Wisconsin Judge Halts Schools’ Policy Keeping Parents in Dark on Kids’ Gender Identity Issues

A state court in Wisconsin last week issued an order prohibiting a school district from intentionally deceiving parents about what their children are doing at school—especially if a child is struggling with his or her gender identity.

Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington intervened and issued an injunction Sept. 28 against the Madison Metropolitan School District, the second-largest school district in Wisconsin, with 27,000 students attending 52 schools. The injunction will remain in effect while the lawsuit that 14 parents brought against the district is on appeal.

In February, those parents sued the Madison Metropolitan School District with the help of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom and the Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-leaning nonprofit public interest law firm. The Daily Signal reported on the case and subsequent developments in July.

In April 2018, the Madison school district quietly instituted a policy that not only promotes transgender ideology in the schools, but allows teachers to conceal pertinent information that students share.

Unfortunately, the latter part of the policy wasn’t about school-related issues such as a failing grade or a nasty spill in the hallway, but specifically about gender dysphoria–or a student’s desire to “identify with” the opposite sex–even if the child’s parents were unaware or disapproving.

Of course, the child could consent to teachers’ informing his or her parents of that, but if not, the policy instructed teachers to keep the information between them.

The judge was right to issue an injunction because the policy was unusually devious from the start. It was in no way ad hoc, accidental, or innocent: If a child approached a teacher about wanting to quietly transition to the other gender, the teacher was required to fill out a “Gender Support Plan.”

Under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, parents can see all school records about their children, but the law excludes teachers’ personal notes from parental review. Thus, the school district instructed teachers to put any information about gender identity there, so parents would not be able to see the notes, even under federal law.

The district’s policy specifies: “School staff shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardians and other school staff unless legally required to do so.”

That’s a blatant violation of parental rights, and it’s worth unpacking why it’s so egregious.

For starters, the policy itself likely took little time at all to implement. But now the case, Doe v. Madison Metropolitan School District, will linger in litigation, perhaps for years. It’s unfair, immoral, and unconstitutional for parents to lose their rights so easily and then have to spend years in court fighting for something that was already rightly theirs.

As I noted in a previous article reporting on this case: It’s hard to tell what’s worse here, that teachers are encouraged to hide a child’s secret transgender life at school behind the backs of concerned parents, completely subverting parents’ natural and legal right to this information, or that teachers essentially are encouraged to evade federal law to make this happen.

Parents pay substantial property taxes in most school districts for public school funding. That by itself should inform school policies about parental rights, not whatever social justice issue is currently popular and politically correct. That issue, right now, relates to transgenderism.

Most schools are open and transparent about what happens during the school day, and all of us know teachers who are more than happy to either brag on a child’s success or tattle on poor behavior. Yet somehow, this is not the case with this controversial, life-altering issue.

As Luke Berg, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said in an email:

Parents should be able to trust that school staff will be open and honest with them about their kids. That shouldn’t require an injunction, but the district has refused to change its policy directing teachers to deceive parents.

The court’s order sends a clear warning to the Madison [Metropolitan] School District and to other schools with similar policies.

It’s disappointing that the second-largest school district in Wisconsin put this policy in place, defying normal parent-teacher procedures, and creatively finding ways to conceal the truth from parents about their child’s struggles with, or “decisions” about, gender identity.

It’s hardly a small issue, and it’s one that parents should know about immediately, if only so they can help get the child the therapy he or she needs.

The court is right to push the pause button on this policy until the lawsuit is resolved and, hopefully, parents’ rights in Wisconsin are fully restored.

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UC San Diego ends up with 5,000 fewer dorm students than projected, primarily because of coronavirus

UC San Diego has 9,655 students living in campus housing this fall, a figure that’s nearly 5,000 less than the campus has been projecting since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The university also disclosed last week that it expects to lose about $200 million for 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. The school had been saying the losses would range from $350 million to $450 million.

