on earth as in heaven.”
Another board member said he was afraid the student teachers would push their beliefs on the elementary students and implied ACU students would shame certain students.
In reality, Arizona Christian and its students’ Christian beliefs instruct them to show kindness, love, and respect to the elementary students they teach and other staff members within the school district.
The school district never cited any wrongdoing, complaints, or evidence of any ACU student teachers violating any school district policy during the 11 years the school district partnered with ACU. ACU and its students always abided by the district’s rules.
The Washington Elementary School District board voted to end its partnership with ACU simply because of the university’s and its students’ religious beliefs.
For this clear violation of the First Amendment, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a lawsuit against the school district to protect the religious freedom of both Arizona Christian University and its students.
What’s At Stake?
The First Amendment prohibits the government from showing hostility to and discriminating against people because of their religious beliefs.
The Washington Elementary School District terminated its partnership with Arizona Christian University specifically because of its religious beliefs, denying student teachers opportunities to teach and improve their future career prospects. This decision also harms students within the school district, in the midst of a nationwide teacher shortage.
If the court rules in favor of ACU, it will affirm that the government cannot treat religious institutions and religious students worse than everyone else.
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Who Owns the University?
American higher education is in crisis. The rise of diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies and a growing intolerance for dissent has spurred political battles for control of campus decision-making in North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. The fights point to a fundamental question: Who “owns” a university? Perhaps the question is better phrased: To whom does a school belong?
In the competitive private marketplace, ownership is clear. When Elon Musk buys a company like Twitter, few question his authority to fire staff or change access rules. While practices vary enormously among the thousands of American colleges and universities, seven groups often claim at least partial ownership and control:
* The board. Most schools, public or private, are overseen by a legally constituted governing board.
* The politicians. At public institutions, state government usually is the legal “owner” of the school.
* The administrators. A school’s president and senior bureaucrats are vested with executive responsibility, which resembles ownership.
* The faculty. The professors who administer academic offerings and conduct grant-inducing research often feel the school belongs to them.
* The students. They are a primary reason for the school’s existence and their families pay substantial tuition and fees.
* The alumni. Graduates constitute the donor base at most private schools and some public ones as well.
* The accrediting agencies. The federal Education Department charges these bodies with certifying an institution’s right to confer degrees.
Some schools don’t fit this mold. Religious schools usually have a somewhat different governing dynamic than do government-owned community colleges, state universities or elite private schools. At some institutions, labor unions have an effect on decision-making. This diversity of ownership historically has been one of the strengths of American higher education. In the U.S., the academy isn’t run by a stultifying monopolistic government education ministry.
The University of North Carolina, Texas Tech University and other large state schools have been the scene of recent high-profile contretemps. Many such schools are dealing with the fallout from declining public support, high tuition fees and falling enrollments. From roughly 1960 to 2010, state politicians increased funding regularly and largely stayed out of internal university affairs. In that period, somewhat clueless governing boards rubber-stamped administrative requests, with the university president wining and dining board members and purchasing their loyalty with tickets to sporting events.
Students had relatively little clout during this period, and an overproduction of doctorates eroded the power and marketability of professors too. Simultaneously, the professoriate, always a liberal bastion, moved to the extreme left. In recent years college professors have openly and aggressively promoted ideologies such as critical race theory.
A decade of enrollment decline after 2011 reflected an accurate perception: Most colleges had become overpriced indoctrination mills. Recognition of this stimulated increasingly aggressive efforts by state politicians to reform universities, eroding their previous near independence from the political process.
In some parts of the country, elected officials have decided to reclaim ownership of their public university systems. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s popularity soared when he demanded that Florida schools account for their DEI spending. He managed to get special state funding for a new conservative-oriented Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and he engineered a daring takeover of the small New College, calling on it to become the South’s answer to Hillsdale, a small liberal-arts school in Michigan that is famous for refusing money from the federal government.
Other states have joined the trend. The conservative North Carolina legislature engineered a GOP takeover of the UNC board of governors, who voted 12-0 to create a new school committed to free expression in higher education. A Texas state senator has introduced a bill to turn the free-market minded Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, into a formal college. The Free Market Institute—which “advances research and teaching related to the free enterprise system and the institutional environment necessary for it to function well”—flourishes at Texas Tech. In Ohio, legislators have vowed to cease rubber-stamping gubernatorial nominees to university governing boards. In the past, these nominees were often picked by university administrators.
Most state universities still depend on taxpayer funding to pay many of their bills. If those universities deviate too drastically from accepted norms of behavior, they can be punished with reduced subsidies, a loss of control, or both. Perhaps legislators will start moving to a new funding model: give state funds to customers (students) rather than to educational producers (universities) and then let education markets work. Ultimately, even militant faculty should realize that tenure isn’t worth much if there are no dollars to pay salaries—or students to listen to their lectures.
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March 23, 2023
Over a Million Students Left District Schools. Are They Learning?
The education disruption caused by mass school closures and prolonged remote instruction beginning three years ago this month led many families to seek other learning options beyond an assigned district school. Emerging research reveals just how significant and sustained that shift was.
In a new report, “Where the Kids Went: Nonpublic Schooling and Demographic Change during the Pandemic Exodus from Public Schools,” Stanford economist Thomas Dee reveals that more than 1.2 million students left district schools during the pandemic response. That exodus endured throughout the 2021/2022 academic year, as families continued to opt for private schools and homeschooling even though most district schools reopened.
Indeed, homeschooling accounted for the largest growth area. According to Dee, for every one child that enrolled in private schools during the pandemic, nearly two children became homeschoolers. The district schooling exodus was particularly pronounced in areas where district schools remained closed the longest, as previous research also revealed.
Prolonged school closures and remote district schooling were the triggers many parents needed to explore other educational possibilities for their children. Now that they have discovered private schools and homeschooling, many families have no desire to return to a district school.
This shift has some people wondering about how children are being educated outside of a district school. Dee concludes his paper by stating that “the sharp and sustained growth in homeschooling and private school enrollment raises new questions about the quality of the learning environments children are experiencing.”
Parents clearly believe that the “quality of the learning environments” their children are now experiencing is better than the district schools they fled. For those families who chose homeschooling and private schooling over the past three years, they gave up a local “free” option for something more expensive, either in time or money—or both. Their continued satisfaction with the quality of their children’s new learning environment is keeping them there.
If parents are satisfied with that quality, then the rest of us should be too.
It helps that there are now many more education options for families, thanks to the everyday entrepreneurs who are creating new learning models and reimagining K-12 schooling.
One of those entrepreneurs is Amber Okolo-Ebube. A longtime homeschooling mother of four children in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas, Okolo-Ebube runs Leading Little Arrows, a weekly homeschooling enrichment program focused on nature, art, and STEM subjects. Her program has become so popular over the past year that she recently leased a building across the street from the University of Texas at Arlington campus. With 33 students and several adult facilitators, she is already near capacity, and will be expanding to run a microschool this fall.
Approximately three-quarters of Okolo-Ebube’s students are neurodiverse, with several, including two of her own children, on the autism spectrum. Leading Little Arrows provides the individualized learning environment and freedom of movement that enables both neurodiverse and neurotypical children to thrive.
Okolo-Ebube sees continued interest from families in homeschooling and other schooling alternatives. “I feel like there’s been a shift,” she told me during my recent visit to Leading Little Arrows. “I think COVID showed parents what was happening in their children’s schools, and also showed them that they could do better with homeschooling.”
She fields calls regularly from parents looking to leave local district schools for homeschooling and microschooling. “I don’t think this is stopping any time soon,” she said.
The Dallas/Fort Worth area has become a hub of education entrepreneurship and innovation. Many of these entrepreneurs, including Okolo-Ebube, have received small grants from the VELA Education Fund to accelerate their programs. A philanthropic nonprofit, VELA provides microgrants to entrepreneurial parents and educators who are building out-of-system learning models, such as microschools, homeschool co-ops, learning pods, and more. Since launching publicly in 2020, VELA has provided grants to over 2,000 of these entrepreneurs across the US, totaling more than $20 million.
The quality of Leading Little Arrows is measured by the continued growth of the program and increased parent interest, as well as the fact that some of Okolo-Ebube’s families drive more than an hour each way to attend. The parents I spoke with told me they value the diversity there, not only racially and socioeconomically, but also the diversity of ages of students (3-17) and the neurodiversity that is represented and celebrated. They also appreciate the personalized curriculum content that is being provided, with academic blocks bookended by ample outside and free-play time.
Over the past three years of education disruption, parents have been empowered to take back control of their children’s education. They are exploring learning options beyond their assigned district schools, and are flocking to homeschooling, microschooling, and related private education models at record rates. Education entrepreneurs across the country are acknowledging this demand for new and different educational possibilities, and are creating the kinds of quality programs that parents want.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/03/21/million-students-schools/?omhide=true
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School Choice Primarily Benefits Students Who Weren’t Already in Private Schools
As school choice sweeps across the country, opponents are getting more desperate in their attempts to stem the tide. Like those who spring October surprises in presidential campaigns, aiming to derail candidates with false but confidently expressed last-minute accusations, opponents of school choice seek to undermine it with a falsehood just as state legislatures gather to vote on choice proposals.
The misleading falsehood is the claim that universal school choice programs wouldn’t expand opportunity because the vast majority of the beneficiaries would be students who already are enrolled in private schools.
The claim is that choice programs do little more than give taxpayer money to families whose kids already attend or would have attended private schools anyway at their own expense. This may provide financial relief to those families, but they are assumed to be advantaged and therefore undeserving of assistance.
Let’s leave aside the fact that all families pay taxes and so all deserve greater control over how those resources are used to educate their own children. As education freedom advocate Corey DeAngelis reminds us, we should fund students, not systems.
And let’s also ignore the insulting assumption that parents who struggle to pay private school tuition, even as they pay taxes for a public school they don’t use, are somehow unworthy of relief from this double financial burden. The assertion that the vast majority of students who use school choice already were enrolled in private schools is completely untrue.
The main promoter of this false claim is Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University who founded and directed its Education Policy Innovation Collaborative. Cowen, however, ceased being affiliated with that center for reasons that haven’t been disclosed, and, around the same time, became a full-throated advocate against school choice.
Cowen writes in a Network for Public Education blog post: “Despite supporter rhetoric that voucher schemes are about new opportunities, the reality is 70-80 percent of kids in states like Arizona, Missouri, and Wisconsin were already in private school before taxpayers picked up the tab.”
He also has widely circulated on social media an infographic by the National Coalition for Public Education that answers the question “Who benefits from school vouchers?” by asserting: “The majority of voucher users in these states have never attended a public school. Vouchers subsidize tuition for students who already attend pricey private schools.”
The coalition’s infographic claims that 80% of choice students in Arizona, 89% of choice students in New Hampshire, and 75% of those in Wisconsin were “already in private school.”
The true rates of choice students who were “already in private school” (or would have enrolled in one anyway) are less than half as large as Cowen claims in those states. Cowen arrives at his inflated figures only by using outdated information and wrongly assuming that all students without a record of prior enrollment in a public school in the state must have been in private school previously.
The largest number of school choice students enter those programs in kindergarten or first grade. Cowen falsely asserts that all those students were “already in private school,” when in fact most weren’t enrolled in regular school at all. They would show no record of having previously been enrolled in public school, but that doesn’t mean that they were “already in private school.”
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Stanford Law ‘Diversity’ Dean Who Allowed Students To Heckle Conservative Federal Judge Placed on Leave
How fitting that the student thugs wore Fascist black
Stanford Law School announced via a ten page memorandum on Tuesday that no disciplinary action will be taken against students who angrily protested the presence of a federal appellate judge, Kyle Duncan, and prevented him from speaking at a scheduled event earlier this month.
The school also said that a dean who abetted the students’ behavior has been placed on leave, and that the school’s faculty will work to review campus free speech policies following the incident. SLS made clear that it stands by the apology it issued to Judge Duncan for how he was treated on campus.
The memo’s author, law school dean Jenny Martinez, said the assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, was on leave from her position, although a reason was not given. The statement left ambiguous whether her change in status is related to potential sanctions from the school or the death threats she has received in recent weeks, which are mentioned in the statement.
On March 9, Judge Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was set to give a talk at the invitation of the school’s conservative Federalist Society. Instead of addressing legal issues as he had planned, Judge Duncan was berated by students for his past rulings.
When the crowd got too unruly, Judge Duncan handed the podium to Ms. Steinbach, who promptly dismissed the judge and praised the students. Ms. Steinbach was widely criticized for her handling of the event.
“I had to write something down because I am so uncomfortable up here. Your advocacy, your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights,” Ms. Steinbach said to Judge Duncan as she pointed to the crowd of students.
“Is your speaking here worth the pain that it has caused, the division it has caused?” she asked. After she finished her remarks, dozens of students walked out of the room, with one calling Judge Duncan “scum” as she walked past the jurist.
Since the event, some students have called for the expulsion of the student protesters, while the demonstrators themselves say they were only exercising their First Amendment rights when they addressed Judge Duncan in the way that they did.
But Ms. Martinez does not believe that to be the case. She allows that “unless we recognize that student members of the Federalist Society and other conservatives have the same right to express their views free of coercion,” the school will be defaulting on its free speech commitments.
Those who protested, Ms. Martinez wrote in the memo, do not have the right to wield a “heckler’s veto.” She defended Judge Duncan’s right to speak to the group in her memo by citing a raft of judicial decisions from both federal and California courts. However, she added the Stanford policies around free speech were unclear and has promised to work with faculty to clarify them.
“I believe we cannot function as a law school from the premise that appears to have animated the disruption of Judge Duncan’s remarks — that speakers, texts, or ideas believed by some to be harmful, inflict a new impermissible harm justifying” the kinds of protests that occurred, she wrote.
Ms. Martinez will now require that every student at the law school take “mandatory educational programming” instead of “referring specific students for disciplinary sanction.”
Dean Martinez argues that the campus-wide programming is a more viable option than singling out individuals for the conduct displayed that day. Video and audio of the event depicted several students peacefully sitting in on Judge Duncan’s event, she said, which would make it difficult to determine who exactly is responsible for the aggressive heckling.
“Even if we could come up with a fair process for identifying and distinguishing between the two categories of students consistent with First Amendment values, the particular circumstances of this event raise additional concerns,” she wrote, including the “chilling” of free speech.
After the incident with Judge Duncan, Ms. Martinez and the president of Stanford University sent a joint letter to the judge to apologize for the way he was treated. That apology, however, sparked nearly as much backlash as the original presence of Judge Duncan himself.
Once the apology was publicized, students peacefully occupied Ms. Martinez’s constitutional law class, donning black clothing and masks. Ms. Martinez and the few students who refused to take part in the silent protests were forced to exit the building down a hallway that was lined with black-clad protesters.
Ms. Martinez notes that the “course I have chosen will not please everyone, not least of which those who have demanded that I retract my apology to Judge Duncan and those who have demanded that students be immediately expelled.”
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March 22, 2023
What’s left of our cultural inheritance?
Though it may come as a surprise to a postmodernist, 3,000 years of Western history offers some viable solutions to modern-day problems. After all, the human condition has not changed that much.
These timeless ideas and values should be at the heart of our education system. Great thinkers and leaders, from Aristotle to Churchill, should tower over our children’s school curricula. Concepts like democracy, the rule of law, and human rights should be taught and celebrated at our universities.
Sadly, the giants of Western history and philosophy have been purposely consigned to the dustbin, making way for identity politics, Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity, and sustainability. It is little wonder the OECD’s latest report reveals Australia’s education standards have been spiralling downwards for more than 20 years.
Forget about inspiring the next generation of Australians by immersing them in the achievements of Western Civilisation, Australia’s youth are instead required to focus on issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality.
This was a key finding of a landmark audit conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs which examined 791 history subjects offered across 35 Australian universities in 2022. According to the IPA research, tertiary institutions teach more about ‘race’ than ‘democracy’ (86 subjects compared to 33 subjects), ‘identity’ than the ‘Enlightenment’ (64 subjects compared to 25 subjects), and ‘sexuality’ than the ‘Reformation’ (54 subjects compared to 17 subjects).
Preschool, primary, and secondary schools aren’t faring much better. The National Curriculum has preschool students rapping about climate change before being taught the alphabet, and learning about ‘Invasion Day’ rather than the profoundly important benefits of the Westminster inheritance.
Postmodern theory is being taught at the expense of literacy, numeracy, and a balanced understanding of history. While it is deeply disturbing that our schoolchildren are falling even further behind those in Finland, Singapore, and Shanghai in mathematics and science, it is perhaps even more worrying that our community is losing the collective memory which is necessary to appreciate, preserve, and maintain the progress our society has made to date. If for nothing else, it is needed to ensure we do not repeat past mistakes.
It is deeply regrettable that neither side of Australian politics appears willing to address this existential problem. Accordingly, it is left to a few remaining groups in civil society, such as the IPA, to preserve, protect and defend the Western canon.
This was a core focus of this year’s IPA Academy program. Held in February, the program was designed for tomorrow’s leaders and focused on individual, economic, and political freedom and the wealth of thought supporting these ideas. Attendees heard from academics and political and private sector experts on topics ranging from Ancient Greece to Enlightenment philosophy, to free speech and the birth of free markets.
Embracing new technologies while retaining tried and tested institutions, values, and methods was also discussed – something our current leaders would do well to remember. Key issues such as harnessing nuclear energy and Australia’s current geopolitical position were addressed and debated, all the while equipping participants with the skills to communicate their beliefs.
The goal was to encourage young leaders to think outside the box and to build on proven ideas to come up with innovative solutions to modern problems. In short, they were being asked to fill the vacuum left by those institutions responsible for the education of young people.
As our public institutions capitulate to the forces of political correctness, and so are increasingly unable or unwilling to pass on the values of freedom and democracy, it is up to us who cherish these institutions to perform this vital task.
Programs like IPA Academy, though currently small, can be highly effective. The old Roman proverb, The human race lives by a few, speaks to the potentially powerful influence of those who dare to make a difference. At IPA Academy 2023, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott quoted this proverb during a speech about leadership in challenging times. Regardless of how noisy the crowd, regardless of how determined they are to shut down debate, the wisdom of the ‘few’ can still be heard.
Great sacrifices were made to win and maintain the freedoms and lifestyle we continue, for now, to enjoy in the West. Sacrifices will need to be made by current and future leaders if we are to preserve our way of life for future generations. It remains to be seen whether young leaders step up to the task. But the good news is we don’t need that many, just a few.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/whats-left-of-our-cultural-inheritance/
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Utah school gives kids 'disgusting' insects to eat in class for climate assignment on cows killing the Earth
A middle school in Utah's Nebo School District gave sixth-grade students "disgusting" insects to eat last week as part of an English assignment on climate change, claiming it would save the environment from cows which were "killing the world," according to a mom who spoke with Fox News Digital.
"Middle schoolers loved the 'ewww' factor, many of them gave bugs a try (and even a few staff members!). Many thanks to our English teachers for creating fun and engaging lessons," the Spring Canyon Middle school said about the March 7 assignment.
Bugs were purchased from a commercial site that is "safe for consumption," the district said.
The mother of one of the students – Amanda Wright – told Fox News she believed the kids were being subjected to "indoctrination" into a "dark climate change religion." She challenged the school's principal Alison Hansen on the assignment after her daughter found it uncomfortable.
The climate change assignment instructed sixth-graders to write an argumentative essay, but did not permit students to disagree. The only acceptable answer was that humans should eat insects for their protein instead of cows, which are destroying the Ozone layer with methane gas.
Some students were given extra credit as an incentive to eat the insects.
Wright complained to the administration, and set up a meeting which she recorded. "[My daughter] wasn't given an option to give an argument," Wright said about the argumentative essay in the meeting.
"Well, the assignment was about finding facts to support," Hansen said.
"All the evidence has suggested, that we probably should be eating bugs – it's good for the environment, etc. But I didn't know that that was an offensive topic to indicate," teacher Kim Cutler said, according to an audio recording.
A separate video recording was taken by Wright's daughter in the classroom.
"How come we can't state our opinion and write that we shouldn't be eating bugs?" she asked Cutler.
"Because we don't have any evidence to support it," Cutler said.
"It's kind of weird that I gave you a topic where there is only one right answer. We don't want to eat bugs and it's gross. But should we be eating bugs? Yeah, because we're killing the world by raising cows and animals. So we need to, not get rid of cows, but like, try to balance our diet so that not so much of our land is being used to raise cows, cause it's killing the Ozone layer."
"What if you wanted to – " the student interrupted.
The teacher said, "You don't have any evidence to support it. There's only one right answer to this essay. And it's that Americans should be eating bugs. Everyone in the world is eating them, it's healthy for the environment and there's just, there's only one right answer."
Cutler later explained in a meeting with the parent that the "indoctrination" that humans must eat bugs to protect the environment was provided in a district training.
She explained that she did not know there were downsides to eating bugs – and apologized for not allowing students to write about an alternative perspective. "I am not aware of the agenda part," she said. "I am sorry for that… it wasn't intending to harm anyone."
In a statement, the district said, "On the questions about extra credit: Yes, the teacher said sure you can have bonus points, almost as an afterthought. There are multiple opportunities for extra credit or bonus points in this class."
"[W]hen the teacher realized there was concern, the student was offered another topic of the student’s choice. Remember this particular assignment is about finding facts versus opinions to support writing an argumentative essay," the spokesperson continued. "Our district, schools, and teachers do encourage parents and students to come to us with their concerns. We want to continue to be partners in the education of children."
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Sex education is now how-to in schools —parents, beware
The facts of life haven’t changed, but sex ed is entirely different from what you took in school. Sex ed in middle school now includes graphic lessons on anal sex, oral sex and masturbation, with stick figures to illustrate body positions.
Supplemental reading in middle-school libraries includes “Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff,” a book explaining foreplay and how to rub the clitoris to produce pleasure.
Massachusetts’ curriculum tells seventh graders how to use cling wrap as a dental dam around their teeth for safe oral sex.
A majority of states require sex education labeled “comprehensive,” thanks to activists’ aggressive lobbying.
Planned Parenthood, the largest producer of sex-ed curriculum for public schools, argues children are entitled to know how to “experience different forms of sexual pleasure.”
Eugene, Ore., high schoolers were recently assigned to write a sexual fantasy featuring massage oil, flavored syrup, a candle, music, feathers or a boa.
How about teaching them math and English instead?
Nationwide, these racy lessons are outraging parents.
Last week, protests forced the Gwinnett County, Ga., school board to shelve voting on a proposed sex-ed curriculum.
Holly Terei, a parent, explained that it’s one thing to monitor social media and the movies kids watch, and it’s another to “have to worry about our children being exposed to curriculum that teaches them how to perform sexual acts.”
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is becoming the poster child for adolescent promiscuity.
Expect this to be a defining issue in next year’s national elections.
In Iowa last week, Donald Trump warned the crowd that schools “are focused on sexualizing our children.”
Most sex-ed lessons are not published by textbook companies.
Instead, sex ed has been highjacked by well-funded left-wing groups with their own agendas.
These include SIECUS (Sex Ed for Social Change), Advocates for Youth (an LGBTQ group) and the American Civil Liberties Union, which argues that children have sexual rights.
They all press for comprehensive sexuality education.
The word “comprehensive” is misleading. What the curriculum stresses is pleasure.
