School Tries Concealing Drag Makeup Day
    
“You did what?!” Parents across Santa Ana couldn’t believe it. In one house after another, the answer to “How was school today?” was nothing like they expected. Moms and dads listened in disbelief as their middle schoolers talked about going to an “LGBT Fair” that no one bothered to ask their permission for. There were even people in drag, their 11-year-olds said, giving make-up lessons — right there in school.

Townhall’s Kira Davis listened as one mom fumed about not knowing about the fair until after it happened. There wasn’t even an opportunity to opt-out, she complained at last Tuesday’s school board meeting. Unfortunately, that was just one of the infuriating examples the largely-Hispanic community used to explain how fed-up they were with the state’s new sex ed law. But the problem is a lot bigger than the law, Davis explained. It’s how liberals are exploiting the Spanish-speaking communities to implement it.

In one of the more fiery exchanges of the night, a mom seethed that so many liberals were trying to marginalize California’s multi-ethnic communities. “How can a state that claims to be so much for the rights of immigrants and minorities then ignore our concerns on purpose? They are hypocrites!” Although California’s law does order schools to offer the curriculum outline in both languages, Santa Ana hasn’t made the Spanish materials available to parents. Hardly an accident, Kira argues, since most of the communities like this one are “whole-heartedly opposed to LGBT-based sex-ed.”

One thing’s for sure: The more radical the social policy, the greater the opportunity for conservatives. Santa Ana’s meeting room was bursting with the latest evidence that Democrats have a huge problem on their hands, especially when it comes to abortion and sex ed. What’s even more insulting, these parents pointed out, is how liberals are purposefully taking advantage of them — deceptively leaving families in the dark because they know “this particular community would absolutely not approve of the more graphic elements.” Not to mention, Kira goes on, “the unmonitored discussions” on gender and sexuality.

Like a lot of other California districts, these parents have reached their boiling point. Tuesday’s meeting was so jam-packed that even the overflow rooms could barely hold the families. Holding signs that read, “No SeXXEd!” moms and dads fended off the ACLU attorneys who’d been farmed out across the state to handle complaints. Later, parents were even more furious to find out that four of the five people who testified in favor of the curriculum didn’t even live in the district!

In between emotional testimonies, Kira was appalled at how condescending board members were, firing back hostile — and at times, demeaning — answers. “As an outside observer, I was terribly vexed by how dismissive and deceptive school authorities were to this particular group of parents. It was clear they did not believe immigrant Hispanic parents were engaged or informed enough to be welcomed into the process.”

“All these people were asking for was a say, a chance to be involved, to be heard and to be active participants in the education of their children. They were asking for respect and instead received nothing but contempt and disrespect from the very people they trust to care for the development of their students.” But, she warns, “If you think this is just another case of ‘whacky’ California paying the price for their ‘whacky’ voting habits, think again. This is coming to a state and a school district near you.”

Are you prepared for that day? Make sure you’ve read FRC’s “A Parent’s Guide to the Transgender Movement in Education” — and share it with your friends.

SOURCE 






College Admissions Bribery Scandal Shows How Higher Ed Culture Has Descended Into Signaling

How much is an elite education worth to you? How about $500,000—and a jail sentence?

That’s how much wealthy actresses, business leaders, and financiers have pawned off to bribe their children off to colleges like Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of California.

According to The New York Times, actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli have already been indicted for bribery of athletic recruiters and college counselors, with further arrests coming.

The bribery scheme to get privileged children into elite universities is causing parents and teachers across the country to fume with righteous indignation. But the revelations of corruption in the multibillion-dollar college admissions industry is perhaps more indicative of how Americans’ views of college—especially among the elite—are shifting into dangerous territory.

More Americans no longer value college education for its ability to train their children with the skills needed to thrive in adult life. Instead, they obsess over college’s signaling value—the value of a school’s name and prestige.

One can see this trend amid the booming college consulting industry, where consultants seek to do everything legally possible to get their client’s child into the best-name colleges.