The huge cut in student housing represents a largely unpublicized effort to staunch the spread of the virus. Campus housing executives weren’t available for comment, said Leslie Sepuka, a spokeswoman.

UC San Diego began fall 2019 with 15,500 students living on campus, a figure that was expected to rise to 17,600 this year as new housing came online.

When the pandemic began to hit hard this spring, the university adjusted its estimates to 14,500 students who would be were living in campus housing in the fall.

UC San Diego told the Union-Tribune in mid-August that it was standing by that estimate. But the campus was actually moving to reduce the number of dorm students due to health safety guidance from the state, according to an email Sepuka sent last week to the U-T.

By early September, UC San Diego shifted, saying it would have about 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students in housing this fall. The number reflected further efforts to “de-densify” dorms in hopes of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

The dorm population was 9,655 on Oct. 1, the university says.

UC San Diego also has said its COVID-19 financial losses could total as much as $450 million, with nearly half of the costs affecting the UC San Diego Health system.

Sepuka said last week that the campus expects to have $140 million in unexpected costs in 2020 and 2021, and that the health system would take a $60-million hit in 2020. The total: $200 million.

“The earlier high-level estimates are no longer accurate because they were exactly that: estimates based on the best assumptions at the time,” Sepuka said in email Thursday.

UC San Diego Health originally expected to lose $200 million alone. The estimate fell to $100 million, then to $60 million after the university received some government support.

“We have very good financial people. But this was a difficult situation, which made it hard to make estimates,” said Dr. David Brenner, vice chancellor for health sciences. “This is the first time we’ve ever had an estimate that was this far off.”

The university has fared much better in forecasting COVID-19 infections. The school said in August that it expected 20 to 40 students in campus housing this fall would get infected the virus. So far, the number of positive tests has been in that range.

The university is trying to prevent an outbreak by regularly testing students for COVID-19, and examining the wastewater from school buildings for signs of the virus. UC San Diego has shown that it can use such monitoring to identify and locate people who have contracted COVID-19.

The university also offers a cellphone-based app that notifies people if they’ve come into contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.

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Disadvantaging Black Students with a Demand for ‘Linguistic Justice’

On August 3, the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication approved a position statement on “Black Linguistic Justice.” The statement was crafted as a set of “demands” that “teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm.” The “Four Cs” is the largest and most important professional association for college-level writing teachers and is closely associated with the National Council of Teachers of English, an even larger group whose membership is mainly composed of secondary school English instructors.

The lengthy and repetitive statement is actually entitled “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” In a clumsy adoption announcement, the CCCC urges teachers to view the statement “as presenting a set of actions for us to enact, not just encouraging words.”

To what has the official body of college composition teachers given its imprimatur? In a word: politics. In two words: separatist politics.

While acknowledging that progressive “CCCC/NCTE policies in relation to multilingualism have been vital to classrooms and communities,” the statement avers that not nearly enough has been done on the political front. Educators “must be activists” (italics in the original).

In language that invokes old Dixie rather than the 2020 schoolroom, the CCCC statement portrays American schools as places where black children meet nothing but disrespect in their English classes. Language instruction as it is now practiced is said to “seek to annihilate Black Language + Black Life.” Thus, educators are called to engage in a “political process that must inherently challenge institutions like schools whose very foundations are built on anti-Black racism.”

The statement was crafted by six self-described Black Language scholars, all of whom are on the faculty of large universities. Up front, they declare their demands to be a product of the moment, citing the pandemic’s effects on black people, #BlackLivesMatter protests, calls to defund the police, and institutions with “anti-Black skeletons in their own closets.”

The result is thus: It is now the official view of the CCCC that teaching black students standard English is racist and therefore “destructive and injurious.”

An initial section lists five demands, each one amplified in separate sections that are redundant and whose rhetorical emphases are primarily political and secondarily psychological. Few strictly pedagogical specifics are enumerated, and student learning goals remain implied and oblique rather than concretely articulated.