Many Massachusetts districts use Planned Parenthood’s “Get Real” curriculum.
The eighth-grade teachers’ manual suggests discussing a hypothetical scenario about two middle-school boys who “enjoy the sexual part of their relationship.”
In Florida, Leon County School Board tabled voting on a sex-ed curriculum this month when parents like Brandi Andrews objected.
She says a cartoon video of a laughing clitoris, part of the curriculum, would encourage young girls to be promiscuous.
CSE advocates argue that “how-to” information about sex keeps children safer.
Don’t believe it. A review of 60 studies of sex education in US schools, published in the scholarly journal Issues in Law and Medicine, found that comprehensive sex education more often resulted in more harm, including more unplanned pregnancies and STDs.
Those are physical harms. Kids can also suffer emotional and spiritual harm.
Comprehensive sex education is an ideology or religion, stressing gender fluidity, sexual experimentation and pleasure-seeking while repudiating parents’ roles and traditional values. Some families share those views, and many don’t.
Hundreds of Muslim Americans recently protested a Dearborn, Mich., school-board meeting holding signs such as “Keep Your Porno to Yourself.”
Christians, Jews and Muslims have all been told they must keep their religious teachings out of public schools.
Parents, it’s time to take control of what our kids are being taught.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/21/sex-education-is-now-how-to-in-schools-parents-beware/
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March 21, 2023
A Chance for Real Educational Change
When the history books look back on 2023, the biggest American news story may be something that’s getting little attention right now: the school choice revolution.
This year, Iowa, Utah, and Arkansas have passed massive school choice bills, giving parents access to state education funding for their children and letting them decide if they want to use it at public or private schools.
In Iowa, starting this fall, many families will be eligible to receive $7,598 per child to use toward the private school of their choice, as well as for other education expenses such as tutoring, textbooks, curricular materials, online courses, and special-needs therapy. In fall of 2025, this will be available to all parents of school-age children.
In Utah, legislators passed a bill funding about $8,000 per student (assuming around 5,000 students enroll) toward private education, including private school tuition and homeschool expenses.
In Arkansas, parents will be able to get 90% of the money the state is spending per pupil in public schools and use it toward the education of their choice. Like Iowa, the program will be gradually rolled out, but by the 2025-2026 school year, all school-aged children will be eligible.
These three states follow Arizona and West Virginia, where thousands of children are already receiving funds to be used toward the education of their parents’ choice. (Sadly, Arizona’s new Democrat governor, Katie Hobbs, is threatening the education savings account program, despite having attended a private school herself.)
Meanwhile, as state legislatures around the country meet, eight more states—Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Texas—are considering introducing or expanding access to education savings accounts.
We could potentially soon be in an America where students in about a quarter of states are liberated from the leftist propaganda of public schools.
Imagine.
Furthermore, there’s broad, bipartisan support for school choice. While the corporate media might sneer at Americans concerned about what their children are learning in public schools, it turns out interest in school choice unites Democrats and Republicans. Asked about giving “parents the right to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs,” 68% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans said they supported it, according to an American Federation for Children 2022 survey conducted by Real Clear Opinion Research.
The poll also found agreement among different races: 70% of blacks, 77% of Hispanics, 72% of whites, and 66% of Asians supported school choice.
No doubt Americans are motivated by a variety of reasons to seek out private schools. Some may want better academics. Others may want safer schools. Some may think that it shouldn’t just be in Florida where kids don’t have to hear about sex and gender issues in kindergarten.
Regardless, right now it is absolutely crucial that conservatives empower parents with school choice. Thanks to conservative journalists and activist parents, we’ve learned a lot about the indoctrination going on in some public schools on topics like critical race theory, American history, and LGBT issues.
But students today aren’t just facing indoctrination. They’re being given the ability to permanently change their lives—without their parents’ knowledge.
Earlier this month, Parents Defending Education identified over 6,000 schools where staff can choose to hide a child’s gender transition from his or her parents. About 3.3 million students attend those schools.
Nor are those schools just in deep blue states. My colleague Tony Kinnett has extensively reported on an Indiana school district’s policy that did not require staff to notify parents if a child was changing genders or names. The school counselor who confirmed the policy has been fired.
Consider the tragic story of Abby Martinez’s daughter Yaeli.
My colleague Virginia Allen reported last year that “Yeli attended an LGBTQ club at school that affirmed her questioning of her own gender. Her counselor at school also affirmed her decision to begin socially transitioning from female to male.”
“I don’t know if the schools, [if[ they [are] supposed to let us know what’s going on or not, but they never send me any note about telling me, ‘We need to talk about your daughter,’” Martinez told The Daily Signal. Instead, she found out from one of her other children who attended the same school as Yaeli.
Martinez tried to talk to her daughter about her gender identity. But Yaeli moved out at 16, and Martinez lost custody. “Because Martinez expressed concerns over her daughter’s ‘transitioning’ to a boy, Yaeli’s school psychologist recommended that she would be better off living away from home,” Allen wrote.
Ultimately, despite changing her name to a man’s name and taking cross-sex hormones, Yaeli, who had struggled with depression before her interest in gender transition, died by suicide at age 19.
Don’t all parents deserve the option to only place their children in schools where parents, not school bureaucrats, make the decisions about their child’s health care and gender identity?
When it comes to so many issues, from serving special needs students, to protecting students, to educating students, many, many public schools are failing today. Yet they still often have a monopoly on state education funds, no matter how dismal their records. That doesn’t make any sense—and it’s exciting to see how many states are waking up and changing that.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/16/a-chance-for-real-change/
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The Murder of the Humanities
For nearly 50 years the “humanities,” those courses in higher education that focus on the liberal arts, have been in crisis. This important front in the culture wars recently saw a brief skirmish touched off by a New Yorker article about the last days of the English major. But such analyses are in fact obituaries. The “woke” purveyors of “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism have finished their march through the institutions and now occupy our universities. Liberal education, the passing on of the “best that is known and thought,” survives only in a few scattered outposts.
Most of the assaults have come from the political and cultural Left and its more recent guise in the “woke” tribunes who have rebranded the old multicultural, identity victim-politics founded on the Leninist principle, “who whom”–– who is the oppressor, who is the oppressed. We all know the answer: Western civilization and all its works, including its fine arts and “great books,” which are mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxiste village explainers put it, of the hegemonic ideologies, values, “truths,” “facts,” and “narratives,” all the “hidden persuaders” who exploit the “false consciousness” of the masses.
Onto this dubious and question-begging explanation for the success of capitalism and liberal democracies, Cultural Marxism grafted “identity politics,” the reduction of people’s complex, undetermined humanity, to the superficial characteristics of color and “race,” and to “culture,” one that, particularly in the case of Americans, is fabricated from fake history or crude stereotypes. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes,
“Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causes destroy any possibility of a natural or cultural community among peoples.”
It follows, then, that the cultural artifacts of one ethnicity are incompatible with those of another. Standards of excellence are inherently racist and oppressive, for they invidiously exclude those of the marginalized “other,” whose history of racist, sexist, and xenophobic oppression and exclusion is thus erased.
A particularly silly, but illuminating, expression of this belief appears in Martha Nussbaum’s 1997 book Cultivating Humanity: “For a black student being asked to study the great books” in the days before multiculturalism broke the canon of great books, “was not like being asked to do so for a white student. For the former, it was like going to a debutante party in whiteface and knowing that one wasn’t on the invitation list.”
So much for black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, who called reading the great books of Western Civilization “cross[ing] the color line.” So much for poor whites or immigrants for whom the great books are an undiscovered county they are the first in their families to explore. Now the liberal arts, the body of achievement in literature and the fine arts, comprises mere tribal badges of hegemony, just as the slavocrats and segregationists believed. Everyone, rich or poor, has to wear the same uniform despite their individual hearts and minds.
So much, too, for our country’s foundational principle of unalienable rights inherent in all human beings, which now is discarded because of the failure of earlier peoples to honor that principle. And that stain is passed on to their descendants, just as anti-Semites justified their bigotry by calling Jews “deicides” or “Christ-killers.”
The historical malfeasance of this Balkanization of culture is particularly egregious, given that over a century ago the case for the liberating power of the liberal arts was made by Matthew Arnold, and more recently strengthened by Allan Bloom. The value of studying literature and the arts is their power to inculcate critical consciousness, the awareness of a larger world of meaning and greater possibilities, one accessible to all of us, regardless of our tribe, sex, or sect, through great works of the imagination.
This faculty Arnold called “the free play of the mind on all subjects,” which fosters the “instinct prompting [the mind] to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatever.” The goal is the ability to turn “a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
What we see today, with our universities functioning as an incubator of illiberal “woke” identity politics, is exactly the opposite: the triumph of “stock notions and habits” that our self-proclaimed intelligentsia “follow stanchly but mechanically,” and the adherence to which is enforced through censorship and collective shaming. The result is the diminishment of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.
A more recent expression of the irreplaceable value of the humanities is Alan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. What Bloom emphasizes is the importance of the “free play of the mind” to our Constitutional order: “By liberal education I mean education for freedom, which consists primarily in the awareness of the most important alternatives.” This does not mean a slavish subjection to tradition, but rather training students to seek the answers to the perennial questions of human value and human identity, and to resist the dominant “notions and habits” of one’s own society and culture: “A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question [what is a human] to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not available.”
Moreover, students should be trained “to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.” This discredits the caricature of blinkered conservatives frightened of new or strange ideas, or too xenophobic and ethnocentric to accept foreign literature or arts. This view is historically false. No civilization has been as curious about the “other,” or been influenced by his culture as much as the West has.
True to that spirit, Bloom writes, “The true canon aggregates around the most urgent questions we face. That is the only ground for the study of books. Idle cultural reports, Eastern or Western, cannot truly concern us except as a hobby.” Good, carefully argued or imaginatively presented ideas are valuable no matter where they come from, and stand and fall on their worth alone. Thus our canon of “great books” are important because they transcend their time and explore questions about human nature and behavior necessary for “ordered liberty,” something quite different from the freedom to do as one pleases.
As for the West’s toxic ethnocentrism, Bloom points out, historically most of the world’s cultures have been, and many remain ethnocentric and intolerant of the stranger. So too with our “woke” tribes today. Where do we see the hatred of the “other,” if not among the “woke” cadres and commissars demonizing all “whites” with “systemic racism”? ? And what’s more illiberal and divisive than the category “people of color,” a broad, elastic term that deems Caucasians like Arabs and many Latinos as some sort of racial minority “of color”? And how come Asians, an ethnicity that has known prejudice and bigotry in America, are now treated like the enemy because they succeed and achieve on their own merits instead of the patronage of the state?
Finally, what force is there in the university to stand against the imprisoning of people in their ethnic cages, to speak up for the true diversity of individual minds and imaginations, and the enrichment of life and thought that follows the liberation from identity-politics straitjackets–– the freedom to learn and know the great variety that is the wonder of humanity?
The champions of unalienable rights and the value of every individual heart and mind are few in higher education. For all the “woke” commissars’ hectoring us about “diversity,” a dreary, antihuman orthodoxy now prevails, and reeducation for servitude has replaced liberal education for freedom.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-murder-of-the-humanities/
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50 shell-shocked teachers, staff flee chaotic Florida school district
Florida’s Brevard County School District, the state’s 10th-largest, held a heated meeting on Thursday that offered an unvarnished and often disturbing glimpse into the state of its classrooms, the New York Post reports.
“On an everyday basis I am deflecting being attacked, scratched, headbutted, pushed, hit,” teacher Alicia Kelderhouse said as her voice choked with emotion.
“I’ve had my hair pulled, and pulled down to the ground. I’ve had my throat gone for on multiple occasions. It’s on an everyday basis right now.”
Ms Kelderhouse said staffers often commiserate in the morning to muster the courage to face the day — and that frightened kids are grappling with the same fears.
“I have students who are afraid every day in the classroom,” she said.
“It’s just not fair to them. That’s what hurts my heart the most.”
The head of the district’s beleaguered teachers union, Anthony Collucci, recounted recent incidents reported by staffers to school administrators.
One student began masturbating inside a classroom, an act that was recorded by a classmate and posted to a group chat.
Another teacher was hit in the face with a tape dispenser, while a colleague suffered a bite mark the “size of an orange” after a student munched on her arm.
Another educator frequently had to remove all furniture from her class because kids were routinely chucking it around the room or at each other.
One district teacher said behaviours have markedly worsened since the pandemic — but the classroom behaviour was already plunging before Covid-19.
“The pandemic was an accelerant to a fire that was already raging,” he said.
The same staffer asserted that sexual misconduct, drug use, theft, violence, targeted spitting and property destruction had become the demoralising hallmarks of his profession.
Several speakers pointed to the ubiquity of mobile phones as a driver of classroom disorder, casting many students as screen addicts no longer capable of sustained attention.
Asserting that a culture of “unbelievable disrespect” has taken hold, one teacher said her kids look at their devices “hundreds” of times each day and keep their earbuds in while lessons are in progress.
“Our students cannot look away from their phones,” she said. “They cannot stop texting.”
Students often tell teachers that they have to wrap up a text message before they acknowledge being called on or addressed in class.
Educators routinely ask colleagues to watch their classrooms for a few moments so they can have a “mini-breakdown” inside a school bathroom, a speaker noted.
Veteran teacher Gene Trent said his colleagues used to call a student’s parent or guardian to address problems — but those efforts have been largely abandoned due to futility.
Mr Trent said previously, a parent would thank a teacher for reaching out and promise to address the situation at home. But in recent years, they often blame the educator for causing poor behaviour.
Other parents, staffers said at the meeting, threaten lawsuits for matters as minor as detention.
Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey recorded a video last month vowing to crack down on unruly behaviour inside schools, filming the spot in front of a jail.
Mr Ivey said classrooms have descended into chaos because kids no longer fear consequences.
“As a result, we are losing teachers en masse,” he said, calling disruptive students “clowns” who are impeding the education of their classmates.
Several speakers criticised Mr Ivey at Thursday’s meeting, and highlighted that suspensions are meted out in disproportionately high numbers to black students.
“Our children are not clowns,” said a local NAACP member. “They are not snot-nosed.”
He accused Mr Ivey of using “scare tactics” and “bullying” in pushing for disciplinary clampdowns.
Another speaker said the district should emphasise diversity, equity and inclusion in any new behaviour code.
“I would feel more comfortable about the discipline policy if I knew diversity was appreciated in this area,” another district parent said.
“And I don’t feel it. My fear is that the practices are inconsistent when I hear about the disparities.”
One parent argued that disruptive students — regardless of race — should be removed from classrooms.
“If you are throwing a chair in a classroom, you do not belong there,” she said. “I’m sorry. If you can’t behave, that’s not my child’s fault. My child’s education should not be hindered because that child doesn’t know how to behave. And by that child I don’t mean black, white, Hispanic or any other thing. I mean the child who wasn’t taught how to behave.”
The Brevard board is developing a new disciplinary framework, and will hold future public meetings on the issue.
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March 20, 2023
Complaint Filed Over School Event Only Allowing Girls and ‘Gender Diverse’ Students
On Tuesday, parental rights organization Parents Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against a school district in Pennsylvania for hosting STEM events only open to “girls and gender diverse students.”
According to documents obtained by PDE and shared with Townhall, Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania will host an academic event called “the inaugural Girls+ STEM Night.” The event is meant to “expose younger girls and gender diverse students to various STEM-related careers and fields in hopes that it will spark an interest to pursue science, technology, engineering and math inside and outside of the classroom” and promises to hold future events of the same nature.
“By its plain terms…only some students may attend this school program. It excludes others — and this exclusion is based solely on an individual’s sex,” PDE noted. “As for the future ‘girls and gender diverse’ programming and networking opportunities, that too would confer a benefit on the basis of sex not offered to all students.”
The letter outlining the complaint notes that discrimination on the basis of sex violates Title IX, which declares that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
"Discriminating against a group of students based on sex is unconstitutional and all such instances of discrimination should be examined with a fine-toothed comb. Every student deserves the same opportunities to thrive and be challenged through STEM-related programming and Lower Merion students are no exception. This is the second OCR complaint we've filed against this district in the last month. The district clearly needs to weed out the bad apples who put these policies in place,” PDE Vice President Caroline Moore said.
Previously, PDE filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights after a public high school in Massachusetts restricted auditions for a school play for students who identify as people of color, which Townhall covered. Last month, the organization unveiled documents that exposed a school district in Kansas for hiding students’ gender transitions from parents.
And, earlier this month, documents uncovered by PDE revealed that one of the country’s top public high schools, located in Fairfax, Virginia, reportedly received hundreds of thousands of dollars from groups affiliated with China’s military.
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What Happens When Parental Rights Are Surrendered to the Government?
Considering how egregiously parents' rights have been trampled in recent years, federal parental rights legislation recently reintroduced in Congress sounds promising, but its premise is dangerous. It could erode parents' God-given rights to direct the upbringing of their children.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis initiated the precedent for parental rights legislation, whose bill was dubbed by critics the "Don't Say Gay" bill. A noteworthy feature of the DeSantis law is that it prohibits sex education in kindergarten through third grade (five through nine-year-olds). It is hard to believe that we need a law to restrict sex education for children who, at these young ages, aren't even thinking about sexuality, but it is necessary.
Governor DeSantis has done more to protect children and our country's freedom than any governor I have observed. He has been right on education policy on many fronts and continues to take the lead on common-sense education policy. But the reality is that our Creator, not the government determines parental rights. Despite such good intentions from leaders like DeSantis, any parental rights legislation is flawed at its inception, suggesting parents' rights are determined by the government rather than the fundamental, inalienable rights of parents afforded by their Creator.
Prominent conservative legal scholar Joanna Martin, J.D., recently published an article titled "A Massive Transfer of Power Over Children from Parents to Governments," She discusses similar concerns with parental rights legislation. She writes specifically about the bill passed by the North Carolina Senate, saying, "… what S.B. 49 does is to transfer power over children from parents to governments. Parents' rights' consist of the privilege of being notified of decisions made respecting their children by governments, and they are granted specific rights to challenge some of the findings."
At last count, seventy-three Republican U.S. House of Representatives members are sponsors of the federal Parental Rights bill filed on March 1, 2023. Several bill sponsors are Freedom Caucus members, which begs the question — have they read the bill? Do they understand the implication of the government delineating parental authority?
When parents file lawsuits citing an infringement of their parental rights, they do so on "a fundamental, inalienable right" basis. According to N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, "We have at least a century of U.S. constitutional jurisprudence explaining that the history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court has described parental rights as 'beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.'"
If Parental Rights Laws are passed, the point of debate becomes the content and context of that law, not the fundamental right. We could end up arguing whether or not a school counselor has the right to assist children in accessing medical treatment, like gender transitioning drugs and surgeries, based on some loophole in the new law. Fundamental, inalienable rights do not have loopholes.
The nonprofit organization's mission, where I serve as president, is to close the U.S. Department of Education and end all federal education mandates. This is the mission because we understand that nefarious pedagogies originate and are pushed onto states by federal agencies incentivized with federal dollars.
Federal parental rights legislation creates more federal education mandates. This is a step in the wrong direction if our goal is to restore parental and local control of education.
The federal Republican bill passed out of committee 25 to 17 and now moves to the full House. In the meantime, the Democrats have offered alternative legislation touts "… inclusive, safe, and responsive public schools … and protecting the civil rights of students and families."
I like the simplicity of the Republican bill, but when reading explanations offered by leading advocates for parental rights legislation, they make it clear that these rights already exist!
One clear point in the federal legislation is the parental ability to influence their child's experiences within a public school. But this is a local control issue. We must hold school boards accountable. After all, implementing this control must happen at the local level. A rogue teacher who ignores approved parental restrictions will not face a federal law. But school boards could set policies to fire them.
U.S. Parents Involved in Education seeks to return education to its proper local roots and restore parental authority over their children's education by helping parents and local communities to escape federal and other national influences.
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First-Year Med Students Told to Call Women ‘People With Cervices’; Professor Slams ‘Anti-Biological’ Lesson
A professor at Indiana University School of Medicine condemned a lesson inculcating gender ideology among first-year medical students as “anti-scientific” and “anti-biological,” warning that it would have “very detrimental effects to the health care profession” and stating that he had not heard of any internal discussions about the lesson before professors implemented it.
“I did not hear about it until it came out in the news,” the professor, who spoke with The Daily Signal on condition of anonymity, said in a phone interview Wednesday. He said the transgender lesson did not surprise him, however, because “the entire biomedical profession has been conquered by this aggressive ideology that inculcates a certain worldview.”
The lesson, “Sex and Gender Primer” for the Human Structure course, endorses calls for the redefinition of sex, claiming that biological sex is “NON-binary” (emphasis original). According to a PowerPoint presentation that the medical organization Do No Harm provided to The Daily Signal, it encourages medical students to use “inclusive terminology” based on the notion that gender is divisible from sex.
It presents as a “resource” the “genderbread person” diagram separating gender identity from gender expression and from anatomical sex.
The lesson laments that “most textbooks present sex as binary” and advocates for “anatomy texts to discuss sex on a spectrum.” It notes that it “will take time to update” the “sexual, reproductive, and genital system content” that is “highly gendered.”
The lesson endorses “person-first language” such as “people with cervices” rather than “women,” and “anatomy-based language,” such as “the testes produce sperm” rather than “the male gonad produces sperm.”
The lesson also notes that “linguistic practices are open to change as LGBTQIA+ advocates refine their perspectives on language.”
The school of medicine’s website describes “Human Structure” as a nine-week course in phase one, year one at medical school.
Do No Harm, an organization of doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals that speaks out against medical abuses, first obtained the lesson, which The Daily Mail first published Sunday, without attribution to Do No Harm.
Do No Harm’s board chairman, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist, condemned the lesson in remarks to The Daily Signal, tying it to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion classes.
“Indiana University School of Medicine’s woke DEI classes on gender are highly speculative and won’t change the health of any group in America for the better,” Goldfarb said.
“This class conflates the anatomy of male and female reproductive systems with a highly controversial and scientifically dubious concept of ‘gender fluidity,’” he noted. “It uses complex and very rare abnormalities in human development to assert that gender is a spectrum and not the manifestation of the basic biologic reality of the sexes. These ideas should not be presented as established biology. By doing so, they provide support for the gender transition of minor children. DEI indoctrination in medical schools must be stopped for the sake of quality of patient care.”
The Indiana University medical professor agreed.
“It’s anti-scientific and anti-biological,” the professor told The Daily Signal. “This is going to have very detrimental effects to the health care profession. It’s going to degrade the trust of the public in health care.”
He warned that transgender ideology “reverts us to a pre-Enlightenment era, where biology and objective facts are not relevant.”
“I have not heard of any internal discussions about this,” he added, lamenting that “there is no open debate about it at all.”
“It reminds me of what I’ve read about the Stalinist era and the way scientists were handled by the state regime during the 20th century,” the professor added. According to English science writer Simon Ings, the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin “embraced, patronized, and even fetishized science like never before,” but “scientists lived their lives on a knife edge,” facing exile, imprisonment, or death if they countered the regime’s ideology.
“I suspect that if there was open discussion” at Indiana University Medical School, “most individuals would be opposed to forcing this very aggressive ideology on trainees,” the professor said.
He urged the medical field to “encourage and require open debate” and to “purge ideology and politics from medicine,” even if it requires politicians to use “financial leverage” to remove gender ideology from schools.
