I remember how it was -- JR
To restore educational excellence, end the government’s monopoly on schools
America’s public schools took shape in the early 19th century.
Advocates believed universal education was best achieved through a unitary system of publicly funded, state-operated schools.
They saw these schools performing three critical missions: providing an academically superior education, promoting national solidarity and instilling strong moral values.
How are public schools doing in achieving these original goals?
At times over the past 200 years, some schools have performed admirably.
But in recent decades, despite the infusion of ever-increasing resources, the quality of public education has clearly fallen.
To start, the declining academic quality is a national scandal.
Students’ dismal math and reading scores are the lowest in decades — and the situation becomes even bleaker when scores are compared internationally.
American students have not scored at or above the international average in mathematics in two decades.
Countries like China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea have consistently earned the highest math scores.
Our nation’s prosperity and security depend on continued technological leadership, but America’s mediocre educational performance in international rankings signals decline.
When an international assessment was administered in 2018, China earned the top score; the United States ranked 38th.
America’s reading and science scores remain far below China’s first-place scores.
And private-school students — Catholic-school students, in particular — typically score higher on national assessments than public-school students.
In New York, charter-school students are achieving substantially higher proficiency rates than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
Public schools are also failing in their second mission.
Instead of promoting unity by forging common bonds, they’re doing the exact opposite.
Increasingly, schools are adopting curricula and espousing ideologies, like critical race theory, designed to teach students they are divided by unbridgeable differences.
Shared cultural identity, trust between peers and faith in individual effort crumble when students are taught America is evil, white people are inherently privileged and racist and disparate outcomes are caused by systemic racism.
Perversely, state schools indoctrinate students with ideologies that challenge the very legitimacy of our nation — explicitly attacking and undermining our Founding Fathers, documents and principles.
Public schools are no longer the institutions we can trust to forge an unum out of the pluribus.
By contrast, studies show America’s private and religious schools more effectively instill political tolerance, encourage civic participation, teach civic skills and foster patriotism in students.
Indeed, parochial schools have an enviable record of integrating wave after wave of new immigrants into American society — a legacy they still embody today.
Finally, how are public schools doing in fostering moral values?
Early public-education advocates believed moral instruction is central to education — and they were right.
Education requires not only teaching technical skills; it demands cultivating moral values.
But the idea a government institution can perform this moral function was doomed to fail in a country destined to become as diverse as ours.
To be a moral teacher, the state must decide what values it will teach.
Yet all values come from an underlying belief system — in America it has been Judeo-Christianity — that explains what it means to be “good.”
Inevitably, then, any government school seeking to teach morality will take positions on matters of religious belief.
But it violates the Constitution for the government to promote a particular religious viewpoint or usurp parents’ right to determine their children’s religious formation.
Up until the 1960s, public schools finessed this problem by explicitly embracing America’s Judeo-Christian heritage: Curricula incorporated a general form of Christianity into the classroom; the Bible was read; Christian prayers were said at school.
These moral values aligned with the traditional religious beliefs of Americans, the vast majority self-identified Christians.
But this changed in the 1960s as religious diversity increased and the Supreme Court demanded schools be strictly “neutral” on religious matters.
That spurred aggressive efforts to secularize public schools by purging all vestiges of traditional religion.
This left a moral void, and when Christianity was dispatched from the classroom, a new belief system took its place.
By the time President Barack Obama took office, progressives had substituted an alternative, secular belief system that justified the values they wanted to teach.
Today, public schools indoctrinate students in radical ideologies — like CRT and transgenderism — that are, at bottom, ersatz religions contrary to traditional religious beliefs.
More and more, government-run schools have become cockpits for a vicious, winner-take-all culture war.
The first step toward achieving educational excellence is to eliminate the monopoly government-run schools have over publicly supported primary and secondary education.
Parents have paramount authority over their children’s moral upbringing and should be able to choose any academically qualified school that best suits their children’s needs.
As in many other Western countries, as long as children are receiving the approved secular curriculum, they should not be denied support simply because their parents have chosen to obtain that education through a religiously affiliated school.
Voucher programs that allow for school choice will reinvigorate education and encourage innovation to serve diverse students’ needs and desires.
School choice puts purchasing power into the hands of parents so they can escape failing schools and obtain quality education for their children.