Nothing concrete is said about student reading and writing; instead, the focus is on self-esteem and political consciousness: “Teachers [must] develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!” It is taken as axiomatic that students’ sense of self-worth will increase if they are taught in Black Language.

The term “Black Language” is worth considering. Black English and African American Vernacular English are terms frequently used by linguists. These terms imply that black American speech patterns and language systems are a variety or dialect of English. As such, Black English joins dozens upon dozens of other varieties, dialects, and sub-dialects of the language, each marked out by factors such as geography, class, race, and educational levels.

Linguists have long pointed out that defining a dialect as nonstandard does not mean that it is substandard. This has been conventional wisdom within the profession for well over half a century. Such non-judgmentalism already permeates America’s collegiate language departments and its university schools of education, which are dominated by progressive faculty, and where the nation’s schoolteachers have been trained.

Despite its calls for separatism, the CCCC statement is itself written in English—English of a certain type, to be sure. The statement is marked much more by the unfortunate stylistic turns associated with contemporary academic publication than it is by phrases intended to sound distinctly Black American. A mere handful of the latter are scattered into the prose, including the drafters’ self-description: “This list of demands was generously created by the 2020 CCCC Special Committee on Composing a CCCC Statement of Anti-Black Racism and Linguistic Justice, Or, Why We Cain’t Breathe.”

Proponents of Black English have made similar proposals in the recent past. The controversial 1990s Ebonics movement (a purpose-built blend of ebony and phonics) arose from the same basic assumptions as the CCCC statement, which is bound to produce the same set of counterarguments heard by Ebonics proponents. The chief criticism leaps to mind: Students who do not learn Standard English will be at a disadvantage once they leave their classrooms.

Employers, educational institutions, civic bodies, and other groups will all expect to hear and read Standard English. Pretending that facility in nonstandard English is sufficient for success cheats students.

The activists’ dream undoubtedly sounds like a nightmare to many parents, who might also sense a certain condescension in the implication that Standard English is somehow beyond the reach of their children—but not beyond the reach of millions of other children who speak their own varieties of English. Didn’t the authors of this statement themselves manage to get on top of standard idioms? Ostensibly in the name of boosting student self-esteem, sound educational goals are to be discarded for political purposes.

The CCCC authors simply deny that abandoning instruction in Standard English will create problems for students. They demand that

teachers STOP telling Black students that they have to ‘learn standard English to be successful because that’s just the way it is in the real world.’ No, that’s not just the way it is; that’s anti-Black linguistic racism.

They go further: Teachers who understand linguistic variety and who endorse code-switching—views heretofore deemed progressive—are also in the wrong. Thus, they demand that “researchers, educators, and policymakers stop using problematic, race-neutral umbrella terms like multilingualism, world Englishes, translingualism, linguistic diversity, or any other race-flattened vocabulary when discussing Black Language and thereby Black Lives.”

The question remains as to what effects this statement will have on college English instruction. Its adoption is of a piece with the CCCC’s previous politics. In a spring and summer in which university administrations rushed to issue public statements of all-in support for Black Lives Matter initiatives, it seems a foregone conclusion that the CCCC would likewise adopt the committee’s statement, no matter what the opinions and practices of its membership at large might actually be.

It also seems inevitable that at least some slippage in instruction and erosion of standards will occur.

It is now the official view of the CCCC that teaching black students standard English is racist and therefore “destructive and injurious.”
A certain percentage of instructors will loosen Standard English requirements, and others will introduce lessons on Black English into their courses. Eggshell-walking will increase. Nonetheless, one also supposes that a substantial percentage will remain on their current instructional track, which is essentially progressive by ordinary, non-woke standards. That is, they will continue to recognize the viability of Black English in black students’ lives but retain their belief that all students benefit from learning Standard English.