Indiana University School of Medicine declined to comment on the document to The Daily Signal.
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March 19, 2023
Four Oxford dons forced to retire by university at the age of 68 win age discrimination claim
Academics can remain productive into their '90s so forced early retirement always was nonsense
Four academics forced to retire at 68 under a policy designed to promote ‘diversity’ have won their age discrimination claim against Oxford University.
The Employer Justified Retirement Age policy was found by an employment tribunal to have a discriminatory effect and could not be legally justified.
The senior academics all left the university between 2019 and 2021 because of the policy introduced a decade earlier. Some went on to work elsewhere instead of retiring.
Nicholas Field-Johnson, 71, head of development in continuing education; Bent Flyvbjerg, 70, a professor in the Said Business School; Philip Candelas, 71, the Rouse Ball head of mathematical physics; and Duncan Snidal, 69, a professor in international relations, successfully joined forces to challenge the university’s ageist policy to push them into retirement.
They stand to receive substantial damages. A future hearing will decide on a remedy unless a deal is struck with Oxford.
The judgment has not yet been published but was revealed by lawyers representing three of the academics.
Their solicitor Simon Henthorn, a partner at Doyle Clayton, said: ‘In our experience it is difficult for employers to lawfully retire employees.
'This was certainly the case in this matter, and we are delighted that the Employment Tribunal has ruled in the professors’ favour.’
Employers used to be able to force workers to retire at 65 but this default retirement age was scrapped in 2011, allowing most to continue working if they want or need to.
Oxford’s policy was also introduced in 2011 and covered staff ranging from the Vice-Chancellor down to senior research staff.
The idea was that it could be justified as the aim was to promote ‘equality and diversity’ by opening up new jobs to a younger generation likely to be more diverse than the existing workforce.
The university claimed that ‘refreshing’ the academic and research staff would help it maintain ‘its rich academic environment and foster innovation.’
But this latest legal challenge has put the policy - set to increase the retirement age to 69 later this year - in doubt.
By law an employer can ask employees to retire at a certain age there is a legitimate aim behind it. In this case the tribunal ruled the policy could not be justified in this way.
The tribunal panel said the university had not produced evidence to show the policy’s success in creating vacancies.
Figures provided indicated ‘nine in ten’ vacancies for statutory and associate professor roles would have arisen if the EJRA had not existed.
The tribunal concluded ‘the overall contribution of the EJRA to promoting equality and diversity is very limited.’
Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews are the only universities to have such age-related retirement rules in place.
An Oxford University spokesman said: ‘The university has been notified of the tribunal’s ruling. We are currently reviewing the detail and considering our next steps, including the option of appeal.’
None of the academics were available for comment.
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‘Restorative Justice’ Is Killing American Classrooms
As record numbers of fistfights are erupting amid a behavior crisis in the American public education system, more schools are attempting to use restorative justice—even though that process often makes behavioral problems worse.
Restorative justice is a remediation theory that suggests students respond better to affirmation-based conversations in which an adult de-escalates any problem situation by calmly discussing the students’ feelings about the problem until everyone agrees.
Restorative justice relies on student investment and commitment to say, “I am willing to do this.”
Traditional methods of discipline are seen as utterly barbaric, with fans of restorative justice suggesting that punishing a student for violent or other bad actions sets them on an unshakable path toward prison and abuse.
Proponents often point to schools that adopted the practice of restorative justice and saw a sharp decline in suspensions—Oakland Unified School District in California, for example. Although suspensions in Oakland Unified have decreased, the level of violence and total number of police incidents in the school district have not.
Few, if any, schools that have adopted restorative justice as a replacement for traditional discipline have seen a healthier school environment that is safer for teachers and students.
Unfortunately for those who seek the utopian, unicorn sunshine of these practices, the majority of students don’t respond well to restorative justice. Hundreds of public school districts that use it are experiencing large numbers of physical fights and continual chaos that is more responsible for driving teachers out of the classroom than almost any other issue.
Restorative justice fails thousands of classrooms a day in situations such as this recent one in Wisconsin described by Milwaukee English teacher Daniel Buck:
A student gets into a violent fight in the classroom—students’ safety is threatened, and the teacher struggles to break up the fight before calling the office. The office may (or may not) send an administrator, counselor, or other office-staff member to the classroom, where the fighting students are taken into the hallway or the office for a brief discussion about their actions.
Most often, the students are told to get along, sent back to class, and within five minutes nothing more has occurred than putting the safety of students at risk with both violent students back in their seats with no more than a polite ‘talking to.’ These students don’t buy into restorative practices. Why should they care?
Any adult who has spoken with a child after (or during) a fight knows that rational dialogue and feelings-centric relationship-building aren’t at the forefront of his mind. Why would a violent or disruptive student choose to engage in an “opportunity for equitable dialogue and participatory decision-making” when he can simply mumble at the floor and be sent from the office back to class without punishment regardless?
I have yet to see a single pair of high school students who just smashed each other’s faces into lockers and cement walls genuinely respond with an air of reconciliation to the questions, “What can you do to repair the harm?” or “Who else was affected by what you did?”
You’re far more likely to hear a screaming explanation of why the other student “needed his a– beat.”
American classrooms have given up detentions, suspensions, and community service as methods of delivering justice in order to gain a never-ending cycle of violence; this teaches students that they may do whatever they wish with no observable risk.
We also forget the additional impact that this horrific policy has on innocent students and teachers who are just trying to engage in the learning process.
How are students supposed to focus on their education when desks are thrown aside by students who are pulling each other’s hair and screaming at the top of their lungs? How are teachers supposed to teach when students are throwing each other across the room without respite?
As the science and STEM coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools, I watched my science teachers struggle under the weight of a failed system as their students beat each other to the point of senselessness day after day, without any administrative action other than “sharing their feelings.”
The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, continues to preach that the “school-to-prison pipeline” is solved by restorative justice. But it seems that students are more likely to be thrown in prison as a result of the practice.
Students who are violent and disruptive without consequences one day will find that police departments don’t have restorative conversation circles. Crimes will be met with prison sentences.
As a teacher, I was told repeatedly in our “equity meetings” that the classical methods of justice were harmful and ineffective—yet charter and private schools that still practice these methods enjoy the privileges of safe hallways and classrooms, fewer police incidents, and a better environment for learning.
Restorative justice practices have driven many teachers I’ve spoken with to tears. Entire schools have locked their bathrooms during the day to prevent students from killing each other between classes. Instagram accounts celebrating hourly fights in large public schools spring up so often that social media platforms have trouble taking them down.
The Justice Department announced March 6 that it would offer grants to teach university education departments about the supposed virtues of restorative justice, hoping to “educate, train, and build knowledge on restorative justice approaches, principles, and their application to criminal justice and community safety.”
Despite the record of classical discipline and justice in creating safe environments, despite the numerous examples we have of these methods working effectively, the Biden administration seems bent on pushing us ever close to the false dream of utopia. And our children will pay the price.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/16/restorative-justice-is-killing-american-classrooms
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Distressing moment female teacher QUITS in the middle of class after being taunted by kids
The woman, who has not been identified, looked distressed as she started to pack up her belongings before storming out of the classroom.
Initially pupils can be heard laughing, before a male voice says 'woah isn't no way' as she continues on her outburst.
It is unclear which school or even where in the US the incident took place, with text over the top of the footage saying 'they made the teacher leave'.
A woman can be heard saying 'just come out' as another member of staff wearing a lanyard appears to stand in the classroom watching it unfold.
The teacher said: 'And people are laughing, I'm gonna go I don't even care if I don't get paid today. I'm just a stupid old white lady, that's all.
'Yeah do whatever you want to do I don't care. You're gonna do it anyway.' 'I'm walking, I'm walking right out the door. I won't ever be back.'
Many teachers have spoken out in solidarity with the woman, saying that 'bullies come in all ages' as well as blaming it on parents for controlling their children.
One said: 'They literally brag about making teachers cry or quit like it's cute or something.
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March 17, 2023
Girls High School Basketball Team Banned From Future Tournaments for Refusing to Compete Against Team With Male Player
A Christian school’s girls basketball team has been banned from competing in future tournaments after forfeiting a game against a team with a male student who claims to be transgender.
In February, the Mid Vermont Christian School girls high school basketball team pulled out of a game in the girls state basketball playoffs. Head of School Vicky Fogg told Fox Digital that the school chose to withdraw from the “tournament because we believe playing against an opponent with a biological male jeopardizes the fairness of the game and the safety of our players.”
The headmaster added: “Allowing biological males to participate in women’s sports sets a bad precedent for the future of women’s sports in general.”
Now, the Vermont Principals’ Association has banned the Christian school from future tournaments because the school would not allow their girls to play against a team with a male player.
The Vermont Principals’ Association said in a statement that it supports transgender student athletes, and said that “Vermont state law(s)” give transgender students the right to play on their team of choice
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Violence Erupts at Charlie Kirk Campus Event Following False 'Lynching' Accusation by Liberal News Outlet
Chaos and violence erupted at a California college during a conservative activist’s speaking event, following a misleading article published by a liberal outlet.
Turning Point USA (TPUSA) president Charlie Kirk was scheduled to speak at UC Davis on Tuesday night. However, before his appearance, the Sacramento Bee published an article alleging that Kirk had advocated for the “lynching” of transgender individuals.
Naturally, Kirk never made such a statement. In a subsequent correction to the article, the Bee explained that the claim arose from an interpretation of Kirk’s remarks about a transgender swimmer. Kirk had said, “Someone should have took (sic) care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s.” Transgender activists, who get overly dramatically upset at the slightest offense, naturally perceived Kirk’s comment as a call for a lynching.
Despite the paper retracting the allegation and issuing a correction, the harm had already been done. People were swift to document the false accusation that the Bee leveled against Kirk.
The false allegation was repeated by UC Davis Chancellor Gary May, who, as reported by the Post Millennial, labeled Kirk a “well-documented proponent of misinformation and hate… who has advocated for violence against transgender individuals.”
May also urged the UC Davis community to “work together to neutralize and negate” Kirk’s influence, aiming to ensure he addressed an empty room.
Following the Bee article and May’s call to “neutralize and negate” Kirk, extreme leftist and LGBT activists, including Antifa members, arrived to prevent the speech, leading to a chaotic situation.
Breitbart reported that videos appeared to show the radical leftists shattering windows to gain entry to the event venue while police tried to hold them back.
Additional footage displayed riot police confronting protesters carrying banners and chanting “fight back” as they attempted to move toward the venue.
Erika Kirk, wife of Charlie Kirk, posted on Instagram that the attack on the event was carried out “all in the name of ‘tolerance.'”
Breitbart reported that when the turmoil finally subsided, only two individuals were arrested for spray painting the building. No arrests were made for breaking the windows or engaging in altercations with the police.
Responsibility for this alarming occurrence can be assigned to both the Sacramento Bee, for publishing the false claim, and to Chancellor May, for echoing the Bee’s false allegation and for urging the UC Davis community to act against Kirk.
The left frequently accuses conservative media outlets of disseminating “misinformation” and “hate” that endanger democracy. Yet, here we have a left-leaning outlet spreading “disinformation” and “hate” against conservatives with real-life repercussions.
Regarding Chancellor May, he should be immediately fired for repeating false claims and most importantly for instigating the violence against Kirk. A similar incident recently occurred at Stanford University, where a dean aligned with a ‘woke’ mob to prevent a federal judge from speaking.
The truth is, the lies spread by the left about conservatives don’t come without consequences.
False claims like the ones spread by the Sacramento Bee and by chancellor May can have real and serious impacts on those targeted and on their families, as the troubling events at UC Davis clearly show
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American Kidz Is Getting Dummer
There’s an old expression that the longer American kids stay in American public schools, the dumber they get.
By that we mean that as kindergartners they tend to score near the top of the heap internationally, but they slip during the middle school years, and they slip even more by the time they graduate high school.
When we consider this against the additional ground we lost during the disastrous COVID lockdowns — the ones engineered by the Democrats and the teachers union pals, never forget — the picture is not only grim; it’s infuriating. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board reported last year on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, also known as the nation’s report card: “Average nine-year-old scores declined the most on record in math (seven points) and in reading since 1990 (five points). Two decades of progress [were] erased in two years.”
Why not just throw more money at the problem, you ask? Oh, we’ve tried that. As the Reason Foundation reported in 2020, “Inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending per student has increased by 280 percent since 1960.”
With that kind of profligacy, is it any wonder that Randi Weingarten and her American Federation of Teachers cronies donate around 100% of their campaign funding to the Democrats every election cycle?
But trust us: Our kids haven’t gotten 280% smarter since 1960. Indeed, now we’re learning that they’ve gotten demonstrably dumber.
A new study suggests that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, the American people’s average IQ is declining, with the greatest difference in annual IQ scores being in the 18-22 age group. And — shocker of shockers — it’s a trend that the study’s authors believe might be related to the quality of education they’re getting.
As political analyst Robert Spencer sardonically puts it:
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but after years of being told that boys who think they’re girls and girls who think they’re boys are “brave” and “courageous” instead of mentally ill, and that the Founding Fathers were all racist white supremacist slave owners who did nothing good in the world, and that figuring out one’s pronouns is much more important than learning algebra or calculus, America’s teens are registering lower IQs than they have in nearly a century. It has long been obvious but now it has been proven: the woke indoctrination that passes for education in America today is making our young people stupid.
The study, published in Intelligence, “measures IQ test results among 18- to 60-year-olds to examine the phenomenon first observed by philosopher James Flynn” — namely, that starting in 1932, average IQ scores increased roughly three to five points per decade. The “Flynn Effect,” then, says that younger generations are expected to have higher IQ scores than the previous cohort.
“Data from the sample of U.S. adults, however,” writes Campus Reform’s Shelby Kearns, “imply that there is a reverse Flynn effect. From 2006 to 2018, the age groups measured generally saw declines in the IQ test used by the study, the International Cognitive Ability Resource.”
The study’s authors theorize that “a change of quality or content of education and test-taking skills” could explain the difference that education makes in the IQ of younger versus older Americans, “perhaps due to a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills.” What those “certain cognitive skills” might be is unclear, but if we had to guess, it’d be a lack of sufficient emphasis in math and the hard sciences.
Trillions of dollars have been pumped into our nation’s public schools and universities for decades, and this is what we’re getting. If ever a moment was ripe for a hostile conservative takeover of Big Education, this is it.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/95733-american-kidz-is-getting-dummer-2023-03-16
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March 16, 2023
Charter schools narrow achievement gaps in Harlem, outperforming NY state averages in math, reading
Charter school students in Harlem are now performing better than the New York state averages in reading and math — a key indicator of the once-struggling neighborhood’s upward trajectory in education, according to a new report.
Today, 59% of kids in community School District 5 attend a privately run, publicly funded charter school compared to a traditional district school in Harlem, research compiled by Success Academy Charter Schools found.
And they’re passing with flying colors — beating state averages by 10% in math and 9% in reading, the data showed.
That’s a vast improvement from 2005, when Harlem students, most of whom attended district schools, performed an abysmal 25 points behind the state average in math and 22 points in reading, according to Success.
The new scores have helped close the Manhattan neighborhood’s statewide performance gap to 3% in math and 2% in reading on the grades 3-8 tests that Albany uses to gauge performance and compare districts across the state.
Public school students in the district also helped shrink the gap with modest 3% gains in math test scores and 6% in reading, according to the data dump from Monday.
Success boasted of the latest stats as Gov. Hochul struggles to win support for her budget proposal to lift the regional cap on the state’s charter schools and allow about 100 more to open in the coming years. Currently, New York City is only allowed to have 275 of the state’s 460 charter schools.
“Harlem’s example demonstrates that raising the cap on charter schools in New York City wouldn’t harm district schools,” Success said in its white paper report. “Rather, it would simply give more alternatives for families who are dissatisfied with their district school options — and many of them have good reason to be.”
The opposition to the charter expansion plan is led by the United Teachers Federation, which argues that charters cherry-pick highly motivated students from supportive families, while the public school system is left to educate the neediest masses, such as English-language learners, special education students or those from the poorest families.
The UFT, which represented 190,000 current and former educators in the city, according to 2022 tax forms, is a major donor to Democratic lawmakers, who control both of New York’s legislative houses.
Former Democratic City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz opened the flagship Harlem Success Academy in 2006, at a time when students in the neighborhood scored 25% behind their statewide peers on math tests and lagged 22% behind in reading, according to Success.
Some 141,000 city students now attend charter schools — making up 15% of the student body in the five boroughs. About 90% of the charter school students are black or Latino, and 80% are from economically disadvantaged families, according to the New York City Charter School Center.
Former governor and charter advocate George Pataki told The Post last month that opposition to raising the cap was “absolutely” racist.
Even the state’s top educator was recently quoted as dismissing the success of charter students as a racial anomaly, as she lobbied against Hochul’s proposal.
“If it [creating charter schools] is such a wonderful experiment, then let me see it in places that embrace it other than communities of color,” State Department of Education Commissioner Betty Rosa said at a February legislative budget hearing. “Good things are embraced by everybody, not just some.”
Success, which runs 47 charters in four of the city’s boroughs, refuted criticism that charters were taking away resources from public schools by highlighting three public Harlem schools — PS 30, PS 133 and PS 194 — with large declines in enrollment that had not suffered financially and benefited from smaller class sizes.
“When charter enrollment increases, it actually increases the amount of money that district schools can spend per pupil on their remaining students since the amount of money a district school loses when a student chooses a charter school is less than the district school would have spent on that student had they remained in the school,” Success argued.
The charter chain also pointed out that students at Harlem charters were more likely to be poor minorities than those attending public schools in the increasingly gentrifying district, where DOE statistics show that 11% of students are white or Asian.
Students are admitted via lottery, and charter school officials are banned from discriminating or favoring their admissions bid based on intellect, disability or any other reason.
Charters are held accountable through a five-year “performance contract” with the state focusing on student achievement — and the low performing ones are closed if they don’t meet standards.
The New York City Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/13/charter-schools-narrowed-achievement-gaps-in-harlem-report/
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Woke colleges are literally driving students mad
Whom the gods would destroy, the old saying goes, they first drive mad. Which means they must hate elite educational institutions a lot.
Take what happened at Stanford Law School last week.
Judge Kyle Duncan of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit went to speak there at the invitation of its Federalist Society chapter. He was to talk about the Fifth Circuit, the Supreme Court and constitutional law.
Duncan is a conservative, and Stanford Law’s “progressive” students didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
They could have avoided that by simply skipping the talk, but they didn’t want anyone to hear what he had to say.
When Duncan showed up, they literally shouted him down.
About 100 protesters made sufficient noise, shouting insults: “We hate you!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc students, f—k them, they don’t belong here either!” and so on.
They also carried childishly insulting signs with slogans like “JUDGE DUNCAN CAN’T FIND THE CLIT” and “FEDSUCK!”
Duncan finally became angry, calling the protesters “juvenile idiots” — which they were — and asked an administrator to restore order.
Stanford Law’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach came to the podium — and sided with the protesters, speaking from remarks she’d prepared in advance.
The scene seemed shocking, but this sort of thing is inevitable when students are told that being exposed to views they disagree with is “harmful” and an intolerable personal insult as well.
And that’s what they’re taught in America’s “elite” institutions and in many non-elite ones too: Words you don’t like are “violence” and do “harm.”
(A friend comments that anyone who thinks “Words are violence” has never been punched in the mouth.)
Stanford’s president and law dean quickly apologized. But I suspect Steinbach’s views — which at a law school, where students must learn to handle encounters with opposing views and persuade people (like judges!) they cannot compel, are basically lunacy — are in fact close to the institution’s true beliefs.
So yes, Stanford is crazy.
Nor is Stanford alone. Last year, Georgetown Law hosted a similar descent into madness when Ilya Shapiro, just hired as director of the school’s Constitution center, posted a critical tweet about President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.
The students not only protested but demanded “space to cry.” (Who wants a lawyer who needs “space to cry” when confronted with a disagreeable tweet? Nobody.)
Rather than telling them to grow up, the dean paid for catered food for the protesters. So Georgetown Law is crazy too.
That’s bad. But what’s worse is that the woke/DEI approach to education also makes students crazy.
Jonathan Haidt recently wrote a fascinating essay on why the mental health of college students has been in such steep decline for the past decade.
He noted cognitive behavioral therapy, used to treat depression, teaches patients to stop ruminating over perceived slights and setbacks and engaging in black and white thinking or emotional reasoning.
But the culture of DEI does exactly the opposite: It encourages students to dwell on slights, engage in (literal) black and white thinking and prioritize their emotions. It’s “reverse CBT,” in his phrase.
Instead of being taught to overcome traumatic experiences, negative thoughts and emotional instability, students are encouraged to dwell on them and even to base their identities on them.
And when students are told their weaknesses provide an excuse to bully others, expect more bullying — and more weaknesses.
This isn’t good for the bullies or the bullied, and it isn’t good for the institutions they inhabit.
Students’ worst, and most juvenile, behavior is indulged and rewarded, with the predictable result that students grow increasingly juvenile and ill-behaved.
This from institutions that charge top dollar to, purportedly, educate America’s future leaders.
Over the past decade, universities have spent a fortune on DEI (though the “inclusion” part certainly wasn’t visible at Stanford) and there’s no evidence it has made things better on campus for anyone except the DEI bureaucrats.
Insanity, we’re told, consists of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Maybe it’s time to stop the craziness.
Or maybe right-wing critics of the higher-education establishment should stop criticizing and cheer this on.
After all, those whom the gods would destroy, they first make crazy. And there’s a lot of craziness going on.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/14/woke-colleges-are-literally-driving-students-mad/
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A disastrous Aboriginal school in South Australia
Schools with Aboriginal majorities are well-known for violence in Queensland but the problem is not confined to Queensland. Everybody is too politically correct to take the firm measures needed to deal with the problem
A student at Port Augusta Secondary School has refused to return to school after a brutal bashing by a fellow student left him with concussion and almost shattered his cheekbone.
The 16-year-old boy, who was attacked on February 21, says he is too scared to go back amid fears he will be targeted again.
During the attack, the boy, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, was punched in the head from behind before being pushed over a retaining wall and hit several more times.
The boy’s father told The Advertiser his son had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the incident and did not feel safe leaving the house on his own.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “Somebody’s going to end up dead.”
The father said he flagged threats made to his son in the weeks before the attack but police and Port Augusta Secondary School took no action. “My son can’t even go down the street on his own,” he said.
The father said violence had continued at the school despite the installation of CCTV and the use of security guards. “They’ve had nothing but issues,” he said. “These kids are still going at it. Cameras aren’t going to keep the kids safe.”
He also said escalating violence on the town’s streets was being “dragged into the school”. “It’s just got to stop. Kids shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
On Friday, The Advertiser revealed students at Port Augusta Secondary School were being “stomped on” during fights.
“The school is f**ked,” one student said.
In February, parents of another student who was the victim of a vicious attack told The Advertiser they had warned the school about a potential fight before the incident.
Videos of fights, which appear to be planned, have been posted to several social media accounts in recent months.
An Education Department spokeswoman said the student who assaulted the 16-year-old had been “excluded” from the school for the maximum period of 10 weeks.
She said the school met with the victim’s family on “numerous occasions” before the attack but “despite their efforts an assault did occur”.