The number of professional college consultants among the nation’s elite has jumped from 2,000 to 5,000 in recent years. Nowadays, 26 percent of the students who got into the 70th percentile or higher on the SAT had some form of private college consulting help.

Economist Bryan Caplan puts this inversion of the goals of higher education more bluntly. Imagine if you could get a degree from Georgetown University without attending any classes. Now imagine you could take every class at Georgetown without getting a degree. Which option would you choose? Most likely, the one that signals value—the former.

The irony is that the signaling value of elite colleges is quite misplaced. According to a paper by mathematician Stacy Dale and economist Alan Krueger, if your child is smart enough to get into an elite college, but chose not to go, he or she will still end up making approximately the same as a similarly qualified applicant who did go to an elite college.

In fact, there is no difference in the earnings of similar-intelligence individuals who go or do not go to Ivy League schools. As usual, it’s the work ethic and intelligence of the student, not the name of the school, that determines long-term adult success.

But elite colleges would rather the parents not know this fact. This is because elite colleges stand to benefit from the misplaced worship of elite parents who prize name-brand schools. They can upcharge their tuition (now above $70,000 a year for Ivy League schools) without worrying about a drop in applications, because an elite education is worth a pretty penny to the status-conscious parents of the new elite. 

With wealthy parents reliably filling the coffers, elite colleges can give less focus to ensuring a quality learning experience for their students. They focus instead on burnishing the surface-level characteristics that keep their names atop the Forbes and U.S. News lists—characteristics like selectivity and diversity. Hiring the best professors becomes secondary to keeping the admission rate below 10 percent and keeping up with the diversity-obsessed zeitgeist.

There is one way parents and students can begin to reverse this national mania for the signaling value of colleges: They can walk away.

What if, instead of spending millions on bribing athletic coaches to fake-recruit their sons and daughters to Stanford’s sailing team, parents devoted their resources to cultivating a love of learning in their children and to providing life lessons in work and moral uprightness? Maybe their children would have the intelligence and ambition, then, to get into Stanford.

Or maybe they wouldn’t get into Stanford. But in the end, that matters much, much less than you think.

SOURCE 





Safe and Orderly Schools: Updated Guidance on School Discipline

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In December 2018, the Trump administration rescinded the Department of Education’s 2014 “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL), thus returning to local school districts and boards their traditional authority to set discipline policy. Although it was frequently described as “nonbinding guidance,” the DCL was anything but. Instead, the letter advised school districts that they could be found in violation of the Civil Rights Act if students of different groups were disciplined at different rates—even if their rules governing suspensions and expulsions were written and administered fairly. Based on that notion, the Department of Education opened investigations that compelled hundreds of school districts serving millions of students to change their school discipline policies.

The basis for this sweeping federal policy intervention was a set of claims: First, that racial disparities in school discipline—in particular, suspensions and expulsions—were not a function of differences in student behavior. Instead, these disparities were largely driven by adult bias, i.e., by discrimination. Second, that suspensions and expulsions, so-called exclusionary discipline, substantially harm students and fuel a school-to-prison pipeline. And third, that exclusionary discipline can safely be replaced by “restorative” or “positive” methods.

While the DCL is no more, the various claims that Obama administration officials made about school discipline and racial discrimination, including the suspicion cast on public school teachers, are still widely circulated and believed. This is unfortunate, because almost all these claims are based on weak or flawed empirical evidence. As school leaders revisit the rules that they maintain to ensure orderly classrooms and safe learning environments, it is essential that they understand why the federal government’s involvement with local school disciplinary policies was ill-advised—and be guided by better and more rigorous research published after the DCL.

KEY FINDINGS

The most rigorous social science suggests that adult bias plays, at best, a minimal role in disciplinary “disproportionality.” Differences in discipline are driven largely by differences in student behavior, and these differences are driven largely by social and economic factors.

Recent, robust research has substantially revised downward reasonable estimates of the negative effects that school suspensions have on students.

There is little basis for claims that “restorative” or “positive” approaches to student misbehavior work, and there is a growing cause for concern that the recent shift away from traditional discipline is doing more harm than good.

SOURCE