In short, they may pay lip service to the statement in department meetings but ignore it in their courses.

Writing teachers who do not wish to spend their time openly fighting back will keep their heads down in public. African American linguist and social commentator John McWhorter of Columbia University joins the growing number of voices—many liberals included—who have noted the career-maiming power held by campus progressives. There is, he states, a “very rational culture of fear among those [faculty] who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.”

The document will strike many administrators as a fringe embarrassment that they hope will never raise its head at their college, whose paying students and parents expect more traditional instruction.

Professors who have grown tired of imposed progressive platforms, activist scholarship, and woke grandstanding may find like minds at the National Association of Scholars, which consistently advocates for rigorous standards and proceeds from a basis of traditional liberalism. Heterodox Academy remains eager to air opinions that run counter to campus orthodoxy.

One can appreciate that dialects and vernacular usage have long been wrongly associated with a lack of intelligence or taken as signs of coming from an inferior culture. Black English speakers have suffered a particular burden in this regard. But they are hardly alone. How many Southerners have been tagged as “slow” hillbillies on the basis of their accents? How many farm boys and farm girls have been told that they are uncouth hicks because of their “bad grammar?”

Multiple wrongs do not make a right, of course, so to whatever extent African American children are disparaged in the classroom, one can agree that gratuitous and misinformed shaming should cease.

But the determination that whatever students bring to the classroom is sufficient unto itself—that they are already language “mavens,” as the CCCC statement has it—reveals a shallow and self-defeating conception of education.

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What Affirmative Action Should Look Like

The New York Times, mingling its editorial and news pages as is now usual, has recently published charts depicting the course of affirmative action at several dozen of the nation’s leading colleges. It depicts trends in minority enrollment without any qualitative assessment of such matters as dropouts, remedial programs, or school discipline. It shows essentially flat minority enrollment figures and appears part of a concerted effort, supported by major philanthropic foundations, to influence the Supreme Court’s impending reconsideration of Fisher v. University of Texas.

It is now nearly 50 years since Joseph Califano—U.S. secretary of health, education, and welfare under President Carter—in one of the more fatuous statements accompanying the civil rights movement, observed that since most Harvard Ph.D’s do well in life, one of the solutions to the problems of American blacks was to see that more of them received Harvard Ph.Ds

This approach, broadly speaking, is the approach of the Times articles. It presents difficulties.

Blacks are no longer the only identifiable minority, or even the largest minority. In California, among other places, their political influence and numbers have been eclipsed by those of Hispanics and Asians. Not surprisingly, affirmative action has met an early doom there, the prospect of a war of all against all not being inviting.

Its effect on higher education has been profoundly disruptive. Colleges have been burdened with larger admissions offices, remedial programs, and ethnic studies programs at the cost of instruction in core subjects. The introduction of an indigestible lump of under-prepared and hence unhappy students has even endangered academic freedom.

Unfashionable disadvantaged groups have been overlooked. Appalachian high schools, Catholic schools in Toledo, and Christian schools in the South have not been overrun by Ivy League admissions officers.

Interest-group liberalism does not provide an impulse to academic excellence. As observed by Learned Hand, “the herd is regaining its ancient and evil primacy; civilization is being reversed, for it has consisted of exactly the opposite process of individualization.”

Overlooked also are the admonitions of George Kennan that schools exist to serve intellectual and not social purposes, that of Edward Levi that they cannot become microcosms of society, and that of Bertrand Russell that society as a whole benefits from academic elitism.

The present policy promotes a focus on everything but the knowledge possessed by high school graduates. The subordination of achievement tests as admissions criteria, not duplicated in England and France, has absolved colleges from taking any interest in the curricula of high schools or the education and qualifications of teachers in them.

The beneficiaries of the policy, to the extent that there are any, are the children of a largely bureaucratic black middle class whose offspring will do quite well without artificial aid promoting an entitlement culture not encouraging intense academic effort.