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March 15, 2023
Florida university reportedly denies student mental health access because he is white
A student at the University of South Florida (USF) was reportedly denied mental health services because he was not a member of the black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) community, according to communications obtained by Campus Reform.
Andrew Davis wanted to attend an “Understanding Self and Others” (USO) group therapy meeting, but he realized that none of the sessions worked with his schedule. Because of this, he asked USF’s counseling center if he could attend the BIPOC meeting as it was the only time he could attend, but the university informed him this wasn’t allowed.
“I am interested in attending a USO group meeting after completing the pre-group appointment but the only day/time that works for me is Wednesdays during the BIPOC students-only group,” Davis inquired in an email. “I am not a BIPOC student but was wondering if I would still be able to attend?”
“Unfortunately, we do need to keep this space speci?c to BIPOC folks … Hopefully you’ll be able to catch another one either during Winter break and/or next semester,” the USF Counseling Center said in response.
On Oct. 5 2022, Davis filed a complaint with USF’S Office of Compliance & Ethics, eventually receiving a response on Feb. 8 of this year, according to Campus Reform.
“The Counseling Center will not prohibit any category of student [from] participating in specialized counseling groups unless specific exception, or a medical mandate is identified that may support exclusivity,” the school responded.
In addition, Davis was reportedly targeted by Equal Opportunity Officer Kenneth Thomas during an Oct. 18 Microsoft Teams information-gathering meeting regarding the issue.
David said Thomas “was accusatory” and “asked me if I even knew what BIPOC meant and if I understood the importance of those groups having their own discussion,” according to Campus Reform.
“He did not seem concerned about my complaint and was more worried about the University’s ability to continue these groups,” Davis added.
USF’s DEI initiatives were exposed by Chris Rufo after he obtained public documents that showed the university segregated students by race, and “promotes the idea that white students should think ‘I feel bad for being white’ and ‘it’s not my fault I’m white’ as part of their ‘racial identity development.'”
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‘Woke’ Grip on Accrediting Agencies
Liberal administrators at universities across America and the accrediting bodies that support them are finding themselves under increasing scrutiny from conservative legislators keen on reining in the excesses of the diversity, inclusion, and other “equity” bureaucracies that have taken over the academies.
The latest tussle is at the University North Carolina, where a Republican congressional delegation is castigating the school’s accrediting agency for threatening its board of trustees after it approved a plan for a new school rooted in values of “full freedom of expression, intellectual diversity, and open inquiry.”
In January, the school’s board of trustees voted to accelerate a plan to form a School of Civic Life and Leadership — key components of which would be free speech and faculty viewpoint diversity.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, board members described curricular objectives at the new school as shattering the ordinary “political constraints on what can be taught in university classes.”
The plan, however, came under fire almost immediately from the school’s accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on College, which is based in Georgia.
The accrediting body’s president, Belle Wheelan, threatened to censure the university’s board to “get them to change” their plan in a presentation reported by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Ms. Wheelan previously served as Virginia’s secretary of education under a former Democratic governor, Mark Warner.
“UNC-Chapel Hill’s board is going to get a letter because of a news article that came out that said that the board, without input from the administration or faculty, had decided they were going to put in this new curriculum offering,” Ms. Wheelan said. “Explain that — because that’s kind of not the way we do business.”
“We’re gonna see the committee and talk to them and help them understand it, and either get them to change it, or the institution will be on warning,” she threatened. Ms. Wheelan’s remarks came in a meeting convened by a gubernatorial commission on “the governance of public universities in North Carolina.”
Some see the commission at which Ms. Wheelan spoke as a ploy by North Carolina’s Democratic governor to undermine the authority of the Republican legislature in appointing members to the UNC board. No letter or warning has yet been issued to UNC from the accrediting body.
This week, a group of North Carolina’s congressional delegation expressed concern that Ms. Wheelan’s remarks “appear to put the institution on warning before fully understanding the Board’s action.”
What may seem like a mere meltdown between bureaucrats and lawmakers represents a real threat to the students who attend these universities. Students are ineligible for federal loans if they attend unaccredited institutions, and they may face other obstacles when seeking to transfer, apply to graduate institutions, or practice in their fields of study.
The past few years have proved contentious for accrediting agencies as culture wars creep into the educational sector. Encouraged by the accrediting bodies, liberal institutions have sought to make mandatory instruction of sensitive cultural topics — race, gender, and sexuality — taught from a liberal point of view.
The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, for example, encourages member organizations to “decolonize” their curricula and diversify their reading lists to include non-Western texts. The American Bar Association, which has accredited nearly 200 law schools, recently scrapped a plan that would have imposed racial quotas as a diversity guarantee measure on law schools, but only after public pressure.
In 2021, Cairn University in eastern Pennsylvania halted its social work program in part because of demands from its accrediting agency, the Council on Social Work Education. The school said the agency’s curricular requirements conflicted with its Christian mission.
“CSWE’s proposed standards prescribed an approach to social issues … that Cairn deemed inconsistent with its own core beliefs,” the university’s president, Todd Williams, wrote a year later. “Thus, the university withdrew from CSWE and its accreditation, which is, of course, voluntary.”
Withdrawing from accreditation, for Cairn, was equivalent to nuking its social work program. Without accreditation, it could not promise its graduates social work licenses upon graduation.
North Carolina’s congressional representation is not the only group of legislators taking accreditors to task. The political leanings of the higher-ed overseers have led to increasing hostility between Republican politicians and accrediting bodies.
Governor DeSantis, a harsh critic of the political leanings of universities in Florida, also has tried to curb the power of accreditors. His Stop WOKE Act, in addition to stifling diversity training and critical race theory instruction, requires universities to change accreditation agencies at least every 10 years.
Before signing the bill into law, Mr. DeSantis said the “self-anointed” accrediting bodies hold an “inordinate amount of power” — even power over legislators, as the UNC debate illustrates.
In 2015, Senator Lee of Utah and Mr. DeSantis, when he was a member of Congress, introduced legislation to strip the Department of Education of its monopoly on conferring power to accreditors, which the two men said enabled a “higher-ed cartel.” They instead proposed allowing states to develop independent accreditation agencies.
The public schools in the Sunshine State are currently accredited by the same agency fighting with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Ms. Wheelan at the helm.
This is not the first time UNC-Chapel Hill has found itself in a tug-of-war between its conservative and liberal stakeholders.
The most contentious case in recent history was that of a prominent statue of a Confederate soldier, known as Silent Sam, on its quad. A former chancellor of the University of North Carolina, Carol Folt, sought to dismantle the statue, but was blocked from doing so by a 2015 state ordinance preventing the removal of Confederate monuments.
Ms. Folt clashed with the Board of Governors over the statue before it was toppled by student protestors in 2018 — a move that would eventually result in Ms. Folt’s resignation.
In 2017, the Board of Governors prohibited the law school’s Center for Civil Rights from providing legal counsel — in many instances, to clients who were facing the state.
The university faced a 2021 lawsuit after denying tenure to the intellectual mother of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones — a decision later reversed. Ms. Hannah-Jones sued the school, and the parties settled on an agreement that would boost diversity initiatives on campus.
https://www.nysun.com/article/unc-squabble-highlights-woke-grip-on-accrediting-agencies ?
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Something Interesting Happened When DeSantis Showed Removed Books From Schools
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) held a press event in Tampa on Wednesday to "set the record straight, debunking the mainstream media, unions and leftist activists’ hoax of empty library bookshelves and political theater pretending that Florida’s schools cannot teach about topics like African American History, including topics like slavery."
The primary reason for the crackdown on inappropriate books stems from making sure no pornographic content is available to Florida students at school.
"Exposing the ‘book ban’ hoax is important because it reveals that some are attempting to use our schools for indoctrination," said DeSantis. "In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards. Florida is the education state and that means providing students with a quality education free from sexualization and harmful materials that are not age appropriate."
The books DeSantis was using as examples of inappropriate materials were found in 23 school districts across the state. While he was showcasing the books, local news channels who were broadcasting had to cut away due to the overt sexual nature of the books.
Of the 23 districts that reported removing materials, the most removed were tied at 19 in Duval and St. Johns Counties — not even close to a whole classroom library, DeSantis office said. Of the 175 books removed across the state, 164 (94%) were removed from media centers, and 153 (87%) were identified as pornographic, violent, or inappropriate for their grade level.
Books and courses teaching African-American history not only have not been removed from the curriculum, but it was recently expanded for Florida students.
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March 14, 2023
Indiana Student Counselor Fired for Condemning School District’s Hidden Transgender Policy
An Indiana school district fired a student counselor Thursday night for confirming and condemning the existence of a secret transgender policy that keeps parents in the dark about their children’s “gender transitions.”
Kathy McCord worked as a counselor at Pendleton Heights High School for 25 years before the school board voted unanimously to terminate her contract for speaking to the media about confidential documents that board member Buck Evans claimed were “false.”
Evans did not indicate which statements were false.
McCord previously confirmed in an interview with The Daily Signal that the school district, South Madison Community School Corporation, was using a “Gender Support Plan” to assist students in transitioning to a different gender, including calling those students by a new name and personal pronouns.
In his remarks Thursday night, Evans said:
Mrs. McCord admitted she did not tell the truth about providing Mr. Kinnett with the document or correct misleading statements within his article, although she did read it before she started. Misleading statements in The Daily Signal article, along with editing the document, enflamed the public unnecessarily. You can see on this document there is to be a meeting with the child’s parents and/or guardians. Mrs. McCord has not been dismissed because she gave the document to Mr. Kinnett, but because of untruthful statements she made to the administration.
The South Madison school district’s Gender Support Plan allows use of a student’s “old name” and pronouns with parents to keep them unaware of what is going on with their child.
Emails obtained by The Daily Signal from South Madison parents and teachers who asked to remain anonymous show that student counselors would send out notices of a student’s “gender transition” and, if the student chose, request that teachers only use the student’s “old” name and pronouns with parents:
At several school board meetings, Schools Superintendent Mark Hall has claimed that this secret transgender policy both does and doesn’t exist.
At a board meeting in December, Hall said hiding medical information from parents is required as part of the school district’s nondiscrimination policy. But the superintendent appeared to cite the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nondiscrimination Policy concerning school lunches, which appears on the district website.
Hall repeatedly has refused to provide any comment on or explanation of the secret transgender policy to The Daily Signal or any other media outlet.
Although other medical, counseling, and permission forms are located on the school district’s website, the school district’s Gender Support Plan is absent.
McCord provided a blank copy to The Daily Signal, which confirmed that the form was modeled after a similar form at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Fishers, Indiana.
South Madison school board members have stated both that they were aware and not aware of the policy, that it didn’t exist, and that it was approved by the board in both 2011 and 2022.
School board President Mike Hanna and his immediate predecessor, Joel Sandefur, have refused to comment to The Daily Signal concerning the discrepancies.
Former geography teacher Amanda Keegan told The Daily Signal that she resigned, in part, due to this secret transgender policy.
“When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent … I was sick to my stomach. I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again,” Keegan said.
Parents repeatedly have shown up to voice their support for McCord. School board meetings have been standing room only in November, December, January, and February, with supporters spilling out into the hallway.
After hearing dozens of supportive testimonies and statements from parents and concerned members of the Pendleton community in November, December, and January, the school board adopted a new policy requiring all speakers to sign up before the start of a meeting. This restriction cut the number of speakers allowed at the February board meeting.
When parents gathered again March 9 at a public hearing by the school board to voice their support for McCord, attendance seemed greater than for any previous board meeting since The Daily Signal exposed the transgender policy.
Yard signs reading “Keep Kathy” have been stolen from several yards in Pendleton, and the Pendleton Police Department told The Daily Signal that it is investigating.
The South Madison school district didn’t respond to requests from local parents to move the public hearing Thursday night to a larger venue to accommodate more attendees.
“It’s despicable what this district is doing to her,” one parent, who held a sign saying “We Support Kathy,” told The Daily Signal on March 2. “Everyone in Pendleton loves Kathy [McCord] to death.”
“She shouldn’t be fired for telling parents what Hall doesn’t want us to know,” the parent added, referring to the superintendent of schools.
Two South Madison teachers, saying they wished to remain anonymous for fear of also being fired, told The Daily Signal on March 1 that they plan to leave the school district at the end of the year to work elsewhere.
“I’m not going to keep secrets from parents for some power-hungry a——,” one teacher said. “I just want to teach.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/09/indiana-school-counselor-fired-for-condemning-districts-hidden-transgender-policy/ ?
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Arkansas’ Sanders Signs Ambitious Education Reform Agenda of School Choice, Anti-Indoctrination
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday signed into law what she called “the largest overhaul of the state’s education system in Arkansas history.”
The “Arkansas LEARNS” initiative is an ambitious reform agenda that expands school choice, modernizes school transportation, restructures teacher compensation to pay more for performance, provides supplemental education for struggling students, and prohibits Arkansas public schools from indoctrinating students.
“We’ve seen how the status quo condemns Arkansans to a lifetime of poverty, and we’re tired of sitting at the bottom of national education rankings,” Sanders said. “We know that if we don’t plant this seed today, then there will be nothing for our kids to reap down the line.”
Perhaps the boldest component of the initiative is the creation of Educational Freedom Accounts, which are similar to education savings account (ESA) policies in 11 other states. With an ESA, families can pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculums, online learning, special-needs therapy, and more. ESAs empower families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and best meet their children’s individual learning needs.
Eligibility for the ESAs phases in over three years. In the third year of the ESA program’s operation, all K-12 students will be eligible. In the first year of the ESA program (the 2023-24 academic year), all incoming kindergarten students in Arkansas will be eligible. So will students with disabilities, homeless students, children in foster care, the children of active-duty military personnel, students assigned to low-performing district schools, or children enrolled in one of Arkansas’s other school choice programs.
According to a recent Morning Consult survey, 7 in 10 Arkansans support an ESA policy. Support is even higher among parents of school-aged children, 78% of whom support ESAs.
The Arkansas LEARNS initiative will significantly improve the state’s national standing on education issues. Last year, Arkansas ranked No. 18 in the nation for education choice on The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The enactment of a universal ESA would have boosted Arkansas to No. 5 in the nation, assuming other states’ policies remained constant. Of course, competition for the top five will be fierce as states such as Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas are also considering adopting universal education choice policies.
Arkansas’ initiative also takes important steps to protect school students from being exposed to indoctrination or discrimination.
The law requires the Arkansas Department of Education to review its “rules, policies, materials, and communications” to ensure that they are in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and do not “conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law or encourage students to discriminate against someone based on the individual’s color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex, age, marital status, familial status, disability, religion, national origin, or any other characteristic protected by federal or state law.”
The law also prohibits school faculty and staff or guest speakers from compelling students to “adopt, affirm, or profess an idea in violation” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such as that people of one race or ethnicity are inherently superior or inferior to anyone else, or that individuals should “be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex” or other characteristics protected by law.
The statute makes clear that it does not prohibit the discussion of ideas and or the teaching of history.
Students in Arkansas will still learn about the ugly aspects of American history, such as slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. However, the law will appropriately prohibit lessons that divide students into “oppressors” or “oppressed,” based solely on skin color or that associate certain traits with particular skin colors.
As Tony Kinnett recently reported in The Daily Signal, there are recorded instances of such lessons in critical race theory in Arkansas classrooms, despite the best efforts of mainstream media outlets to deny it.
With the enactment of the Arkansas LEARNS initiative, Sanders has raised the bar for conservative education reform. Arkansas will now be among the top states that empower families to choose the learning environments that work best for their kids.
Arkansas has also taken an important step to ensure that traditional public schools are focused on education, not indoctrination.
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Texas A&M system bans DEI statements
Amidst the nationwide chorus to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in education, the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS) announced on Mar. 2 that it will ban diversity statements from admissions and hiring.
The announcement from TAMUS Chancellor John Sharp follows a Feb. 6 directive from Gov. Greg Abbott. A memo from Abbott’s chief of staff, obtained by The Texas Tribune, told the state’s public colleges and universities to use merit, not DEI, in its considerations.
“We believe serving Texas can be accomplished best by recruiting the brightest and most qualified students, faculty and staff,” Sharp states in the TAMUS announcement.
Sharp also states, "No university or agency in the A&M System will admit any student, nor hire any employee based on any factor other than merit."
TAMUS reviewed its admissions and hiring procedures in response to Abbott’s directive. Job applications, according to the announcement, should only include “a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statements about research and teaching philosophies, and professional references.”
The Texas Tribune reported that the memo from Abbott’s office accused DEI initiatives of “push[ing] policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others.”
“Rebranding this employment discrimination as ‘DEI’ doesn’t make the practice any less illegal,” the memo continued.
The announcement from TAMUS, composed of 11 universities and eight state agencies, follows the University of Texas (UT) System’s decision to pause DEI initiatives at its 13 campuses while reviewing its admissions and hiring.
Texas Tech University (TTU) similarly updated its policies after an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by John Sailer shared documents revealing that its biology department “penalize[s] candidates for heterodox opinions.”
In what appears to be a response to Sailer taking the documents public, Campus Reform reported that TTU eliminated diversity statements from hiring.
Efforts to eliminate DEI from academic and professional life have spread like wildfire. Legislation introduced in Tennessee would ban DEI requirements from the education, training, and employment of professionals providing services in health care, mental health, and social work.
Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction issued a DeSantis-style probe into DEI spending at the state’s public colleges and universities. After DeSantis appointed six new members to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, the board voted to shut down its DEI office.
Trustee Christopher Rufo said that the move made the New College “the first university in America to abolish its DEI bureaucracy and restore the principle of colorblind equality.”
https://campusreform.org/article?id=21464
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March 13, 2023
Diversity director fired for questioning California college’s anti-racism policies, she claims
A black director of a “woke” California college’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education claims she was fired for questioning the institution’s anti-racism “orthodoxy” and what the term “anti-racism” even means.
Dr. Tabia Lee said De Anza College, a community college in Cupertino, retaliated after she objected to several campus policies aimed at inclusion.
“I was working in a California community college, and I noticed that there was a lot of resistance to my even asking questions about anti-racism, policy efforts and language,” Lee told nonprofit Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
“And I just purely wanted to know what folks meant when they were using those terms. And I encountered a lot of hostility a lot of resistance to me even asking question.”
She told Higher Ed she was canned after declining to join a “socialist network,” objected to the college’s land acknowledgments for an Indigenous tribe and questioned why the word “Black” was capitalized but not “white.”
Additionally, Additionally, Lee said she refused to use the gender-neutral terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx” because of her belief they only fuel racism.
“I find that the same toxic ideologies around race ideologies are now being advanced under gender ideologies,” Lee said, according to the outlet.
“I also find that the constant obsession with pronouns and declaration of pronouns causes deep discomfort for individuals who identify as gender fluid or who struggle with gender dysphoria.”
A colleague of Lee’s also accused the black faculty member of “white speaking,” “whitesplaining” and supporting white supremacy.
The school has a very different reason for firing Lee, however.
In a letter obtained by Higher Ed, district chancellor Judy Miner wrote Lee showed a “persistent inability to demonstrate cooperation in working with colleagues and staff” and an “unwillingness to accept constructive criticism.”
De Anza College voted Tuesday not to re-employ Lee, who started at the school in 2021, for the next academic year.
Lee claims she felt backlash from administrators shortly after she started the position.
They finally saw a reason to fire her when she published a Feb. 18 essay published in “Journal of Free Black Thought” stating: “Under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, in many learning environments a neo-reconstructionist race(ist) orthodoxy has emerged that actively works to suppress and exclude alternative frameworks, methods, ways and means for dealing with American education’s race(ist) problem.”
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The University of Michigan Is in a DEI Mess
Policies that divide Americans by race, or increase their perception of racial differences, spawn tribalism, separation, and hatred.
Although black and Hispanic enrollment rose slightly [at U of M], students are increasingly avoiding students of other races, ethnicities, and political views.
The DEI administrators at the University of Michigan have chosen small tribes over greater uniting principles. No wonder its students are unhappy.
Read many of America’s greatest writers about race and legal equality, and you’ll find a similar theme: policies that divide Americans by race, or increase their perception of racial differences, spawn tribalism, separation, and hatred.
Frederick Douglass warned that policies fostering racial identity, rather than shared American values, sow “dangerous seeds of discontent and hatred.” Justice Thomas Cooley wrote that distinctions based on race would “assail the very foundations of [our] government.” Justice John Marshall Harlan said that nothing could “more certainly arouse race hate” and “a feeling of distrust between these races” than segregationist polices. And Justice Antonin Scalia, quoting Professor Alexander Bickel, called racially discriminatory policies “destructive of a democratic society.”
Scores of others, like Thomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Shelby Steele, have said the same.
The University of Michigan did not listen to them, and it is learning its lesson the hard way.
As reported in The Michigan Review, one of the university’s student-run publications, the school launched a major Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative in 2016 that made racial identity a key focus for all of the school’s programs and vastly increased the size of its DEI bureaucracy.
At the same time, the school conducted Campus Climate Surveys of its students. Comparing those surveys to ones conducted in 2021 reveals some of the harmful effects of that initiative. Students are increasingly self-segregating. Although black and Hispanic enrollment rose slightly, students are increasingly avoiding students of other races, ethnicities, and political views. The Michigan Review reports:
The number of students who interacted with people of different political persuasions decreased by more than 11 percent, of different religious beliefs by over 9 percent, of a different national origin by 5 percent, and of different races by more than 3 percent.
Students are also increasingly unhappy.
By nearly every metric in the survey, students have become less happy since the beginning of DEI 1.0. They are less likely to believe that U-M has an institutional commitment to DEI and less likely to feel valued or that they belong on campus. The number of students who felt that they were treated fairly and equitably at Michigan fell by over 3 percent. Finally, the number of students satisfied with the campus climate overall fell by almost 11 percent.
The only thing that hasn’t changed, likely to the chagrin of the University’s DEI administrators, is students’ feelings about the racial climate on campus.
The school is about to launch a new DEI initiative, and this time it ought to pay some attention to the great minds quoted above.
Frederick Douglass offered advice in a 1867 speech called “The Composite Nation.” Much of his wisdom is directly applicable to modern universities. Let’s hope they take it.
Americans in 1867, Douglass said, “def[ied] all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can remember.” Then, as now, the country was “of all extremes, ends and opposites.”
What policy, he asked, should the nation adopt towards its many ethnic groups, which were only increasing?
The answer, he said, could not be racial separation: “Those races of men which have maintained the most separate and distinct existence … are a standing confirmation of the folly of isolation.” Besides, America had tried that already. It had previously chosen to be governed “by race pride, rather than by wisdom.” And that policy “filled the country with agitation and ill-feeling and brought the nation to the verge of ruin.”
This was entirely predictable. After all, prejudice “is an ancient feeling among men … peculiar to no particular race or nation.” But that is no reason to accept it, Douglass argued.
Instead, he urged Americans to embrace America’s founding principle, “that is the principle of absolute equality.” That principle transcends base and arbitrary classifications like skin color: “Man is man, the world over,” and we have much more in common than not.
Rather than adopt policies that separate us along racial lines, we ought to receive all others “as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions.” In fact, Douglass argued that we must adopt such a policy.