Our children — and America’s future — deserve better
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School Busing of a Different Sort: Nonprofit Takes Students to Off-Campus Bible Studies
Once a week, an estimated 30,000 students across the country are picked up by what’s called “a big, red LifeWise bus” and leave public school grounds for a Bible lesson at a local church or other religious institution.
It might surprise some, but it’s entirely legal in the United States, says LifeWise Academy founder and CEO Joel Penton.
LifeWise was created in 2019, after Penton saw a local program like it in his hometown of Ayersville, Ohio. Students would briefly leave their public school classrooms for Bible lessons at a local church or other religious facility, and then return to school to continue their reading, writing, and arithmetic lessons.
Currently, LifeWise Academy serves 323 schools in 12 states, and about 30,000 K-12 students, Penton said in a recent phone interview.
The nonprofit’s CEO addressed an area of confusion for many parents, who are uncertain when offered the option of midday Bible lessons for their children. Parents often assume that the government has full control over their child’s school day.
“I know what people are feeling,” Penton said. “They’re feeling that the school owns that time—the state owns the time of 8 a.m. [to] 3 p.m., or whatever the school day is, and that’s just not true.”
That understanding of parents’ rights regarding their children’s school time was legally validated by the Supreme Court in a 1952 case, Zorach v. Clauson, he said. The case permitted New York City students to leave their classrooms for religious instruction.
Penton says that ruling allows any parent to let their child receive Bible lessons through his program and not violate the First Amendment’s establishment-of-religion clause.
Another issue Penton says that LifeWise critics raise is a misunderstanding of the separation of church and state. The separation concept is not actually in the Constitution, but it’s often still cited when referencing issues involving religion and public schools.
Ironically, Penton insists that LifeWise is the epitome of church and state separation. “Kids are quite literally separated from the state school,” he explained.
The LifeWise founder has taken some heat from leftists for his Bible program. He says critics are “few and far between … but tend to be loud.”
An NBC News report on Tuesday focused on how the organization occasionally offers “ice cream or popcorn parties” to encourage students to attend its lessons. That, NBC suggested, was a ploy to attract secular students who otherwise might not attend. It was the second of three reports NBC aired on the religious group.
Left-leaning sister network MSNBC ran a follow-up report on Wednesday, with host Alex Wagner claiming that LifeWise is “currently influencing the minds of public-school kids in progressive cities like Columbus [Ohio].”
That 10-minute segment, which included a rebroadcast of part of the previous NBC report about LifeWise, suggested that teaching students about the Bible could be indirectly affecting elections in “blue island cities” in red states.
In a video posted on X (formerly Twitter), Penton said that NBC “admitted that the program is very successful, that it’s growing rapidly.” He added that LifeWise is good for schools, too, noting that post-COVID-19, “chronic absenteeism” remained a big problem nationwide, but when LifeWise participates in the school day, absenteeism goes down.
Penton cites an independent study in October from the Thomas P. Miller & Associates consulting firm, which found that when LifeWise programs are in place, there is a “statistically strong” increase in student attendance. LifeWise programs are said to even have a similar positive impact with respect to disciplinary issues, which decrease at participating schools.
LifeWise almost always can persuade schools to permit its program, Penton said. “Ninety-three percent of the time the school says, ‘Yes, let’s do this.’”
The nonprofit founder says that LifeWise serves students in 12 states, from kindergarten through 12th grade. Some 250 of the programs serve elementary schools, a majority of the total.
There’s no charge for participation in LifeWise, Penton said, for either school systems or the student participants.
“We want to make the Bible available to all of them [students]. And that’s what we’ve been trying to build, a plug-and-play program any community can implement,” Penton said. Forthcoming programs include schools in Washington state and even California, in a Los Angeles County school.
He said he hopes to have LifeWise operating in at least 20 states and 500 schools by this fall.
To start a LifeWise Academy program, would-be participants can go to LifeWise’s website and start an online petition. Once there are more than 50 signatories from an area, LifeWise will aid local community members in the process of scouting a location and getting permission from the local school board.
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‘Inclusive’ Sex Education Puts Kids at Risk
As suicide rates, sexual assaults, mass depression, and anxiety grip America’s youth, the Biden administration, state legislatures, and public school districts have begun usurping science education with “transgender and gender-nonconforming” curriculum.
Students in over a dozen states no longer have access to biologically based sex education; that’s been replaced by liberal laws and policies requiring classrooms to exchange biologically proven facts with pseudo-scientific advocacy of gender fluidity.