What would an affirmative action program renouncing ethnic categories, and embracing principles of an old-fashioned universalistic liberalism, look like?

It, like the National Merit Scholarship program and the New York State Regents’ Scholarships, would reward students and their parents for demonstrated achievement in high school.

It would provide paths to residential higher education for those performing well in post-high-school distance learning programs such as the MOOG programs offered by consortia of American universities, the courses offered by University of Maryland-University College once limited to our military abroad, those offered by the Open University in England, the creation of which Prime Minister Harold Wilson once rightly regarded as his proudest achievement, and those offered by UNISA in South Africa, once the world’s largest correspondence school university and the alma mater of many of the Robben Island prisoners who made up Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet.

It should reserve substantial parts of upper classes for students doing well at community colleges and in the military.

It should provide facilities for mature female undergraduates, as is done at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and facilities for child care, in recognition of the fact that such students are apt to be highly motivated.

It should offer early career or mid-career enrollment to persons without a college background who have proven themselves in business, government, ot the military, on the pattern of the Nieman Fellowships for journalists at Harvard and the Wolfson Course and Pew and Press Fellowships at Cambridge.

Such opportunities, if publicized well, should produce minority enrollments equal to those elicited by the present corrupt system, with lower dropout rates and no costs for remediation. They reward the deserving rather than the undeserving and the mature rather than the immature. They appropriately aspire not to a perfectly equal society, but to an open one.

Such programs will not cure the problems of a black underclass in the gang and drug culture of our inner cities. What they need are works programs like the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, uncontroversial when it was ended by wartime labor demands, and directed at its inception by General George Marshall, who made his reputation there. Also needed is drastic revision of the drug war, and a larger and more adequately incentivized Army, so as to avoid the repeated redeployments into war zones that have produced a massive suicide rate among recent veterans. None of these measures are within the means of higher education institutions, however committed. They should stick to their proper business.

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Australia: Closures undermined education

New CIS research confirms the breadth of educational damage of school closures — especially troubling for Victorian students finally returning to class next week.

The analysis paper Parents’ perspectives on home-based learning in the covid-19 pandemic revealed that around 1.25 million students (over 40% ) across NSW, Victoria, and Queensland may have fallen behind while learning at home. It’s estimated Victoria’s disadvantaged students may have gone backward up to six weeks in their progress over the extended period of closures.

The new research makes clear that the quality of schools’ support to children and parents is decisive in how students fared with their learning — and that the quality of this support was mixed.

The secrets to success with home-based learning are sophisticatedly simple: students need regular interaction online with teachers, and parents need regular contact with schools.

Yet, a concerning number of students — as high as 30% in Queensland — didn’t have regular contact online with their teachers. Instead, they were relegated to completing worksheets and working independently. It comes as no surprise that these students were much more likely to have fallen behind.

Parents who were regularly contacted by teachers felt more informed and confident helping supervise learning. However, while many parents were contacted daily or most days, some weren’t contacted at all. Over 50% of parents who weren’t regularly contacted by schools say their child fell behind.

The better equipped parents are, the more effective support they can provide for their child’s learning — a fact that’s as true during the pandemic as it is in more normal times.

It’s clear that the school closures experience will leave lasting impressions to schooling; for students, teachers, and parents.

In households where the home-based learning wheels were well-oiled, parents gained more positive opinions about teachers’ work and schools’ education standards, compared to pre-covid. That’s evidence that parents appreciate the lengths many teachers and schools went to under such difficult circumstances.

It also shows there’s goodwill to be tapped in order to forge more constructive relationships going forward. Capitalising upon this would better support the work of schools, see parents as informed participants in schooling, and ultimately be more conducive for students’ learning.

The pandemic has been an unwelcome disruption to students, teachers, and parents.

Not only is there students’ learning loss for schools to now contend with, but also an imperative that lessons are learnt so that more effective schooling may yet be a silver lining.

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