A nation like ours, unique in the world for its diversity of color and creed, has only two paths before it. On the one hand, it can tolerate tribalism and, in that case, allow “the very soil of the national mind [to become] barren,” or, on the other, it can set aside tribes and unite a disparate people under a greater principle.
It is worth remembering that these were the words of a former slave who had every reason to be resentful and to think that America’s founding principle was false. But he did not. Instead, he believed that root of the evil he suffered “was never our system or form of Government, or the principles underlying it; but the peculiar composition of our people, the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.”
The principles were noble, the people were not. But if the people actually lived up to their principles, they could be.
Our nation, he said, “will be great, or it will be small, according to its own essential qualities.” So, we ought to adopt essential qualities greater than our small, divisive tribal loyalties.
The DEI administrators at the University of Michigan have chosen small tribes over greater uniting principles. No wonder its students are unhappy and self-segregating. Nothing at the University of Michigan inspires them to something greater than human nature’s petty tribal instinct.
The solution is not a new DEI plan, or more anti-racism initiatives, or segregated dormitories and graduation ceremonies. The solution is “the principle of absolute equality,” which is the only path away from human nature’s tendency toward petty prejudice.
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Andrew Tate is flooding Australian schoolboys with an aggressive ideology contemptuous of feminist correctness
So what are the schools going to tell the boys? Under feminist pressure, the official ideology is that boys should be more like girls. Such advice will go down like a lead balloon. Telling boys to be sensitive and respectful is probably good advice but it will at most get a bored yawn.
Tate has shown the emperor to have no clothes. There is no considered guide to healthy masculinity. There is nothing to replace his message. Masculinity is simply attacked by elite writers
A prominent principal has warned schools are contending with a “tsunami” of misogynistic digital trends and revealed they are tackling the problem with in-house education programs to specifically address the rise of so-called ”mega misogynist” Andrew Tate.
Tate, the former professional kickboxer turned king of “toxic masculinity’’ has amassed a huge global following on social media sprouting his extreme anti-feminist, alpha male views.
Youth workers say Tate, currently in a Romanian jail under investigation for human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group, has emerged as a key influencer of 11-17 year old boys.
St Joseph’s Nudgee College principal Peter Fullagar, 62, said Tate had been on the school’s radar for the past 12 to 18 months and discussions about him had been incorporated into its educational programs.
“There is a tsunami working against us to be fair. It is relentless,’’ Fullagar said.
“We do talk to boys about Andrew Tate and rather than say, ‘Don’t go there’ and try to shut it down, we want to learn why boys are attracted to his message.
“As schools, as educators, we are working really hard to give boys an opposite message.
“We are dealing with young boys‘ behaviour all the time through mistakes they make in and around misogynistic behaviour, homophobic language, racial comments, bullying and harassment. It is part of young people’s landscape today.
“The power of social media has come at us in a rush over the past 10 years so schools are continually responding and refining responses. If it’s Andrew Tate currently, it will be a bigger name in a couple of years time.’’
Fullagar said his school’s established Student Formation Program covered a range of issues including respectful relationships, the definition of masculinity, mental health and wellbeing, risk taking, drugs, issues of consent, social media and being safe in the online environment. Andrew Tate was discussed in the context of social media and what it means to be a young man in today’s world.
St Paul’s School, a coeducational private school north of Brisbane, is also aware of Tate’s influence. Headmaster Dr Paul Browning said young people were bombarded with negative social media messages.
“The temptations are right there in their face, in their bedroom at night time. Unfortunately, undesirable influences follow them into that space,’’ Browning said.
“You can’t ignore it and we have strong programs at the school to help with social and emotional development of young people and the development of their character. We’re not just interested in a child’s academic achievement but also the type of people they are becoming.’’
St Paul’s executive director of Faith and Community Nigel Grant said he first became aware of Tate about a year ago when year nine boys “tried to shock me’’ during a school wellbeing program called The Rite Journey. “We are trying to be on the front foot on this,’’ he said.
“We were having a conversation with year nine boys about what it means to be a man, asking who they respected and who were their heroes. It was in that context that Andrew Tate’s name came up.
“The boys had heard all about him and were aware of the power to shock adults. Some had been impressed by some of the stuff he was saying.
“I was suitably naive but quickly became well informed and, as a group of teachers, we addressed the issue directly and tried to produce a suitable counter message.
“We are regularly shocked but rarely surprised at the content young people see. The internet is like the wild, wild west. Even the best filters can be worked around and children are particularly vulnerable.’’
QUT Professor of sociology Michael Flood, an expert in engaging men in violence prevention, men and masculinities, said schools must be proactive in dealing with toxic social media influencers.
“Schools have an absolutely central role to play particularly through respectful relationships education in inoculating young people against the sexism and the misogyny that Tate and others preach,’’ Flood said.
“Conversations about influencers like Tate should be going on in schools and certainly growing numbers of teachers are forced to have those conversations whether they want to or not because boys and young men are repeating some of the things that Tate claims.’’
A Department of Education Queensland spokesperson said the Respectful Relationships Education Program has been available in Queensland schools since 2017.
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March 12, 2023
Downplaying Academic Excellence in Med School Admissions
For some time now it has been true that many blacks avoid black doctors because they don't trust the qualifications of black doctors. That will now accelerate
America’s top medical schools, worried they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.
Of course, the universities won’t admit what they are doing – and certainly not why. All they will say is that their new standards add “equity” and “lived experience.” Unfortunately, adding those factors inevitably lessens the weight given to others.
The harsh reality is medical schools are downplaying academic achievement and MCAT scores, which give the best evidence of how well students are prepared for medical school. The MCAT is specifically tailored for that purpose. In addition to a section on critical reasoning (similar to the SATs), it examines students on biology and biochemistry, organic chemistry, the physics of living systems, and the biological and psychological foundations of behavior. It’s easy to see how those relate directly to higher education in medical science. Yet med schools want to downplay them and add inherently subjective criteria like “lived experience.”
Med schools are especially eager to get rid of the MCATs. After years of evaluating admissions folders, they know they cannot meet their goals for minority enrollment if they retain their near-total emphasis on academic qualifications. They know, too, that standardized tests and grades leave a statistical trail. They want to kick dust over that trail before the Supreme Court’s expected ruling against affirmative action. They fear the statistics will show marked differences in admission rates for individuals from different groups who have similar scores and GPAs. That’s not a wild guess. Admission teams know the evidence from years of experience.
But dropping the tests, or making them optional, presents a thorny PR problem. Schools fear they would sink below competitors in national rankings, which include MCAT scores. So, they are doing what undergraduate colleges have already done. They are colluding. By withdrawing jointly from US News and World Report rankings, they hope to soften the blow to each one’s prestige. (It’s an interesting question whether this collusion violates anti-trust laws, as their collusion about scholarship awards did.)
What medical schools call “equity” and “lived experience” are code words for discrimination by racial category. They are using this word fog to cloud over four crucial but uncomfortable facts. First, today’s standardized tests are actually fair and unbiased. Medical schools don’t deny that. They know test makers have spent fortunes over the past half century to scrub their tests of any racial, cultural, or ethnic bias. Second, medical schools aren’t claiming the tests are poor predictors of performance. They can’t.
Third, they know criteria like “equity” and “lived experience” are inherently subjective and opaque to outsiders. That’s their magic potion for admissions officers. These education bureaucrats are following the advice Humpty Dumpty gave in “Alice in Wonderland.” Alice asks him, “Must a name mean something?” And Humpty replies, “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Humpty Dumpty would be enthralled with code words like “lived experience” and “equity.” They mean exactly what Humpty and admissions officers choose them to mean – neither more nor less.
Finally, by emphasizing non-academic “experience,” these schools are downplaying the reality that their applicants have already graduated college, most likely as science majors. That academic background is the most important “lived experience” for graduate study in any rigorous field, including medicine.
To implement the bias they prefer and do it secretly, medical schools are counting on public ignorance and apathy. When patients believe any subgroup of doctors has systematically higher or lower qualifications, they will take that into account. They do the same thing in choosing lawyers, dentists, accountants, and other professionals.
That may be unfair to any individual practitioner, but it’s inevitable. That’s because ordinary patients (or consumers) have no direct way of judging professional competence. They can only look for indirect (and imperfect) signs of a good doctor. Did she go to a top medical school, for instance, or practice at a teaching hospital? If they think it is harder for an outstanding Chinese-American undergraduate to gain admittance, they will reasonably guess she’s a better student and a more-qualified doctor. They may be wrong about that particular doctor, but it’s a sensible guess.
There’s a general – and inescapable – point here. When admissions, hiring, or promotion are influenced, either positively or negatively, because of group membership, when outsiders know that and cannot measure quality directly, they will see that “group membership” as a telltale sign of ability.
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‘School Choice’ and Homeschool Families Must Fight Together
President Reagan once famously quipped, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Indeed, those of us on the right are rightly skeptical of government schemes to inject its tentacles into private life, and some have raised good-faith questions about the risks of bringing “public funding” (and the strings attached to it) into private education.
But Reagan himself knew that empowering parents reduced the threat of government influence over our nation’s children, and he proposed in 1985 to allow parents to redirect up to $600 of what taxpayers would have otherwise spent via existing programs on a child in a public school and instead use it for that child’s private education. Just like today, Reagan’s faith in school choice programs horrified—and terrified—those on the left who believe our children should be molded chiefly by the state, not parents.
For years since, a small portion of American families have been able to direct their own children’s education through values-based private school or by directly homeschooling their own kids. Some have done so with help from the current patchwork of school choice programs, and others by fully bearing the financial burden themselves. But now, states across the country stand poised to break down the financial barriers holding back millions of families from doing likewise, while also obliterating the current penalty levied against private and home-educating families who not only dutifully pay taxes to support other children, but then also bear the full financial burden again to provide for their own.
Indeed, education savings account (ESA) programs are now blossoming in conservative friendly states such as Florida, Arizona, and West Virginia—even as union-backed leftists fight tooth and nail to suppress them in progressive bastions such as California, Illinois, and New York.
Some fear that accepting ESA funds will empower the left to hijack their control of their children’s education. This fear should not be taken lightly. But neither should it blind nor paralyze our judgment.
There is no doubt that with or without ESA legislation, parents and lawmakers will always have to remain vigilant to defend the integrity of private and home-based education. But as California has shown with the likes of its recently enacted legislation, SB 107—threatening the custody of any parent nationwide who does not support radical gender theory when it comes to their own children—families will never be “safe” from the ambitions of the left simply because they ask to be left alone. Indeed, the threat to families directing the upbringing of their children exists not because of programs like ESAs, but in spite of them.
Indeed, it is tempting to some on our side to embrace the status quo out of concern that in the future, leftist lawmakers would try to burden ESA-type programs with damaging regulations. But that status quo means stranding more than 90% of our nation’s kids in a system where groups like the National Education Association (NEA) are actively seeking to inculcate the next generation in state-sponsored leftwing ideologies. This generational monopoly presents a far greater risk to the future of the nation and to the liberties of our children than a hypothetical battle down the line to preserve the victories we will have won for school choice and private education in the meantime.
The more families and schools that are involved in nonpublic education (which will be boosted significantly by programs like an ESA), the larger the constituency of voices to speak out and defend families against future attempts to undermine private or home-based learning. Already, for instance, the hugely successful public Great Hearts charter network responded to Arizona’s ESA expansion by launching religiously affiliated “Christos” campuses.
We must not join with the unions and prematurely impose our own civilizational defeat. Rather, as homeschool parents themselves have written at length, we must re-center families and amplify the voice and power of parents who wish to educate their own children free of bureaucratic interference or undo financial strain.
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Parents and Education
Parents will be held responsible by God for their children’s education, says the Bible. This was a view shared by the majority of America’s founders.
But today there is a great defiance against this on the part of many in our educational establishment. Many leaders in the educational system seem to think they know better than the parents as to what should and should not be taught.
FoxNews.com reports (3/4/23): “A Colorado elementary school’s private emails show secret plans to defy parents’ wishes on transitioning their child's gender.”
Recently, a Fairfax (Virginia) County parent, Neeley McCallister noted: “As parents, it is our primary duty to protect our children and preserve their innocence…Unfortunately, there is a toxic movement infiltrating our schools that is more interested in pushing a political agenda rather than teaching…our children the subjects we were taught in school: math, reading, science, history.”
McCallister made these remarks during hearings to promote a bill in the new U.S. House of Representatives, under the leadership of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The new bill seeks to assert parental rights when it comes to what is taught in the schools.
This is right and good. Centuries ago America made great strides in becoming a “city on a hill” in part because of the great education so many citizens received. Initially it was based on the Bible and resulted in astounding levels of literacy.
As James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, observed, “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
The first Congress under the Constitution that gave us the First Amendment also passed a law that ensured that each state to be added to the new nation should be committed to education. If the American experiment were to work, it could only do so if the people could read and write for themselves. So on August 4, 1789, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance.
This important document said in Article III: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” This was in a day when “Religion” meant Christianity of one stripe or another.
Even Thomas Jefferson, who departed from Christian orthodoxy later in life, at least indirectly allowed the Bible and Isaac Watts’ hymnals to be used to teach reading at two schools for which he served as president of the board of trustees. Isaac Watts was a great writer of classic Christian songs, including “Joy to the World,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “Jesus Shall Reign."
However, in the last few decades, there has arisen an anti-God tenor in the schools. Last week, Foxnews.com reported on a story out of the Phoenix area, where a school board rejected hiring teachers from a Christian college because these teachers were deemed “not safe”: “An Arizona school board member wearing cat ears during a meeting said she would oppose having a contract with a Christian university over the religious and Biblical beliefs they espouse.”
Another board member concurred with her, as he decried the university for “teaching with a Biblical lens." The board agreed with the anti-Christian ban.
The school board says in effect, “Teachers needed. Biblical Christians need not apply.” This sort of discrimination is clearly unconstitutional. But is it what parents want?
We all have a lens, a worldview. It was a Biblical worldview, a “Biblical lens,” that made us the most free and prosperous nation. But if the Left had their way, only those with godless values should be teaching our children---with little or no significant input from the parents.
Americanwirenews.com noted a similar example of anti-Christian bias at work in the schools. A public school teacher in Washington state said we need to keep the schoolchildren safe from their “Christo-fascist parents.”
Some parents teach their children to follow the Bible---the way Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan learned their values. “Horrors,” say many in the education establishment today, trying to separate parents from their children’s education.
Thankfully, the new Congress is fighting back, as noted. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich writes, “Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans have given the American people an opportunity to dramatically strengthen the role of parents in the education of their children.”
The preamble to The Parents Bill of Rights Act declares: “Parents have a God-given right to make decisions for their children. Unfortunately, many school districts have been ignoring the wishes of parents while special interest groups try to criminalize free speech.”
The preamble adds, “This list of rights will make clear to parents what their rights are and clear to schools what their duties to parents are.”
Perhaps Rep. Elise Stefanik says it all: “Parents are the primary stakeholders in their child’s education, and they have a right to know what is going on inside their child’s classroom.” Hear, hear.
https://townhall.com/columnists/jerrynewcombe/2023/03/09/parents-and-education-n2620379
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March 10, 2023
Arizona School Board Bans Christian Student-Teachers
An Arizona public school district says they will no longer hire student-teachers from a Christian university.
The Washington Elementary School District voted unanimously to end a partnership with Arizona Christian University because of the school’s religious beliefs.
The school district said the university’s values posed a threat to LGBT students.
“We cannot continue to align ourselves with organizations that starkly contrasts our values, and say that we legitimately care about diversity, equity and inclusion and that we legitimately care about all of our families," said school district president Nikkie Gomez-Whaley.
Three board members identify as members of the LGBT community — including Tamillia Valenzuela. She wears cat ears and identifies as a bilingual, disabled, neurodivergent queer black Latina.
The school district released a statement defending its decision:
“The Washington Elementary School District (WESD) Governing Board is committed to creating a welcoming environment for all our students, families, and staff. While we recognize the right of individuals to practice their faith, public schools are secular institutions. To that end, the board unanimously voted to discontinue its partnership with Arizona Christian University (ACU) whose policies do not align with our commitment to create a safe place for our LGBTQ+ students, staff, and community. This is not a rejection of any particular faith as we remain open to partnering with faith-based organizations that share our commitment to equity & inclusion.”
Ms. Valenzuela says she has a problem with the university’s call for their students to be committed to Jesus Christ and to transform culture.
Arizona Christian has provided student teachers for the past 11 years without any issues.
But Board Member Kyle Clayton - who is also gay - says they don’t want educators to teach through a biblical lens.
In other words, Washington Elementary School District is openly discriminating against Christians.
“The school board's recent decision to ban ACU students from serving as student teachers was done for one reason only: our University's commitment to our Christian convictions," said Arizona Christian president Len Munsil. "That's wrong, it’s unlawful, and it will only hurt the district’s students. Religious liberty and freedom of conscience are bedrock American principles. We are exploring our options to defend the rights of our students.”
Munsil said the university has partnered with the school district for years and more than 100 students have served in the classroom.
"Administrators have time and again asked us to send more ACU students because of the quality of our students' work and their love and servant's hearts for all. The school board's recent decision to ban ACU students from serving as student teachers was done for one reason only: our University's commitment to our Christian convictions," he said.
It's flat-out discrimination.
Just consider how the nation would have reacted had the school district banished LGBT staffers from its classrooms.
If there's room for teachers who fly the rainbow flag, there must be room for teachers who fly the Christian flag.
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College Industrial Complex's Left-Wing Lies
Families saving for college and encouraging their kids to aim for the top are getting scammed by the left-wing college industrial complex. Colleges distort and outright lie about who gets accepted, education quality and what it costs. If they were selling auto loans and used the same deceptive tactics, they'd be in jail.
Columbia University announced last Wednesday that it is permanently eliminating SAT and ACT test scores as part of the undergraduate admissions process -- the first Ivy League school to go permanently test-optional. Columbia issued a slippery statement about making admissions "nuanced" and "respecting varied backgrounds, voices and experiences." Truth is, Columbia is ditching merit for diversity. Without admitting it, Columbia has replaced an academic mission -- providing a rigorous education to a group of prepared students -- with a new one: social engineering.
Expect other colleges to follow. Elon Musk commented Saturday that "very few Americans seem to realize the severity of the situation."
President Joe Biden made equity the mission of all federal agencies. On March 1, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona blasted the higher education industry's "unhealthy obsession with selectivity" and urged a focus on "upward mobility."
That's politics. But parents making the biggest investment of their lives, except buying a home, ought to know what they're paying for: a rigorous classroom experience for their youngster, or a bit part in a social experiment.
Colleges don't want the public to discern what's going on. That's why they're railing against U.S. News & World Report rankings, published annually. The rankings factor in, among other things, test scores, graduation rates (after six years), how much debt students have when they leave, class size and faculty credentials -- precisely the facts families need.
Nearly all colleges made SAT and ACT tests optional during the pandemic. And most institutions are sticking with that temporary policy for the current year. Not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which already reinstated testing. Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill explains that it's "not all about who comes in the door but also who goes out." A quarter of students admitted to MIT in the fall of 2020 scored a perfect 800 on the math SAT, and none scored below 700. Schmill recalled that a decade earlier, when MIT admitted students with a wider range of scores, fewer made it to graduation.
The American Civil Liberties Union slams ACT and SAT tests as "unjustifiable barriers for historically underrepresented students of color." The issue is more complicated. The tests have been screened to prevent bias. But high schools in areas serving Black and Hispanic students tend to be lower quality and offer fewer advanced placement courses, leaving students unprepared.
Sadly, most colleges are more interested in being politically correct than ensuring their student body can do the work.
They're also apprehensive about a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, due in June, that is expected to curtail or outlaw considering race in admissions. In lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, test scores were used as evidence showing how these universities rejected high-scoring Asian and white applicants to promote diversity. After the June ruling, many institutions will likely eliminate testing to get rid of any evidence of racial favoritism. Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law predicts that institutions will find ways to prefer minorities "that can't be documented as violating the Constitution."
A majority of Americans consider it wrong to favor any racial group in admissions. But right versus wrong be damned. The left-wing higher education establishment will likely find ways to do it, and worse, cover it up.
Race isn't the only thing colleges lie about.
The U.S. Education Department's College Scoreboard lists colleges' graduation rates. But check the fine print. Graduation is defined as earning a diploma within eight years. Who has time or money for that?
A staggering 91% of colleges misrepresent their costs, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation.
Columbia confessed it falsified class sizes and faculty credentials to U.S. News & World Report.
Despite nonstop virtue signaling, the higher education establishment is anything but virtuous. Americans need to stand up to these liars.
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A U.S. High School Reportedly Collaborated With Chinese State Military-Affiliated Institution
One of the United State’s top public schools reportedly received hundreds of thousands of dollars from groups affiliated with China’s military, The Washington Examiner reported.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST), which is part of Fairfax County Public Schools, reportedly partnered with Tsinghua University High School (TUHS) in 2014 “to assist it and China generally with adopting the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and advanced lab research TJHSST is famous for,” the report noted. TUHS is affiliated with Tsinghua University in Beijing, considered by the U.S. government to be a Chinese military institution.
As a result, the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund (TJPF) received thousands of dollars of donations from Chinese interests, parental rights group Parents Defending Education revealed and shared with the outlet (via The Washington Examiner):
The Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund (TJPF) received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Tsinghua University as part of this agreement. TJPF also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ameson Education and Cultural Exchange Foundation as well as the Chinese company Shirble, which were both led by men tied to China’s United Front Work Department, the Chinese government’s foreign influence campaign.
[...]
The Pentagon assessed in 2020 there were “Military-Civil Fusion linkages” with Tsinghua University, noting the school's "People's Liberation Army-affiliated labs." A report prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) in 2022 noted the PLA Air Force “established the ‘Dual-Enrollment Program’ with Tsinghua University.”
[...]
TUHS says it is “attached” to Tsinghua University and is “directly under the Ministry of Education.” TUHS’s principal noted the school is “under the guidance” of the CCP, and leaders of the TUHS include CCP officials. TUHS International’s advisory board also includes Mao Daqing, part of the “United Front Work Department of CCP Central Committee.”
Jerry Dunleavy, who wrote the piece, said that the agreement was signed between the principles of Thomas Jefferson and TUHS at China’s embassy in the U.S.
According to PDE, a newsletter from TJPF in 2014 said that the relationship between TJHSST and TUHS will “help to fulfill a long-term goal of the school, that of sharing TJ’s uniquely successful approach to teaching science and technology with other schools in order to expand educational opportunities for students, no matter where they reside.”
The Examiner added that Ambright Education Group, which is connected to the Chinese government, helped establish “Thomas Schools of China” modeled off of TJHSST (via The Washington Examiner):
Ambright said the “Thomas Schools of China” came about through “collaboration" with TJHSST, and its 2019 recruitment flyer said it was “establishing Thomas Schools of China” in Shanghai, Hefei, Jinan, and Nanjing by incorporating “advanced school operations” from TJHSST.
The Thomas Schools emphasize they are “modeled after the curriculum” of TJHSST and aim to "support the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Its steering committee includes former Chinese government officials.
