Maine K-12 indoctrination sparks populist push back

Lawrence Lockman

Newly-launched "Forgotten Parents Initiative" aims to hold superintendents, school boards accountable

If there were ever any doubt that many teachers in Maine’s K-12 public schools are using their classrooms to indoctrinate students in Leftist politics and ideology, those doubts were blown away during a public hearing at the Statehouse a few weeks ago.

I had long suspected that Leftist indoctrination was fairly common, but the evidence was for the most part sketchy and anecdotal. The accounts of classroom bias were often second- or third-hand reports accusing self-styled “progressive” teachers of taking cheap shots at President Trump or GOP members of Congress.

A news report three years ago seemed to confirm my worst suspicions, and started me down the path to sponsoring legislation earlier this year to impose a Code of Ethics on K-12 teachers.

In December of 2015, an assistant principal at Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport posted a racist, anti-Christian comment on his Facebook page.

Get a load of this: “The only terrorists we need to fear are domestic white ‘Christian’ men with easy access to guns. Vote Bernie. That is all. Enjoy your day.”

At the time, I wondered if that sort of Leftist hate speech ever spilled over from the faculty lounge into the classroom. After all, if this guy posted that kind of crap in a public forum on Facebook, what’s going on behind closed doors in the classroom?

He deleted his hateful post after the school was deluged with phone calls and emails. Administrators then circled the wagons around the perpetrator, so he was able to hang onto his job, despite his trifecta of racist, sexist, Christo-phobic hate mongering. Not to mention his overt hostility to the 2nd Amendment.

Fast forward to last month in the Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs.

A public hearing was held on my bill, LD 589, “Resolve, Directing the State Board of Education to Adopt Rules Prohibiting Teachers in Public Schools from Engaging in Political, Ideological or Religious Advocacy in the Classroom.”

Legislators got an earful from parents who are fed up with their kids being bullied and browbeaten by teachers with an ideological ax to grind. Some of the most egregious abuses occurred last year during the national student walkout that was pushed and promoted by Leftist gun-control advocates.

As previously reported by FrontPage, the committee heard about numerous instances of teachers using their classrooms as taxpayer-funded bully pulpits to spew Leftist propaganda. That unrebutted testimony is now part of the permanent public record.

So I’m not the least bit discouraged by the fact that the bill was killed in committee. Disappointed, yes, in my GOP colleagues on the Education committee, but not discouraged.

And here’s why.

The proposed legislation sparked an outpouring of public support that was so intense even Maine’s lying, dying Fake News industry couldn’t ignore it. The debate in committee on my Code of Ethics bill garnered statewide TV, radio, and newspaper coverage, and generated tons of traffic on social media. It seemed at times like every other parent or grandparent who commented had a horror story to share about partisan bias in the classroom.

We intend to harness that energy and frustration.

My populist/conservative nonprofit Maine First Project has launched the Forgotten Parents Initiative. Our aim is to engage parents at the local level and help them push back against classroom indoctrination. And we’ll be back with another piece of legislation at the earliest opportunity.

FrontPage readers understand that American public schools have produced two generations of graduates steeped in the toxic brew of identity politics. Conservatives are late to the game, or rather, late to the battlefield. But we cannot afford to let another generation of young Americans be marinated in Leftist politics, ideology, pseudo-science, Christo-phobia, and racial scapegoating.

So I would encourage state legislators across the country to join the fray. Work with the David Horowitz Freedom Center on this existentially important project. Then watch what happens when voters discover that a member of the legislative branch of government “gets it.”

We have not yet begun to fight.

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No Safe Spaces for Conservative College Students

A majority of these young conservatives find their political views are not welcome on campus.

OneClass conducted a recent survey of more than 1,500 students from 207 schools, finding that 55% of students who identified as Republican said their political beliefs were not welcome on campus, whereas only 16% of Democrat students felt their political views were unwelcome. Furthermore, the polling showed that 37.5% of Republicans did not feel safe expressing their political views, which was “three times more” than Democrat students.

In writing about the polls, Jerry Zheng noted, “The fear of being cast with damning labels and feeling ostracized is genuine for conservatives on campus. It’s also why 55.1% of Republicans are closet conservatives who don’t tend to share their political orientation with their friends. For Democrats, being part of a college campus that mostly shares their views could be what contributes to feeling accepted in inner and wider circles.”