Despite the claims of the U.S. Department of Education, no quantitative studies show gender transition or “gender nonconformity” is a healthy or normal part of human development.
These child-targeted policy prescriptions are often sweetened artificially by using comfortable terminology, such as “comprehensive,” “inclusive,” and “gender affirming” to paint those who disagree with the unscientific, immoral content aimed at minors as bigoted and heartless.
If parents respond negatively to the content of these postmodern sex-education revisions, news outlets (which may claim to be unbiased) use those gaslighting terms in their coverage of the outrage.
This effectively gatekeeps any debate about negative consequences by portraying dissidents as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. After all, what kind of monster wouldn’t be inclusive and affirming?
The most recent and flagrant example of this has been seen in Arizona’s Flagstaff Unified School District. Local parents obtained a video of school district staff discussing changes to the sex-ed curriculum that included removing the boy/girl binary.
When parents shared their concerns at the next school board meeting, board President Christine Fredericks responded: “I will never apologize for being inclusive.”
So far, liberals’ strategy of dismissing any commonsense concerns with moral scolding straight out of a 1990s anti-bullying commercial has been effective. Parents who expressed concern about teenage boys pretending to be girls to gain access to girls’ locker rooms were disregarded as backward, uninformed, and unfeeling.
When tragedy struck, in part due to these policies and worldviews—as in the sexual assault by a “gender-nonconforming” boy in a girls’ restroom of Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools—parents were scolded again and charged with being bigoted opportunists.
Similarly, after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, in which a transgender assailant slaughtered three 9-year-old students and three staff members at the private Christian school, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded by suggesting that “transphobia” was the true danger.
An LGBTQ+ activist organization called The Trevor Project has intimated repeatedly that the near 40% suicide rate for transgender individuals isn’t due to mental illness and toxic prescriptions. Instead, it’s the result of “bullying,” which also has been redefined to mean “anyone who doesn’t passionately support the child’s transition.”
The assertion has been echoed consistently without question by federally funded media outlets such as PBS.
This quantitatively unverified accusation is a key rationale from the Left in why updating sex education curriculum is essential for them. After all, the point of sex ed is to answer students’ questions concerning physiological and reproductive development.
These answers in biology-based sex education clearly differentiate men and women, not just in external sexual organs but in development rate, hormone production and balance, and higher susceptibility to certain diseases and conditions.
A postmodern, “inclusive” approach as outlined by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, teachers unions, and massive grants from the Biden administration removes that differentiation altogether.
Separating sex and gender as physicality and mentality, therefore disconnecting behavior from sex by suggesting that your sex comprises your organs whereas your gender is all in your mind, is heinously distant from reality. Naturally produced hormones based on sex govern anatomical systems, behavior, immune response, and reproduction.
The additional foolishness of encouraging minors that changing external appendages somehow certifies a gender change only adds insult to the injury of what was historically a scientifically sound subject.
Although biological sex education warned boys and girls of their higher likelihood of developing cancerous tumors in certain sex-specific organs and advised them to watch for signs at different ages, the new “gender affirming” sex ed does nothing to warn students about the carcinogenic danger of “hormonal treatments” in gender transitions.
The human endocrine system is incredibly fragile; tampering with it can be perilous. Women who seek hormonal treatment for menopause are required to be warned that doing so quadruples their risk of developing cancer. Although the same hormones are injected in transgender treatments, no such carcinogen warning is required or offered in any current “gender affirming” sex-ed curriculum.
The lack of patients’ mental health improvement and increasingly higher rates of detransition and regret aren’t mentioned either.
None of the biology, anatomy, and physiology, or developmental psychology texts from which I’ve taught have ever provided a shred of evidence justifying the omission or twisting of critical information when instructing students.
At that point, you’re no longer a teacher, you’re a sleazy salesman for a pyramid scheme.
The misnamed “sex education” that the Department of Education describes as “safe and supported” is in reality temporal, shallow, and dangerous. As other nations ban transgender experiments on minors, President Joe Biden’s administration has put American children in danger via woke dictate, bastardizing health education into its antithesis.
Sex education in the U.S. is quickly becoming a sick joke, and permanent damage to American children is the punchline.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/05/inclusive-sex-education-is-a-mockery-of-biology/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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