“We already knew the Chinese Communist Party infiltrated America’s colleges and universities through ‘Confucius Institute’ programs,” PDE President Nicki Neily told the Examiner. “However, it is frightening to discover the same problem occurring in K-12 schools.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/03/07/high-school-china-ties-n2620299
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March 09, 2023
Left-Wing College Industrial Complex Puts Diversity Ahead of Merit
Families saving for college and encouraging their children to aim for the top are getting scammed by the left-wing college industrial complex. Colleges distort and outright lie about who gets accepted, education quality, and what it costs. If they were selling auto loans and used the same deceptive tactics, they’d be in jail.
Columbia University announced last Wednesday that it is permanently eliminating SAT and ACT test scores as part of the undergraduate admissions process — the first Ivy League school to go permanently test-optional. Columbia issued a slippery statement about making admissions “nuanced” and “respecting varied backgrounds, voices and experiences.”
Truth is, Columbia is ditching merit for diversity. Without admitting it, Columbia has replaced an academic mission — providing a rigorous education to a group of prepared students — with a new one: social engineering. Expect other colleges to follow. Elon Musk commented Saturday that “very few Americans seem to realize the severity of the situation.”
President Biden made equity the mission of all federal agencies. On March 1, the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, blasted the higher education industry’s “unhealthy obsession with selectivity” and urged a focus on “upward mobility.”
That’s politics. But parents making the biggest investment of their lives, except buying a home, ought to know what they’re paying for: a rigorous classroom experience for their youngster, or a bit part in a social experiment.
Colleges don’t want the public to discern what’s going on. That’s why they’re railing against U.S. News & World Report rankings, published annually. The rankings factor in, among other things, test scores, graduation rates (after six years), how much debt students have when they leave, class size and faculty credentials — precisely the facts families need.
Nearly all colleges made SAT and ACT tests optional during the pandemic. And most institutions are sticking with that temporary policy for the current year. Not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which already reinstated testing. Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill explains that it’s “not all about who comes in the door but also who goes out.”
A quarter of students admitted to MIT in the fall of 2020 scored a perfect 800 on the math SAT, and none scored below 700. Mr. Schmill recalled that a decade earlier, when MIT admitted students with a wider range of scores, fewer made it to graduation.
The American Civil Liberties Union slams ACT and SAT tests as “unjustifiable barriers for historically underrepresented students of color.” The issue is more complicated. The tests have been screened to prevent bias. But high schools in areas serving Black and Hispanic students tend to be lower quality and offer fewer advanced placement courses, leaving students unprepared.
Sadly, most colleges are more interested in being politically correct than ensuring their student body can do the work.
They’re also apprehensive about a Supreme Court ruling, due in June, that is expected to curtail or outlaw considering race in admissions. In lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, test scores were used as evidence showing how these universities rejected high-scoring Asian and white applicants to promote diversity.
After the June ruling, many institutions will likely eliminate testing to get rid of any evidence of racial favoritism. Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law predicts that institutions will find ways to prefer minorities “that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution.”
A majority of Americans consider it wrong to favor any racial group in admissions. But right versus wrong be damned. The left-wing higher education establishment will likely find ways to do it, and worse, cover it up.
Race isn’t the only thing colleges lie about. The Education Department’s College Scoreboard lists colleges’ graduation rates. But check the fine print. Graduation is defined as earning a diploma within eight years. Who has time or money for that?
A staggering 91 percent of colleges misrepresent their costs, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation. Columbia confessed it falsified class sizes and faculty credentials to U.S. News & World Report. Despite nonstop virtue signaling, the higher education establishment is anything but virtuous. Americans need to stand up to these liars.
https://www.nysun.com/article/left-wing-college-industrial-complex-puts-diversity-ahead-of-merit
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The problem on campuses isn’t ‘wokeness’—it’s certainty
Stories of campus political excesses pile up like bodies. To cite a few recent examples: There was the law student group at Berkeley that banned Zionist speakers, the Stanford Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, and the Valdosta State University professor who taught that sex isn’t dichotomous.
I am not a fan of the word “woke.” I find it to be dismissive, snarky, and generally unhelpful. Yet, it’s the go-to term for many people who wish to express their concerns about colleges today. It’s meant to refer to a narrow, progressive political ideology that, critics say, limits free speech, suppresses debate, and forces students and faculty alike to self-censor. But the very real challenges have been misdiagnosed by both higher education’s critics and its defenders. Campuses don’t have a “wokeness” problem. They have a certainty problem.
Righting the ship, as they say, requires understanding what’s making it sink. I’ve written here and here about the “Certainty Trap.” The Certainty Trap refers to a resolute unwillingness to consider the possibility that we’re wrong or that we’re not right in the way we think we are. It has cousins in intellectual arrogance and incuriosity, but those concepts don’t quite go far enough. After all, if I tell someone to be intellectually humble or curious, there’s a tacit assumption that they can identify where they lack those things in the first place.
It turns out that we’re not great at recognizing exactly what it is we should be either humble or curious about. It’s a bit of a paradox in the sense that, if you understand your own need for humility, you’re already halfway to a solution. So how do we tackle a problem we can’t directly observe? We tackle it by learning to think differently—by recognizing that our clue that we’re falling into the Certainty Trap isn’t a feeling of being certain. No, the clue that we’re falling into the Certainty Trap is when we feel the urge to harshly judge and demonize those who disagree with us. When we see the answers as simple, only a stupid or evil person could think otherwise.
Here’s what this can look like in practice, taking the three examples I mentioned at the beginning. First, when things get heated over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, don’t just point to the need for viewpoint diversity. In the Berkeley case, when a student group at Berkeley Law School “barred supporters of Zionism from speaking at its events,” it was because they thought the right answers were obvious. The trick is to show them they’re not. As I wrote here, this might include asking questions like: Can people on both sides be aggressors and victims? Whose claim to victim status matters more? What is the difference between self-defense and unprovoked aggression? What is the right way to compensate people who have been wronged? Who deserves compensation, in what form, and when? And, of course, who should decide all these things? Certainty keeps us from considering these questions.
Second, when Stanford initiates its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” to “address harmful language in IT at Stanford,” they’re making various assumptions that have gone unspoken. One of the biggest is that intent doesn’t matter. To take one example from the linked document, “crazy” is considered offensive. But, who declared this to be the case? How should we think about people’s sensitivities? Are the norms of what’s acceptable set by the most sensitive person in every room? Should they be? Taking it one step further, how should we think about the role of intent? My point isn’t that people’s feelings of being offended don’t matter or that having good intent is exculpatory. The point is that certainty keeps us from diving in.
In the third example, at Valdosta State, a parent complained about the “woke” way the professor was leading a discussion about gender and biology. The instructor had taught that “sex, instead of being a dichotomy, is bimodal, meaning there are two large lumps (male and female) with other in between (intersex).” The real problem? Certainty. There are debates in biology about whether what the professor said is right (which is part of the reason this is in the opinion section). There are also debates about the prevalence of intersex conditions and whether biological sex should be considered binary or bimodal. None of this means the instructor shouldn’t have said what she said. But it can’t, in good faith, be presented as definitive.
Certainty has at least two implications, both of which are powerful. One is that it leads us to stop asking questions. Given we can’t know ahead of time where the next question will lead, this forecloses our ability to create or access new knowledge. The second, related but subtly different, is that it leads us to conclude that there are no questions to be asked, by anyone. And this changes social norms. It changes what we think is socially acceptable and what isn’t, leading us to view dissenters and contrarians as moral abominations who deserve to be punished.
The good news is that the problem of certainty is actually easier to solve than a battle over political ideologies. That’s partly because certainty can come from the left, right, or center. Right now, the certainty that underpins several of the left’s views on hot-button issues has powerful effects on higher education, simply because that’s the prevalent political orientation on campus. But, if the pendulum were to swing in another direction, and campuses were made up of people convinced the 2020 election was stolen, certainty would still be just as much of a problem. The way to address it is twofold. The first step is to recognize the root problem. The second is to start asking questions, and to do so while understanding that the most important thing often isn’t answering the questions, but generating them.
Certainty can take any of these forms: declaring knowledge as definitive, treating the path forward or the solution to a contentious problem as though it’s obvious, behaving as though there is a clear “right” decision in conflicts between different values or the interests of different groups, or failing to recognize that, when it comes to heated issues and problems we care about, pretty much any solution has both costs and benefits. Each of these elements of the Certainty Trap assumes a simplicity that not only doesn’t stand up, but actively constrains our thinking.
In 2023, lean into ambiguity. It’s not as bad as you think.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/campuses-certainty-problem
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Australia: The Left’s aversion to teacher quality is harming our kids
The Productivity Commission has recently thrown down the gauntlet on teacher quality, and its importance to the nation’s economic health. Despite the difficulties and complexities, we should pick it up and finally embrace the challenge.
Australia’s educational woes are well documented, with student learning outcomes in free-fall over the last two decades. But a recent report by the Productivity Commission has provided a ray of light.
Its report into Australia’s education system found the largest single factor in student success, and their ability to go on and make a meaningful economic contribution, is teacher quality. As a former teacher myself, I would say: quelle surprise!
The commission determined that students taught by above-average teachers will earn almost $500,000 more over their lifetimes than those taught by average teachers. Not exactly loose change. So, we need to have an overdue and difficult conversation about teacher quality.
Let’s get one thing straight: the majority of our teachers are amazing. They care for the students they teach. They’re dedicated and expert. Before entering Parliament, I was the head of a large secondary school in my electorate, so I know this first-hand.
Nonetheless, as is the case in any profession, some teachers are not currently up to scratch. Do you know someone who, as a result of struggling to get a job elsewhere, ultimately fell into teaching?
I do. And recently, I’ve been really concerned to find out that one in 10 new teachers can’t meet the necessary standard in critical learning areas like numeracy and literacy. Moves are afoot to change this.
Back in 2016 a Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students was introduced. I’m hopeful that it will ultimately become a valuable tool. It’s also good that universities are lifting the ATAR scores required for admission to teaching degrees.
I’ll concede that not every teacher has to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist. Yet mastery of their chosen subject area is essential. Teaching requires significant intellectual grunt.
There’s a lot more to do at the front end, but here’s a much trickier question: how do we support the 300,000 Australian teachers – currently plying their craft – to be their very best?
One response must be to put in place meaningful and rigorous systems of teacher appraisal.
I commenced my teaching journey fifteen years ago. As a 24-year-old, entirely new to the profession, I could not believe the amount of autonomy I had. There was certainly no appraisal. What’s more, there were no key performance indicators. Indeed, there was very little oversight of any kind.
This meant that I could teach whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Coming from the fishbowl of politics, as a staffer, I loved my newfound freedom.
Teacher autonomy is hard-wired into the culture of our school systems which we borrowed from the British public school model. After a hundred and fifty years, that’s no easy thing to change. But it’s certainly not conducive to best-practice, or personal growth.
Change has started, albeit slowly, in the best private schools. A small proportion of schools have excellent models in place.
These involve regular lesson observations by a school leader and targeted feedback; student surveys about teacher performance; professional development informed by a mentor; and goal setting with ongoing reviews to assess progress.
Of course, powerful public sector unions are stridently opposed to processes such as these. Yet, in my personal experience, they can be enacted in a way that is highly supportive of staff.
I’ve been appraised myself on many occasions. It’s nerve-wracking, sure. But what I’ve seen is that the many fantastic teachers are affirmed, while those who are struggling are supported to get better, or find a job that better fits their skills.
These conversations are difficult. As a (biased) former teacher I have a high regard for those still in the profession. Yet facts are facts. Our students have never performed worse in the crucial areas of literacy, numeracy, and science – at least not since the Program for International Student Assessment commenced publishing its reports in 2000.
Of course, the quality of teaching is not entirely to blame for this. But it can play a huge part in arresting Australia’s learning decline. That, says the Productivity Commission, will pay real dividends for us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-lefts-aversion-to-teacher-quality-is-harming-our-kids/ ?
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March 08, 2023
Arkansas Poised To Move to Universal School Choice
Arkansas’s state legislature is expected to pass a universal education savings account plan this week, making it the fourth state to enact a universal school choice policy in the past year.
Governor Sanders, formerly President Trump’s press secretary, has made school choice a hallmark of her short time in office. She announced her plan — called Arkansas Learns — after her moment on the national stage delivering the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address.
Ms. Sanders’s plan takes the form of education savings accounts, disbursements of state funds for education-related costs directly to families. ESAs have won favor among school choice advocates over the past decade for their flexible approach to spending.
Unlike traditional vouchers, ESAs can be used for any number of approved items — including school tuition, textbooks, tutoring, and homeschooling curricula — and unspent funds can roll over from year to year, incentivizing families and retailers to economize.
“We want to make sure we’re empowering parents by giving them educational freedom accounts to allow them to make the best decision about where and how their kids should be educated,” Ms. Sanders said in a Fox News interview last month.
The annual disbursement per child is roughly equal to the per-pupil funding at a public school in the state. In Arkansas, ESAs — known as Education Freedom Accounts — would roll out at around $7,500 per student, with provisions for adjustments based on inflation.
The legislation would increase accessibility to ESAs over a three-year span. The 2025-26 academic year would be the first that any Arkansas student would be eligible for an ESA.
If Arkansas passes the Learns Act this week, it will be the fourth state to enact a universal school choice program — following similar measures in Arizona, Iowa, and Utah. West Virginia has a near universal program, with 93 percent of students statewide eligible for ESAs, according to EdChoice.
School choice is just one component of the sprawling education bill, which clocks in at more than 140 pages. The Learns Act also includes provisions for public schools, including raising the minimum teacher salary to $50,000 a year.
Democrats have pushed back hard against the bill. In a statement last week, the state’s Democratic Party called the legislation a “scam” to “dismantle and defund our public school system.”
“This bill does not address the state’s responsibility to provide a suitable, efficient school funding system,” a state legislator, Joy Springer, said.
Ms. Springer and her allies’ efforts matter little in the Arkansas legislature, though, as it is held by a Republican supermajority.
The bill is expected to pass the state legislature this week. An earlier version passed the state senate, but a technical amendment was added regarding public school teachers’ employment rights.
The amended bill was passed by the house and will likely have a quick turnaround in the senate by mid-week, making it ready for signing by the governor by the end of week.
https://www.nysun.com/article/arkansas-poised-to-jump-on-school-choice-bandwagon
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Your children belong to you, not a school. If you don't fight, you'll lose them
By Karol Markowicz
My co-author Bethany Mandel and I set out to write our new book, "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation," to answer this question and teach parents how to lay down the marker and say: mine.
It’s a question that, not so long ago, we didn’t feel we needed to ask.
In October of 2021, Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, said, "I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
Taken on its own, the comment might even be benign. Sure, parental involvement in education had always been a prediction of student success. A 2010 study called "Parent Involvement and Student Academic Performance: A Multiple Mediational Analysis" by researchers at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found "children whose parents are more involved in their education have higher levels of academic performance than children whose parents are involved to a lesser degree." But should parents be designing a curriculum? Maybe not."
The exchange, however, wasn’t about which math curriculum to use. It was about whether parents had a right to demand pornographic books be pulled from the library. Suddenly the question of parental involvement seems clearer to most people.
The left says it doesn’t happen, pornography in libraries is a right-wing bogeyman, and yet parents at school after school keep discovering these books at the school library.
What’s happening here?
We encapsulate the current moment into the word "wokeness" and it really took hold during COVID. Leftism has always existed but wokeness is something new. Wokeness demands that up is down and black is white and pressures you to believe it too. Wokeness pushes a separation between parent and child.
Wokeness pushes a separation between parent and child.
We open our book with a history chapter and the roots of this wokeness in totalitarian regimes of the past. We trace how places like the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge, and others, tried to sever the family connection as a way of pushing their indoctrination on to the kids and, by extension, the parents.
We are seeing it happen in America today. Kids are told to keep secrets from their parents. Sometimes the secrets are life-changing.
Just recently the story broke about a Long Island teacher who had transitioned a child from girl to boy behind the backs of the parents. The child is 9.
The teacher assigned the student a new boy name and referred to the child as a boy. The parents were only alerted to what was going on when the girl started having suicidal ideation.
The important point about this story is that it took place in a "red" area. It happened in a red hamlet of a red town in a red county. Parents who think they are safe from the reaches of wokeness because they live in a conservative area have to think again.
We heard so many stories like this one, about parents being cut out of their child’s life.
Part of the reason we wrote this book is we saw the concern that so many people have, correctly, about the indoctrination that happens at college campuses. What alarmed us is that it starts far earlier than college now and parents seem unprepared to grapple with the onslaught.
This wokeness doesn’t just target children at school. We trace the way this forced conformity has taken hold at medical schools, teachers’ colleges, publishing companies and so on.
Everyone is afraid to speak up and step out of line. We chart parents who have shown bravery in fighting for their children and show other parents how to take a stand.
It’s going to take a fight but it will be worth it. Because whose child is this? Yours. Fight for them.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/your-children-belong-you-school-fight-lose
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The ‘anti-discrimination’ bandwagon – coming to Australian schools
You have to hand it to the ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors – they are effective. Watch them go from city to city preaching ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’, the only catch being you must submit totally to their worldview.
This cottage industry has seen great success in Western Australia, Queensland, and the Northern Territory: jurisdictions that have all sought to curtail religious freedoms. Since taking the reins of power in Canberra, the Albanese government has similarly been only too happy to oblige – accepting calls for a review on religious exemptions for schools in federal law.
But the feel-good, anti-discrimination messaging of the review’s supporters disguises a radical agenda, one which strips schools of protections that allow them to operate according to a self-determined set of values.
The new provisions, released by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), fly in the face of religious freedom and parental rights. As it stands, political parties would be allowed to hire staff who share their ethos, while schools would not.
Most fair-minded individuals would be appalled by such blatant double standards.
The Institute of Public Affairs’ submission to the Commission’s inquiry found the proposed reforms would; curtail the right of parents to give their children an education consistent with their values; facilitate sectarianism by pushing religious disagreements into the courts; and give government bodies, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission, the power to control what faith-based schools can do, say, and teach.
The ALRC wants government agencies to enforce compliance with new restrictive standards. And yes, you read that right, the ALRC essentially wants to take parents out of the equation and disregard the values and beliefs they want instilled in their children.
It is something straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, except it’s likely to become reality in Australia.
Make no mistake, religious freedom is under direct attack in Australia, and the first formal steps towards new religious discrimination laws have been taken by the Albanese government.
Out with the old and in with the new. Freedom, choice, and Judaeo-Christian values are to be replaced with a rigid creed, which entrench radical ideologies on gender and sexuality.
Worse still, the ALRC wants its reforms extended to all religious bodies in due course, which is perhaps the most concerning part of the whole Consultation Paper. If the narrative that religious protections are harmful to certain marginalised groups takes hold, then the cottage industry of activists has won.
Left-wing activists have been working hard for years to normalise this very idea with little courage shown by religious groups, who have typically been desperate to accommodate the howls of activists at every turn.
The bottom line is that when harm is equated with hurt feelings and is used to put a stop to the dissemination of genuinely held beliefs, religious freedom is dead. The proposed changes will foster greater intolerance and, as such, impacts all people of faith: Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians alike.
By pushing for legislative change, the ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors have ensured their cottage industry will continue to thrive long after this debate fades from public discussion.
Advocates have praised the reforms as progressive, but ultimately the recommendations are in direct conflict with Australia’s long-standing tradition that upholds religious toleration and pluralism.
In the name of progress, ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors are determined to throw out the Western intellectual tradition and replace it with identity politics and Critical Race Theory. Here, the subjective feelings of the individual are elevated above basic freedoms of religion, association, and expression.
Fortunately, there has been some pushback from the Christian community on this issue. Two major Christian schooling associations that represent 150,000 students across the country, have pulled out of the consultation process with the ALRC. The groups claim to have ‘lost faith’ in the inquiry remaining ‘balanced’ in addressing the issue.
As one Catholic Bishop warned late last year, preventing religious schools from requiring staff to teach in line with the school’s faith would strip these schools of their religious essence, while ushering in a Woke quota system for hiring, rather than a system based on shared worldview.
The provisions, if enacted, will also do parents a disservice by taking away their choice to send their child to a school with a genuine religious ethos.
This move against religious freedom also highlights a deeper and more troubling phenomenon occurring across Australia, the detachment of the political class and inner-city elites from mainstream Australians who want their freedoms preserved and to get on with their life.
As you go about your busy day, you may ask yourself, why all the fuss? As former High Court Chief Justices Mason and Brennan once wrote in a joint judgment, freedom of religion is the ‘paradigm freedom of conscience’ and ‘the essence of a free society’.
Ultimately the proposed changes will foster greater intolerance and impact all people of faith – Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians alike. This is not only a serious problem for religious freedom, but also seriously problematic for free speech.
Never forget, many had to fight for the freedoms we enjoy today, we must ensure they are not surrendered in silence.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-anti-discrimination-bandwagon-coming-to-a-school-near-you/ ?
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March 07, 2023
Bank of England discriminates against private schoolchildren
Lawrence Goldman
Let me begin with a recent experience of my own. I intend to take a group of my students to the ‘Slavery & the Bank’ exhibition at the Bank of England’s museum which runs until the end of April 2023. The Bank itself did not trade in slaves as an institution, but some of its earliest Directors certainly did on their own account, and in 2020 it ‘commenced a thorough review of its collection of images of former Governors and Directors to ensure none with any such involvement in the slave trade remain on display anywhere in the Bank’. The exhibition contains much more than this about its involvement in slavery, right up to the Bank’s role in the payment of compensation to slaveholders in the 1830s and 1840s after the Emancipation Act in 1833.
Looking through its website to find out about group bookings, I read the following: ‘Can I bring a state school or community group? Yes, we welcome state school and adult community groups. We can offer you a free group talk or presentation…’. Can that really mean that the Bank doesn’t welcome groups from independent schools, I wondered? (Declaration of interest at this point: I have been a governor of two private schools, one of which I attended myself long ago before it became independent). I sent off an email to find out. What came back was even more astonishing than the specific reference to ‘state’ schools: the museum was open to all but “it’s the presentations that are only available to state primary and secondary schools’”. You can look but you can’t touch, is about the size of it. We’ll let you in if you’re from a private school, but we’ll reserve the special educational experience for some other children.
Set aside any views you might hold about private education in general. This is not about the rights and wrongs of that. This is simply about discrimination, and a type of discrimination which makes it less easy for some children to learn than others. Why should children learning history be divided in this way? And who made the decision to treat children from one type of school differently from children from another? Would the Bank discriminate among people coming to its exhibition on grounds of colour, or race, or religion, or sexuality? I would hope not. Why then does one group of children get treated better than another?
The exhibition is designed to explain the Bank’s role in slavery and the slave trade. I commend their honesty. But how can the Bank mount such an exhibition while brazenly treating two groups of children differently? If it has a mission to explain, that mission must be for everyone, and for everyone’s children.
I have asked for an explanation and I’ll keep our readers updated.
The incident may be small but it’s a remarkable illustration of the double standards in so many of our institutions which focus on past wrongs while oblivious to their present vices and failings. Is this a case of virtue-signalling, therefore? Probably. At the very least a museum engaging with the subject of slavery in particular should be very clear that it is not itself perpetuating division and discrimination.
The Bank has been criticised severely in recent months for its abject failure in controlling inflation, its primary responsibility. Institutions that fail in small things tend to fail in big things as well. Many have called for the resignation of the Governor of the Bank. I call for the resignation of whoever devised this particular form of discrimination among children learning history.