And if recent history is any indication, conservative students do have reason to be wary, after a leftist attacked a conservative on the campus of UC Berkeley, just to note one example. Thankfully, physical violence is not the norm on America’s college and university campus. However, the survey confirms that students are increasingly subjected to a blatant anti-conservative bias from both fellow students and, more significantly, from school faculty and administration — which, by the way, tilt 10-1 leftist. OneClass’s survey seems to further support the findings of Harvard’s 2017 poll of Americans age 18 to 29, which revealed that only 25% felt safe sharing their Republican views on campus.

Far from celebrating actual diversity — the diversity of thought — the American college-campus culture is fast becoming a homogeneous blend of a postmodern, neo-Marxist ethics in which only leftist dogma is allowed to be freely confessed. Any counter perspective is seen as threatening and must be silenced.

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Something's Wrong When the Diploma Is Worth More Than the Education
    
The college admissions scandal should be the populist issue of our time.

Most of the talk in our politics about how “the system is rigged” is incredibly abstract and symbolic. But this is infuriatingly concrete.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed a massive effort by wealthy parents and a shady “admissions consultant” to bribe and cheat their way into getting kids into a slew of elite schools.

Prosecutors say William Singer, the ringleader of the operation, sold two forms of services. For tens of thousands of dollars, parents could pay for their kids to have a proctor correct their incorrect answers as they took the SAT. Or, if that wouldn’t do the trick, parents could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe coaches at elite schools to designate applicants as desired athletes, thus circumventing the minimum requirements for grades and test scores.

In one case, a California family allegedly paid $1.2 million to Singer, who in turn allegedly paid Rudy Meredith, the women’s soccer coach at Yale, $400,000 to claim that the family’s daughter was a coveted recruit even though she didn’t play at all.

This scandal is a staggering indictment of higher education, and American education policy generally. Virtually every constituency in American life has good reason to be rankled. Defenders of affirmative action for various minority groups are rightly livid about this effort, by mostly rich white people who already have every advantage imaginable, to game the system. Opponents of affirmative action who argue that merit alone should determine admissions have every reason to be outraged as well.

For both groups, and for everyone between the two extremes, the pressure to get kids into the best college possible — and then figure out how to pay for it — is a source of incredible anxiety.

But the scandal goes beyond just these issues. It is also a searing indictment of the value of an elite college education in the first place (and the ridiculous emphasis schools place on collegiate sports). None of these parents seemed remotely concerned about whether their kids could hack it once they got into their dream schools — and rightly so.

George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan, in his book “The Case Against Education,” makes a compelling case that most of the value in diplomas from elite colleges isn’t in the education they allegedly represent but in the cultural or social “signaling” they convey.

Imagine you’re deposited on a desert island, forced to fend for yourself. Would you rather have the knowledge that comes with taking a survival training course, or just the piece of paper that says you took the course? Obviously, you’d rather know how to identify poisonous plants and sources of water than have a diploma that says you know how to do things you can’t do. Now, ask yourself: Would you rather have the Yale education without the diploma, or the diploma without the education?

From an economic perspective, the piece of paper is vastly more valuable than the education, particularly in the humanities (and Caplan runs through the numbers to demonstrate this). The paper opens doors and gets you callbacks from employers and entree into elite social circles where who you know matters more than what you know. The education might make you a better person, but the parchment is the ticket to opportunity. It’s no guarantee of success, but it’s a profound hedge against failure.

Parents know this, and parents without special advantages — wealth, fame, connections — resent it.

As a matter of public policy, the way we tell everyone they should go to college, even if it means incurring crushing debt, is a scandal. College isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t necessary for many careers or vocations — and shouldn’t be necessary for many others.

If there’s a maxim that should serve as a golden rule for policymakers, it’s this: Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex we make a system, the more it rewards people with the resources — social, cognitive, political or financial — to navigate them. A system that rewards subjective priorities — in the name of diversity, athletics, social justice, donations, preferences for legacy students, whatever — creates opportunities for bureaucrats, parents and students to game the system.

You’re never going to create a system where some parents won’t do anything and everything to help their kids. All you can do is create a system that makes it more difficult to cheat or exploit loopholes. That requires clear, simple rules applicable to everyone.

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