One final thing. The Bank of England has taken down the portraits of those of its Directors who were involved with the slave trade. That is to hide from its history, a cowardly and altogether convenient method of covering up the truth. No one need ever know because the evidence has been removed. The morally correct course of action would have been to keep the portraits visible and explain who the subjects are using plaques, perhaps even with a permanent exhibition on the history of the Bank, including any links to slavery. It would have reminded the Governor and his staff that all economic decisions have moral consequences, and it would have made them better bankers.
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Teachers union head Randi Weingarten mocked for blasting DeSantis in ill-formed tweet
Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten lashed out at Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — firing off a tweet riddled with grammatical errors that accused the potential 2024 presidential hopeful of “banning everything he dislikes.”
“DeSantis should be fixated on the cost of living issues in Fla – housing is unaffordable, home insurance even worse, but instead he is exanding gun access, defunding, public schools, & banning everything he dislikes – teachers, journalists & the vulnerable,” Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote Sunday.
Her claims — as well as the misspellings and misplaced commas in her tweet — generated criticism on social media, with DeSantis’ deputy press secretary arguing Weingarten should instead focus on why so many parents have left New York for the Sunshine State.
“Maybe it’s because they wanted to be as far away as possible from schools where Randi has influence,” Jeremy Redfern wrote on Twitter.
Carlos Lopez-Cantera, former lieutenant governor of Florida, ripped Weingarten for her spelling and grammar mistakes.
“My teachers always called me out for not proof reading my spelling and grammar, and they were right in doing so,” he tweeted. “Below is from the president of the national teacher’s union.”
Actor Dean Cain, meanwhile, quipped, “Why is she always commenting on everything? I thought she was the head of the mafia — I mean teacher’s union.”
Last week, Weingarten went viral for a speech on the student loan crisis in front of the Supreme Court described by critics as a “meltdown”
The teachers union prez punctuated her angry remarks to demonstrators with a series of wild body movements and frantic pointing gestures.
“During the pandemic, we understood that small businesses were hurting, and we helped them, and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. Big businesses were hurting and we helped them, and it didn’t go to the Supreme Court to challenge it,” Weingarten said as she began to jump up and down.
“All of a sudden, when it’s about our students, they challenge it! The corporations challenge it! The student loan lenders challenge it! That is not right! That is not fair! And that is what we are fighting for when we say cancel student debt!,” she screamed, her voice cracking at times
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Hundreds of parents, kids to rally at City Hall to push Dems for more NYC charter schools
Hundreds of parents, kids and educators are expected to rally Tuesday at City Hall to demand lawmakers lift the cap and open more charter schools in the Big Apple.
The pro-school choice push comes as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to lift the cap has faced fierce resistance from state Democratic legislators allied with the anti-charter teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, including state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens), who chairs the committee on New York City education.
Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams has gone wobbly on school choice, complaining about the additional costs that could be imposed on the city to open more charters.
He testified at a recent budget hearing that the state should help pay the bill.
Parents who will attend the 11 a.m. rally said it’s time for politicians to listen to the parents.
“Parents like me want the best for their child. Right now, there’s so many families where I live in Central Brooklyn that don’t have access to high quality schools,” said Brooklyn public school mom Natasha Cherry-Perez.
“More public charters means more access to a great education that can change your child’s future. Parents need their choice respected and supported.”
The head of one of the organizing groups, the pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform, also said it’s time for lawmakers to do the right thing.
“This rally is about empowering parents who overwhelmingly want and deserve the right to choose the best school for their child,” said DFER NY Executive Director Jacquelyn Martell. “It’s time to change history and expand options for these families!”
A recent Morning Consult/DFER survey found that nearly two-thirds of parents — 64% — said they support increasing the charter school cap, while just 23% of parents said they were opposed, with the remainder undecided.
Charter schools are publicly funded, privately run schools that typically have a long school day year and school year that traditional public schools students.
Students at charter schools largely outperform neighboring district schools on the state’s standardized Math and English Language Arts exams, a Post series revealed.
The overwhelming majority of charter schools are non-union and have more flexibility to operate and set their own curriculum.
About 90 percent of students in charter schools are black and Latino. pro-charter advocates, among them former three-term Republican Gov. George Pataki, who approved the original charter school law, said it’s racist to deny minority students the opportunity for a better education.
Former Gov. David Paterson, who expanded charter schools when he was in office, also supported Hochul’s cap lift.
Critics have also accused some lawmakers, including Sen. Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan), of being hypocrites for sending their own kids to private school while opposing the charter school option for mostly poor and working class minority parents who can’t afford private school tuition.
Opponents complain that charter schools divert resources from traditional public schools amid declining enrollment.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/parents-rally-to-urge-pols-to-lift-the-charter-school-cap/
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March 06, 2023
Massachusetts school faces federal investigation for 'racial segregation' after barring white students from auditioning for school play
A theatre production at Newton North High School has landed the school district under federal investigation by the Department of Education after the company barred white students from auditioning.
The Massachusetts school's Theater Ink program put on a show titled 'Lost and Found: Our Stories as People of Color,' which according to the show's audition packet acted as 'a reserved safe space for this exploration and for people of color to be vulnerable and support one another.'
At the time of auditions last fall, the student director posted a video to the company's website declaring that 'All BIPOC [Black, indigenous and people of color] students at North are invited to audition.'
It was at that point that the grassroots national movement Parents Defending Education got involved and filed a complaint with the federal government that the school districted discriminated against students on the basis of race.
The claim noted that the audition criteria, which included asking students about their race and ethnic identities violated 'both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.'
PDE President and Founder Nicole Neily told Fox that the school's administration 'failed their student body by allowing a racially-segregated production to move forward - and missed the opportunity to impart the lesson that racial discrimination is always wrong.'
In the Lost and Found audition packet, students were told that weekly rehearsals for the production would include 'organized discussions about race and identity in our lives.'
The Newton Public School system, which is the entity being investigated by DOE, previously told Fox Digital that it is committed to encouraging all of its students to participate in the theatre program, 'particularly students of color, who have been vastly underrepresented in our programs.'
'While centered in the stories of the lives of our students of color, no one is turned away or excluded from participating or having a role in the ‘Lost and Found’ production of Theatre Ink, Newton North's teaching and working theater program,' said the district.
'The Newton Public Schools do not exclude students based upon color, race, ethnicity, or religious background.'
However, NPS also condoned and offered a message of support for the Lost and Found theatrical endeavor, seemingly offering a stamp of approval for the high schoolers' casting practices.
'We are proud of our students for the hard work they do to not only assemble a diverse group of performers, but also to challenge each other to have difficult conversations around societal issues,' said the district.
'Theatre Ink has consistently provided opportunities for students to tell and celebrate the narratives and stories of those who have been historically underrepresented.
'Amplifying the stories, experiences, and history of students of color is just one component of our diverse fine and performing arts programs,' the statement continued, additionally offering that it fully supports 'the premise and educational value of this performance.'
One graduate of Newton North High School shared on Facebook how disheartened she was by the news that her alma mater had segregated its theatre program and is now facing an investigation.
'What on Earth, I am appalled,' she wrote, sharing a link to coverage of the story. 'This is not the High School I graduated from. We were All Tigers. Apparently not anymore. It’s Time to clean house and remove activist educators.'
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School Administrators Undermine Excellence To Promote “Equity”
The American education system is being rigged by hard-core, radical leftist administrators and teachers and their unions. But their efforts go beyond implementing racist policies, corrupting our children with anti-American, pro-Marxist propaganda, sowing gender confusion and canceling parental rights. They’re also diminishing and curtailing hard work and success.
The latest example: 17 schools in Virginia did not notify students and their parents of National Merit awards those students had earned. That outrageous behavior was based on the bizarre claim that letting the students know about their commendations would not promote the school administrators’ stated objective of “equal outcomes for every student, without exceptions,” regardless of academic performance or lack of dedication to their studies.
Such intentional and disgraceful conduct is shocking. The receipt of such awards can be a key factor in the decisions made by college admissions officers as well as organizations that award scholarships. As someone who was able to attend college because of financial help from a National Merit scholarship, I find it despicable that these woke officials deliberately hurt the ability of their students to get into the college of their choice or to win the scholarships that could help them pay for school.
This misbehavior may have a long-term, deleterious effect on many of the affected students and, in particular, on their professional careers.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed a new law to prevent this from happening again. He has also asked Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to investigate the matter as a possible violation of the state’s education and civil rights law. But for the nearly 1,000 students who may have been hurt, all of this will come too late.
These reports surfaced only because of the persistence of a local woman and author, Asra Nomani. Nomani’s son, Shibli, earned one of the National Merit commendations. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia, that has earned a reputation as one of the best high schools in the country. It’s a school I know well: My daughter graduated from there 10 years ago, before its administrators started implementing these types of insane policies.
The school, however, withheld the information regarding Shibli’s award from the family for two years. The director of student services at Thomas Jefferson, Brandon Kosatka, and the school principal, Ann Bonitatibus, were apparently responsible for implementing this policy.
When Ms. Nomani pressed Mr. Kosatka on why the school failed to notify them about the award, he admitted that they withheld information about the time-sensitive academic honors because they did not want to hurt the feelings of those who didn’t receive such accolades.
Misbegotten policies like this do not merely have isolated effects. For instance, this policy, which was initiated at Thomas Jefferson and spread to other schools, primarily hurt Asian American students. Thomas Jefferson is already involved in a lawsuit filed by the parents of Asian American students because of a new admissions policy it implemented several years ago that discriminates against their children on the basis of race. And we are awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court on the discriminatory admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina in litigation brought by Asian American students.
All of this was discovered in late December. Even though the administrator at Thomas Jefferson admitted that this was a deliberate policy, the affected school districts suddenly claimed it was just an “error” as soon as it cane to light. This claim is very difficult to take seriously, and all the administrators who devised and implemented this egregious policy still have their jobs.
What really happened was captured by Ms. Nomani when she said that the “equity warriors out there want to talk about dismantling the systemic injustice, but they are actually now the purveyors of this racism and discrimination.” Truer words were never spoken about what is happening in our schools today.
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Canada: Catholic Student Suspended – Then Arrested – For ‘Opposing Gender Ideology’
In a sickening update in February — that should shake the conscience of every defender of human rights and freedoms in Canada — police in Ontario arrested 16-year-old Josh Alexander for attending class at his Catholic school, after he was suspended for protesting the allowance of males who identify as females to use girls’ bathrooms. I have been following the developments of this story from the beginning. See HERE and HERE for background. Thankfully, focus on the case isn’t going away, but is attracting increasing media attention across Canada, the U.S., and the UK.
To sum it up: Ontario student Josh Alexander was penalized with a 20-day suspension last year by his Catholic school “after he organized a walkout in protest of male students being permitted into the girls’ washroom.” In an interview around the time of Alexander’s initial suspension, the teen told LifeSiteNews that he believes, in accordance with Catholic teaching and the Bible,?that there are only two sexes. Under the freedom of religion, Alexander has the guaranteed right to affirm this belief.
Or so we thought.
Liberty Coalition Canada (LCC) took up Josh’s case and sent a “Notice of Intention to Appeal Suspension” to Mary-Lise Rowat, Superintendent of Educational Services at Renfrew County Catholic District School Board. But Josh’s situation deteriorated, and fast. LifeSite news wrote in an update in February:
Alexander’s lawyer, James Kitchen, the chief litigator for Liberty Coalition Canada (LCC), told LifeSiteNews that Renfrew County Catholic District School Board won’t “permit him (Alexander) to attend school for the rest of the year because, according to them, Josh’s beliefs constitute ‘bullying of trans students.’”
What nonsense. Mind you, the school is bullying Josh over his religious rights and freedoms, while doing severe damage to what the school proclaims about honoring Catholic teachings.
In an update reported by Fox News, Kitchen stated that his client’s legal battle shows how freedom in the country is rapidly eroding. He further warned that Canadians “do not understand the gravity of the threat their government increasingly poses to religious freedom, which he said is ‘essentially dead’”. One of the first things Justin Trudeau did when he first became Prime Minister in 2015 was to shut down the Office of Religious Freedom.
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March 05, 2023
The trouble with ‘microaggressions’
Welcome to the divisive and somewhat sinister world of racial ‘microaggressions’. Loosely defined as ‘a subtle slight or action that leaves people from a minority group feeling upset, offended or uncomfortable,’ the person who has delivered the insult might even be oblivious they have caused offence. The latest manifestation of its chilling effect on workplace relationships came in an employment tribunal case brought by Christabelle Peters, a black British academic.
Peters, a lecturer in American cultural and political history, sued Bristol University over a series of microaggressions. One of her complaints was that the nameplate on her door did not have her ‘Dr” title on it. Her grievances included claims that her office furniture wasn’t delivered on time and that payslips were not delivered to her office pigeonhole. Peters also accused a senior lecturer of telling her ‘nobody gives a shit about Africa’ after she pitched a research idea about the continent.
Did the university partly help bring this case on itself?
The tribunal ruled in Bristol University’s favour: it found that the nameplate issue was an ‘admin error’ and heard that another lecturer experienced the same problem. The tribunal in Bristol was also told that nameplates at the university are often prepared by junior workers who were mostly unaware of who the lecturers were.
Did the university partly help bring this case on itself? After all, it has made a big song and dance of publishing a detailed guide to help staff and students identify, report and counter microaggressions. which it defines as ‘the everyday slights…that members of marginalised groups experience in their day-to-day interactions’. Peters presumably took this advice to heart. Among the microaggressions the guide lists are women ‘being mistaken for being in a role more junior than the role you hold’ or when ‘an assertive female manager (is) labelled as ‘bossy’ while her male counterpart is described as a ‘good leader’.
How has it come to this? The theory — if that is not too strong a word for something based on hunches and feelings rather than concrete evidence — is that microaggressions reinforce ‘white privilege’ and undermine a culture of inclusion.
The savants who promulgate this nonsense are the usual mix of antiracism ‘experts’, organisational psychologists and HR departments looking for quick and easy fixes to workplace culture and practice. They appear deliberately blind to the obvious flaws.
First and foremost, a mindless institutional witch-hunt, rooting out and punishing perceived racial slights through the simplistic catch-all category of microaggressions, is simply not the panacea it is cracked up to be. Training programmes based on such a flimsy premise might well succeed in marginally increasing awareness of ignorant comments, but at what cost? Surely a more likely outcome over time is a divisive and inflammatory workplace.
Daft ideas like this merely encourage a dangerous belief that one group is always the aggressor and the other the victim. Which is surely racist in itself. It is a statement of the blindingly obvious that assumptions, biases and aggression can, and do, often go both ways. Other equally damaging consequences flow. People will be tempted to keep their beliefs and opinions to themselves, especially if they think they are likely to be punished for any minor infringement however unintentional.
Most damning of all is the danger of a form of workplace apartheid taking hold because people will feel safer mixing with those from similar backgrounds. They might choose simply not to engage with anyone from an ethnic minority, just in case an innocent or well-meaning remark is overheard, misunderstood and reported.
This purportedly antiracist orthodoxy is slowly but surely taking a stranglehold in offices everywhere, but universities in particular are leading the charge. The overall impact is to heighten everyone’s sensitivity to any form of workplace slight, turning offices into factories of grievances, resentments and ultimately tribunal claims. That’s exactly where Peters ended up. She lost and rightly so — but no one should be surprised if there are other similar cases in the pipeline.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-trouble-with-microaggressions/ ?
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Video Emerges of Black Students Allegedly Attacking, Forcing White Students to Say 'Black Lives Matter'
A harrowing video has surfaced of a racially charged schoolyard incident that rocked an Ohio community last month.
Kenwood Elementary School in Springfield, Ohio, came under national scrutiny after it was reported that children there were assaulted after refusing to say “black lives matter.”
The incident occurred on Feb. 10 and, according to a police report, involved a number of black students who targeted their white classmates.
The black students demanded that the white students say “black lives matter” and recorded them making the proclamation.
Students who declined? According to police, they were “chased down and escorted, dragged, or carried to the playground” and forced to utter the words.
WKEF-TV has now acquired surveillance footage that shows what exactly went on in the schoolyard.
In the videos, you can see white students being rounded up, thrown to the ground, and forced to kneel in front of their black classmates.
The disturbing footage may change the tune of some parents who gave surprisingly evenhanded responses to WHIO-TV when the incident first came to light.
“I’m angry as a parent, but I understand they are children,” said Ryan Springer, whose 12-year-old son was one of the hazing victims.
“It’s not OK to hate anybody because of their skin color or their gender or sexual orientation, or anything like that. Nobody should be hating anybody. … They should just be worried about being children,” he said.
Springer did wonder how school authorities allowed these racial tensions to boil over on the school playground.
“Where was the school staff when all of this was taking place? And why? Why did it get so far?” he asked.
The school district is currently working with police to investigate the matter.
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MN parents, teachers blast school board over botched handling of violence in schools: Our children are dying
Parents outraged as violence surges in Minnesota schools
St. Paul community leader Rev. Darryl Spence discusses the growing outrage from Minnesota parents, teachers and students over violence in their schools.
Teachers and parents in St. Paul, Minnesota are torching the city school district for its complacent attitude regarding violence in schools.
In wake of the fatal stabbing of 15-year-old student Devin Scott, St. Paul community leader Rev. Darryl Spence is begging Americans to not accept leaders lack of action as "politics as usual."
"Well, most of it is happening, like you can imagine, because of gang violence. It's just a continued circle. I am in strong support of bringing SRO's [school resource officer's] back into the building. I was there for the immediate aftermath of the stabbing. I saw the chaos caused by the lack of connection between the school and the police department," Spence said during an appearance on "Fox & Friends Weekend."
Parents and teachers in St. Paul, Minnesota gathered at a school board meeting in wake of rising violence in schools.
Parents and teachers in St. Paul, Minnesota gathered at a school board meeting in wake of rising violence in schools. (Fox News)
"The police department had no idea of the lay of the school, what was the best route out, how to best get kids back to their parents. So, yeah, I think it's caused because of the school board decided not to have SROs in the building."
Spence's comments come in response to the school board's controversial decision to remove school resource officers from the building.
No students proficient in math at 19 Minnesota public schoolsVideo
Teachers echoed Spence's concerns, one saying that the school board has been "negligent" in their response.
"It was amazing how many teachers, how many educators still beg for help. They literally were begging for help. I myself raised the question, how are the children?" Spence asked, Saturday.
"We have to quit bickering at the top and start looking out for our children. Our children are dying out. We are losing children at an alarming rate. We have to do something different. We can't keep being politics as usual," he explained to co-host Pete Hegseth.
Rev. Darryl Spence joined "Fox & Friends Weekend." Saturday, to weigh in on St. Paul's schools' unprecedented crime wave.
Rev. Darryl Spence joined "Fox & Friends Weekend." Saturday, to weigh in on St. Paul's schools' unprecedented crime wave. (Fox News)
In response, Hegseth issued a provocative question to Spence, asking "Are teachers able to enforce discipline in these schools?"
"In their words, no they can't," Spence began. "I heard it over and over. It's more, I think we have to be honest. This has to start at home. Kids have to come to school ready to learn. My pastor, Pastor Patterson actually works in the building, at Harding. And he says, all he sees is kids walking the hall. He has the ability to say, please go to class. But if he turns the corner, there they are, the same student. They come to the building, but they don't go to the classroom," he continued.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams says when America 'took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools'Video
While noting that kids are dying at an "alarming" rate, Spence concluded by calling on the city school district to implement honest policy reform.
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March 03, 2023
University of North Carolina moves to ban ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ statements in anti-woke backlash
The University of North Carolina (UNC) moved against encroaching woke culture and voted to ban diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) statements and politically preferential hiring.
UNC voted to ban DEI statements and compelled speech from admission, hiring, promotion and tenure at its Board of Governors meeting Thursday.
The board stated the university "shall neither solicit nor require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement," according to the resolution. An employee or applicant also can't "be solicited or required to describe his or her actions in support of, or in opposition to, such beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles."
"Practices prohibited here include but are not limited to solicitations or requirements for statements of commitment to particular views on matters of contemporary political debate or social action contained on applications or qualifications for admission or employment included as criteria for analysis of an employee's career progression."
Kenny Xu, President of Color Us United, which advocates for a race blind society told Fox News Digital that his organization has been leading a campaign to remove DEI from medical education practice, but he believes the move by UNC will have implications for higher education across the country.
"We believe in a race blind, meritocratic society with high standards and that's what has traditionally produced excellence in the United States," Xu told Fox News Digital. "When we saw wokeness and DEI infiltrating the medical profession, that's when we became concerned because medicine is the one place where everybody knows, liberals, conservatives, independents, that you need the most qualified doctor to get the best outcome."
"When diversity, equity and inclusion says ‘No, you need doctors of a certain race’ or ‘No, we need to be teaching things from the lens of social justice rather than the biological practice of medicine,’ that's when we got concerned," he added.
Color Us United wrote a petition to get the Dean of the UNC Medical School to denounce DEI, which required diversity statements in the hiring and promotion process.
The medical school's Guidelines for Appointment, Promotion and Tenure (APT) previously declared that "A statement for each area is required as part of the C.V." and "should outline depth and breadth of efforts in each area, including but not limited to impact of work, philosophy and style, team-based projects, and mentee interactions."
Dr. Nche Zama, a cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital who also ran for Pennsylvania governor in 2022, described the move by the UNC board as a "pivotal decision" that will be "applauded by some and rejected by others."
"In the final analysis, it is a decision that is in the best interest of all our children who will come to appreciate that EXCELLENCE (not phenotypes or ethnicity) should be the ultimate standard in their lives," he told Fox News Digital.
"The catastrophic failures in our educational system are predicated in many ways on a decades-old absence of a banner of excellence in the collective and individual learning experiences of many of our children who sadly, live in a cultural milieu that fosters a diabolically pervasive psychology, promoting self-hate, entitlement, and mediocre aspirations," he added.
He said he believes this education climate has "ushered in the recent cataclysmic push for quick-fix solutions in the guise of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, along with an antiquated time-tested placebo called affirmative action, instead of designing sustainable solutions that bring sustainable value."
Earlier this month, UNC announced its plan to combat woke ideology on its campus with a new School Civic Life and Leadership School that a board member described as a way to "level" the playing field for discourse on campus
Trustee Marty Kotis said that "when one side is represented and the other side is suddenly allowed to speak up, it may seem like we're taking aim - but really we're just trying to create a level playing field."
"We are working to support a culture of respect, debate, and discovery. It won’t be easy and will often feel simply uncomfortable," Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz said in a message announcing the school. Yet these are the skills our students, and we as citizens, need to be stewards of our democracy."
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Florida International University adopts radical DEI program that condemns US as a system of 'white supremacy' while also separating students by race
Florida International University in Miami adopted a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program that teaches students that the US was built on a system of 'white supremacy' while also training them in left wing protest tactics.
The radical DEI program was revealed thanks to a Sunshine Law records request from Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo.
Rufo, a conservative activist, claimed in a blog post that starting with the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, officials at the school began issuing statements 'condemning the United States as a system of "white supremacy."'
He goes on to say that the school went on to hold discussion programs that was segregated along racial lines. The result of those discussions was to teach students that 'blackness is inherently noble, and whiteness inherently corrupt.'
The school also published materials that instructs students how to prepare for protests. 'Bring a bandana to cover nose and mouth,' one such piece of literature reads. Another section reads: 'Download a messaging app that has end to end encryption.'
In 2022, it was announced that Florida International University received a little over $77 million in public money.
The use of DEI programs in hiring has caused controversy more widely. Critics say that favoring underrepresented groups is unfairly detrimental to others, while proponents say such efforts are needed to help give traditionally marginalized groups equal footing.
At FlU, college officials justified the use of racially segregated meetings as a means to help people of color to heal and 'discuss the unique impacts of systemic racism,' Rufo alleges.
After the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, the college went on to publish an 'Inclusive Language Guide.' Words that were considered taboo according to the guide included 'husband,' 'wife,' 'mother,' 'father,' 'she' and 'he.'
Acceptable replacements included 'spouse,' 'parent,' as well as 'they/them.'
Rufo, a graduate of Harvard Extension School, describes the content of the programs being offered by FIU as 'pure left-wing activism.' He accuses the school of promoting the Black Lives Matter movement and of describing life in the United States as a system of 'power, privilege and oppression.'
Trans and non-binary as well black people are defined as the oppressed and Christian holidays are 'cultural imperialism.'
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would gain more influence in the state's public university system, and majors involving gender studies or critical race theory would be eliminated if a bill filed this week wins support from the Republican-controlled legislature.
The new measure, which largely reflects a legislative agenda announced by DeSantis in January, would also ban consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in hiring of faculty.
It would require each institution's board of trustees to approve hires, giving DeSantis greater influence over those decisions because the governor appoints a significant number of board members.
The wide-reaching legislation represents a new front in the Republican war against the 'woke' agenda many conservatives believe liberals are trying to push on public education across the country.
DeSantis, who is expected to launch a presidential bid after Florida's legislative session ends this spring, has positioned himself as a leader in that fight.
'In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition,' DeSantis said in January.
The legislature, which has a clear Republican majority, convenes for its regular session in March.
Asked about the bill on Friday, a spokesman for the governor, Jeremy Redfern, said DeSantis would decide whether to sign it after seeing a final version passed by lawmakers.
Academics, free speech advocates and students condemned the measure. Jeremy C. Young, senior manager of free expression and education at the writers' organization PEN America, tweeted that it would be the 'central battleground for the soul of higher education.'
'It would virtually end academic freedom, shared governance and institutional autonomy at all Florida colleges and universities,' Young said in a statement in February.
Florida's public university system includes 12 universities with an enrollment of more than 400,000 students.
Last month, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott told state agencies and public universities that such practices violated labor laws. The University of Texas system's board of regents on Wednesday said it had paused all new DEI policies in its hiring.
The Florida bill would also prohibit spending on programs or campus activities that promote DEI and what it calls 'Critical Race Theory rhetoric.'
Programs required for compliance with federal regulations and some other assistance programs would be exempted.
The measure states that general education core courses taught at public universities 'may not suppress or distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.'
Critical race theory is an academic concept that asserts that racism is woven into the US legal system and ingrained in its primary institutions.
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5th-Grade Student Suicidal After Teacher Allegedly Forces Her to Use Name 'Leo', Male Pronouns
Remote learning during the pandemic awakened many parents to what their children were being taught by activist teachers.
It might be time to consider forcing schools to offer parents a means to monitor what is going on inside classrooms in real time now that kids are back in class and at the mercy of the American left’s political and social agendas.
A teacher in New York is accused of encouraging a 10-year-old girl to identify as a boy throughout the 2021-2022 school year.
According to a lawsuit from the child’s parents, she was failed by the school system at every level as administrators made a concerted effort to leave them in the dark about it.
The family of the girl is suing Debra Rosenquist, a teacher at Terryville Road Elementary School in Port Jefferson Station on Long Island.
According to an attorney representing the family affected by the teacher’s alleged actions, the child had never expressed a desire to explore a different “gender identity,” but became tormented after her fifth-grade teacher began to refer to her by male pronouns and the name “Leo.”
That was part of a pattern where vulnerable children were encouraged to “try being gay,” or to identify as boys if they were girls or girls if they were boys, according to the lawsuit.
In addition to the teacher, the suit names as defendants the school itself, principal Annemarie Sciove, the Brookhaven-Comsewogue School District and Superintendent Jennifer Quinn.
The family alleges Rosenquist was so unrelenting in her quest to force gender and sexuality on children that their daughter soon began to experience “suicidal ideations.”
“As a result, [the student] became confused as to her gender,” the lawsuit says. “Despite knowing about Rosenquist’s conduct… it took the District, Quinn, and Sciove months to inform [the child’s parents] about it.”
The lawsuit is descriptive in its accusations about Rosenquist, who is not surprisingly still employed by the district.
“Rosenquist pursued her own agenda outside the curriculum, which included persuading her 5th-grade students to try ‘being gay’ or being another gender even when they were not,” the lawsuit says. “To further her agenda, Rosenquist read and provided her students graphic books about gender and sexuality which were not on the curriculum.”
Officials with the Brookhaven-Comsewogue School District met with the girl’s parents and were told the teacher was using non-approved books that covered topics such as gender transition surgery and hormone therapy, the lawsuit says.
One such book told the story of parents who had apparently failed their daughter by assigning her a female gender at birth.
Being told she was not a girl was so harmful to the student allegedly targeted by Rosenquist that she wanted to die, the lawsuit says.
In January 2022, the teacher’s alleged depravity led the student to draw a picture of a girl and to write the words, “I wanna kill myself.” She also wrote, “I feel sad like a lot.”
The family’s attorney, Debra Wabnik, told Fox News that Rosenquist “manipulated a pre-teen female into changing her gender identity when the child did not feel any inclination to do so.”
“The parents did not learn about what Rosenquist was forcing upon their daughter until it was discovered that the child had suicidal ideations,” Wabnik said.
“The psychological and social damage Rosenquist caused this child and her family was immense. Incredibly, the District still has Rosenquist in the classroom where she can similarly harm other innocent children,” she said.
The attorney said in a statement to the New York Post that the student is female and prefers being female. “At no point did she identify as male,” Wabnik said.
The district said actions were being taken against Rosenquist but did not elaborate any further.
Quinn also offered a bland and sterile statement that portrayed the Brookhaven-Comsewogue School District as one that cares deeply for children.
Yet the district was allegedly aware one of its teachers had gone rogue and was working to undermine the identities of defenseless children with confusing ideas that are built on the lie one can change their gender.
That led to an innocent child expressing a desire to die.
There is no telling how many other classrooms this is happening in, but anyone with children enrolled in government schools ought to monitor what their kids are being told by morally corrupted individuals with teaching degrees.
As a country, we must demand accountability for instructors who do this to children and swift justice for those who let them get away with it.
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March 02, 2023
Discredited Research Cited in Legal Briefs for Supreme Court’s 2 Racial Admissions Cases
Sometimes a narrative is just too good to give up, even when the facts don’t support it. This seems to be the reason why some supporters of racial preferences in college admissions keep citing bad research in legal briefs before the Supreme Court.
In the two cases challenging the race-based admissions practices of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, more than a dozen briefs cite “The Shape of the River,” a 1998 book by William Bowen and Derek Bok, to support such race-based admissions.
That research, however, largely has been discredited. The authors of the briefs citing it either haven’t done their research or think they can pull a fast one on the Supreme Court as the justices consider the two cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
“The Shape of the River” hit bookshelves in 1998 to great fanfare in liberal media outlets because it purported to prove that racial preferences in higher education help black students to make more money after graduation. Indeed, it claimed that racial preferences were responsible for the growth of the black middle class, and that without those policies, blacks would suffer.
The book also purported to disprove the “mismatch effect”—the documented phenomenon that lowering admissions standards for racial minorities actually reduces the number of minorities entering academia and high-paying professional jobs.
But the book did no such thing.
The authors, Bowen and Bok, studied the graduation rates and post-graduation careers of students at 28 colleges, concluding that racial preferences were a great benefit to black students. In fairness to them, their study did prove one thing: Racial preferences favored black applicants at the expense of white and Asian applicants. That was a big deal because up to that point, many liberals denied this result.
But from there on out, the book’s major conclusions weren’t reliable. Its core claim—that the mismatch effect didn’t exist—was based on several serious mistakes.
First, the authors failed to separate black students admitted to elite institutions because of academic merit from those who were admitted under racial preferences. The authors could have disaggregated that data, but they didn’t. As a result, the study didn’t include data about the specific group at issue—an error that made the study, in the words of economist Thomas Sowell, “the statistical equivalent of ‘Hamlet’ without the prince of Denmark.”
Second, the authors looked only at students’ SAT scores and considered no other academic credentials. Is a student at Penn State with a score of 1200 as academically advanced as a student at Princeton with a 1200? Probably not.
Students are more than a single test score—Bowen and Bok argued as much before they wrote “The Shape of the River”—so we learn little, if anything, by assuming that two students with the same test score are the same.
Third, Bowen and Bok didn’t even compare students with the same SAT scores; they compared scores in broad bands. As professor Gail Heriot, a leading expert on racial preferences explains, comparing bands “is what statisticians do when they set out to muddy the waters.”
This error meant that Bowen and Bok didn’t actually test the mismatch hypothesis that they claimed to disprove. The hypothesis, to quote Sowell again, is that “the larger the differential in academic qualifications between black and white students at a given institution, the larger the racial differential in failure to graduate tends to be.”
To test this hypothesis, Bowen and Bok would have needed to look at the data from individual institutions. Instead, they looked at aggregations of data from institutions with different students and different SAT levels.
Incidentally, another study, “America in Black and White,” actually did look at data from individual institutions, and it confirmed the mismatch effect.
It gets worse for Bowen and Bok, however, because their own data demonstrated the mismatch effect despite their efforts to hide it.
Another study, “Reflections on ‘The Shape of the River,’” looked at Bowen and Bok’s report and found some shocking hidden conclusions. For example, Bowen and Bok reported that 8 of 10 black students in the study collected a diploma—a number well above the national average.
However, flipped on its head, this same statistic tells a different story. Whereas 2 of 10, or 20%, of black students failed to graduate, only 6% of white students failed to graduate. In other words, Bowen and Bok’s own report showed that even at elite institutions, the dropout rate for black students is 3.3 times that of white students.
One wonders what other revelations might be hidden in Bowen and Boks’ raw data. Researchers are unlikely ever to know because, in bold defiance of academic transparency, the authors refuse to make their raw data publicly available.
These are only a few of the errors in “The Shape of the River.” So many studies have done so much damage to it that serious researchers of affirmative action won’t rely on its claims about the mismatch effect.
And yet, the book remains a favorite citation for ideologues and activists. In the current cases at the Supreme Court, more than a dozen amicus briefs cite “The Shape of the River” in defense of racial preferences.
This looks like a commitment to narrative over facts.
The great irony of this wrongheaded commitment is that it actually harms the black students it claims to want to help. If not for racial preferences, we’d have more black doctors, engineers, and professors than we have today, as Heriot explains here.
It’s no good that this commitment to a false narrative is winning out over reality, at least for some people. But for others with more open minds, it provides an important warning: Beware of experts peddling statistics that confirm your beliefs; doubt them always, and double-check their work.
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Anti-Trumper at University of Virginia
Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has accepted a teaching position at the University of Virginia after Wyoming voters threw her out of office last year.
Cheney spent her last term not representing them, instead focusing on exacting a political vendetta against former President Donald Trump while serving as a prominent member of the partisan Jan. 6 House select committee.
The former high-ranking House Republican joined her Democratic Party cohorts when she tried to convince everyone she and they were saving the world.
Voters in the Cowboy State did not feel like they needed to be saved by her and her new friends — or from the former president.
People who were concerned by actual issues replaced her with Rep. Harriet Hageman, and most everyone seems happy with the new arrangement.
But without a pulpit from which to shout her message that democracy is in danger of being replaced by the ghost of Hitler, Cheney has no audience.
According to a statement from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, she will now be able to force her message onto impressionable young people.
Not only can Cheney tell young people how to feel about democracy and Trump, but she can do it while remaining near the swamp that is Washington, D.C.
“We’re thrilled to share [Cheney] will be joining us as a Professor [of] Practice,” the school said on Twitter after Politico first reported the news.
Cheney predictably used the words “our democracy” in her statement to UVA. “There are many threats facing our system of government, and I hope my work with the Center for Politics and the broader community at the University of Virginia will contribute to finding lasting solutions that not only preserve but strengthen our democracy,” she said.
The message was on-brand, so at least the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney is consistent. There is something to be said about that.
Some people who came across the school’s announcement on Twitter pointed out UVA’s proximity to Washington, while one offered a perfect course suggestion for Cheney: “Orange Man Bad 101.”
The title of teacher might not come with the same prestige and megaphone as Cheney’s old job, but it is sure to give her a little bit of clout with the only people she seems to care about: Democrats and establishment Republicans who are obsessed with pleasing them.
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Delaware lowers passing score on bar exam in push for racial diversity: 'Not supposed to be a barrier'
The Delaware Supreme Court lowered the passing score on the state's bar exam amid other changes reportedly intended to increase racial diversity among the state's lawyers.
The 200-question multiple-choice exam will be offered twice instead of once a year beginning in 2024 – and its passing score will be lowered from 145 to 143, according to local outlet WHYY.
The number of essays on the exam will be decreased from eight to four, and the number of essay topics will be reduced from 14 to 10.
The clerkship requirement is also being lowered from 21 weeks to 12 weeks, and the mandatory list of 25 legal proceedings that potential lawyers must attend has been shortened to 18 out of 30 possible items.
The late application fee for law school graduates and attorneys admitted in other states has also been decreased.
In the court's announcement of the changes, Chief Justice Collins J. Seitz Jr. pushed back against any assertion that they reflect a "lowering of standards" and referred to them as a "modernization" of the admission process aimed at aligning with the standards in other states.
Seitz, who began the diversity project that led to a report that suggested changes to the exam, maintained that such revisions will enhance competitiveness in attracting legal talent to the state that serves as a hub of business litigation, according to Reuters.
"Delaware is the only state to hold the bar exam just once a year," Seitz said. "This can frustrate applicants because if they fail to pass the exam, which may be required for them to keep or land a job in Delaware, they have to wait a full year before they can try again."
"The bar exam is not supposed to be a barrier to entering the profession but is supposed to be a test of an applicant’s ability to successfully practice law in Delaware, and I believe these reforms will help better reflect that purpose," he added.
Chuck Durante, who serves as president of the Delaware State Bar Association, praised the changes, according to WHYY.
"These changes are designed to remove certain unnecessary impediments to applications to the Delaware bar, to rip some barbed wire from the welcome mat, some traditional barriers that had developed into something quite artificial," he said.
Durante further noted that "attitudes must continue to evolve in Delaware," according to the outlet.
"White people generally who have their antennae up, who understand what is happening in society, have learned the meaning of microaggression. They’ve learned the meaning of how to be welcoming, how to be professional, how to make this community better suited for diversity in its professional class, including its lawyers," he said.
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1 March, 2023
Catholic School Suspended Student Who Spoke Out Against Transgender Bathroom Policy
A 16-year-old boy who was suspended indefinitely from a Catholic high school in Canada for objecting the school’s trans-inclusive bathroom policy.
The student, Josh Alexander, spoke to EWTN News Nightly about the experience. He attends St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. The school reportedly allows biological males who identify as girls to use the women’s restroom.
In the interview, Alexander said that after he began attending the Catholic school, was was “informed by female students that male students were using the female washrooms.” At one point, the issue came up in a classroom debate.
“I quoted some Scripture, I said that there’s only two genders. And apparently, because there’s transgender students in the class, that was considered bullying,” he said, adding that he “took it to the office, and I said, ‘Ok, this is an issue. There’s female students that are uncomfortable. Something needs to be done.’ And I was ignored. A female student made the same complaint I did, and they ignored her as well. So at that point, I decided to organize a protest outside my school. Two days before the protest, they suspended me indefinitely.”
Alexander was first suspended from school for “bullying” in November, according to Catholic News Agency. When he tried to return to school earlier this month, he was suspended a second time and arrested for trespassing. He is forbidden to attend classes at the school through the remainder of the year.
“One of the allegations being held against me until this day is that I said ‘male breastfeeding is pedophilia,’” Alexander said.
“I do sympathize with the confused transgender students,” Alexander explained to EWTN, “because they’ve been wronged by their parents and by society and by the education system that has pushed this indoctrination on them. But at the same time that doesn’t mean I’m going to condone their wrongful behavior, especially when it’s a violation of my female peers’ privacy.”
“My issue wasn’t with the individual students,” he clarified. “I have an issue with the system that is going to encourage this form of misbehavior.”
Alexander plans to file a complaint in violation of his religious freedom, he said.
“As of right now, I don’t really have much of an education. They’ve offered me some online stuff. But, I was actually the organizer of the student walkouts across Canada during the freedom convoy against the online learning and against the mask mandates and all that. So, I’m certainly not going to accept this form of inferior education,” he said.
In a statement, the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board said: “Bullying behavior that creates an unsafe space for our students is not tolerated … A trans person should not be required to use a separate washroom or change room because others express discomfort or transphobic attitudes, such as, ‘trans women are a threat to other women’” and cited the Ontario Human Rights Code, the same code a separate school district in Canada used to defend a teacher who wears “z-size” prosthetic breasts to school, which Townhall covered.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/02/24/transgender-bathroom-policy-n2619943
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A Christ-filled university
WILMORE, KENTUCKY, is the kind of quaint town (population 6,027) you might drive through and forget. Perhaps if you stop at the intersection of Main Street and Lexington Avenue you may notice a white Presbyterian chapel and a redbrick Baptist church on opposite corners—reminders of a bygone era when America was staunchly Christian. But over the past two weeks this sleepy town has turned into a pilgrimage site for tens of thousands of people who believe God’s presence has descended on the campus of Asbury University, a private Christian school where students have been worshipping nonstop for days. They are calling it a spiritual revival.
To an outsider the scenes inside Asbury may seem perplexing. Students are crying, jumping, praying, shouting and singing. News of an unending worship service on campus went viral online. On Tiktok, a socialmedia app, the hashtag #asburyrevival has been posted nearly 100m times. Joel Podeszwik, an insurance salesman and a lay minister from San Diego, California, travelled to Wilmore to see it with his own eyes. “I wanted to be in a place where God is pouring his spirit,” he says. An Asbury spokesperson estimates that up to 70,000 people from across America and even overseas have come to experience the numinous air inside the university’s chapel.
Generation Zers—those born between 1997 and 2012—are not known for their piety. A third are nonreligious and nearly one in five are agnostic or atheist, the most of any generation. They grew up in less devout homes and start questioning their beliefs at a younger age, according to the Survey Centre on American Life, part of AEI, a thinktank. But it would be premature to conclude they are giving up on faith. The Barna Group, a research firm, reports that over half of Gen Zers aged 1317 say they want to learn more about Jesus. Another survey, by the American Bible Society, a religious outfit, found that over 70% of Gen Zers express interest in the Bible. And the Pew Research Centre found in a poll published in 2020 that four in ten teenagers believe in God with “absolute certainty”.
Kevin Brown, Asbury’s president, thinks younger folk prize authenticity above all else. He says they are not asking, “What do you believe?”, but “Does this work?” Research from a global study of Gen Zers by the Barna Group backs his hunch: respondents were more likely to say they wanted to see Jesus’s teachings promote good than know whether they were true.
Take the revival at Asbury, which began on February 8th. The service that preceded it was “unremarkable”, says Mr Brown. The volunteer preacher who spoke that night confessed he had “totally whiffed” the sermon—a sports term for missing the mark. The music is simply vocals, a piano and acoustic guitars. There is no programme, no one calling the shots—a point Asbury’s spokespersons stress. The revival seems the opposite of organised religion.
In some ways, it is also a rebuttal of religious politics. When Tucker Carlson, a popular Fox News host, requested permission to visit the campus, the university declined. What is happening on campus is purely spiritual, a university spokesperson told Mr Carlson’s crew. “Jesus doesn’t care about politics,” says Alexandra Presta, a senior at Asbury and editor of the university’s newspaper. “He just wants you no matter who you are, and he loves you no matter what political party you identify as.”
Younger Christians, though conservative, seem tired of their parents’ culture wars—polls suggest they rate LGTBQ issues, a hot topic among Republicans, lower than gun violence and racial justice. They have witnessed moral failures of church leaders and the rise of extremists who identify as Christians. Ryan Burge, who studies religious trends, says Gen Zers have grown wary of institutions, and reckons this is why so many are religiously unaffiliated.
After two weeks the university has decided to move services off campus. The revival, Mr Brown believes, will continue elsewhere. (Students at other colleges are reported to be trying to start revival meetings.) Some curmudgeons say this is prematurely ending a movement from God. Ms Presta disagrees: “We can’t stop something we didn’t start.”
https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/a-new-awakening/bnl-economist-20230224-f93fb939a65
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Washington teacher says schools must do more to keep students' info secret from 'Christo-fascist' parents
A Washington teacher complained on Friday that many schools’ "guidelines and laws" haven’t helped them keep students' information secret from "Christo-fascist" parents.
A tweet shows Auburn School District 408 teacher Karen Love responding to another that urged parents to check their school district’s policy regarding keeping info about their child’s secret from them.
"Parents-check your school districts’ policy regarding keeping info about YOUR child secret from you. There are some scary policies out there. Schools should not have a right to keep info about your child from you unless abuse by you is suspected. There I said it and mean it," a tweet written by "The Principle’s Office" reads.
Love responded, "I cannot disagree with this more. So many students are not safe in this nation from their Christo-fascist parents. And our guidelines and laws haven’t caught up with this."
The Twitter thread of Love and the other users was reposted as a screenshot by Ian Prior, a senior advisor at American First Legal. "Teacher in Washington State thinks schools don’t go far enough to keep secrets about their students because they ‘are not safe in this nation from their Christo-fascist parents,’" Prior tweeted.
Love responded to another tweet that claimed "few" educators know deeply about the history of racism and oppression. "It’s absolutely wild to me how few educators have a working knowledge of the history of racism and oppression in this nation," SwaggyG tweeted.
Love replied, "Because many of them are perpetrators of it– 80% of teachers are white women. And at least statistically, over 50% of them vote for upholding white supremacy and patriarchy."
Several others reacted to Prior’s thread, blasting the teacher and filing a public records request to Auburn School District to obtain emails of Love that contain any words regarding transgender, gender and a plethora of other related terms.
"I wonder how far DOES she think the school should go to keep secrets from parents? There’s a public records request for that," senior fellow with Independent Women's Forum Nicole Solas tweeted, showing a screenshot of her email to the Auburn School District requesting public records about Love.
Another Twitter user responded to Prior, "Librarians think exactly this. Full on religious discrimination. And to defend school kids getting graphic child [porn] as school books. #AASL23 will be loaded with such groomers and @ALALibrary will be training more. All taxpayer supported, of course. #parenting #moms #dads"
"Until we enact laws that allow removal of these people from teaching positions, this will continue. The forfeiture of their teaching licenses is appropriate," another tweeted.
The teacher's comments underscore the phenomenon of parents across the country paying closer attention to school boards by challenging progressive curricula and contesting books they deem inappropriate.
The issue of education has become a top concern among voters. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, school board meetings have oftentimes become battlegrounds between parents and school board officials, reigniting the debate on how much control parents have over their children's education.
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