Tuesday, November 30, 2021



‘Moms for Liberty’ Stirs Action in Response to Controversial School Curricula

Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit education advocacy group still in its infancy, encourages parental engagement in a growing number of school board meetings across the country to demand a voice in their children’s education and push back on curricula and policies that they oppose.

Two Florida moms, Tina Descovich of Bevard County and Tiffany Justice of Indian River County, started Moms for Liberty in January 2021. Just 11 months later, the movement currently has 160 chapters and 70,000 members in 33 states.

“Parents have been involved in the Parent Teacher Association [PTA], supporting their classrooms and building playgrounds. PTA serves a great role. But it doesn’t address policy, and parents should have a role in that,” Descovich told The Epoch Times. “Parents have not been engaged at the policy-making level.”

She believes that parents have become more engaged because they got a glimpse inside the classroom when COVID-19 mitigation efforts closed schools, moved classes online, and kept students at home.

“Parents saw sub-par curriculum and indoctrination,” Descovich said.

How It Started
There was no specific event that prompted the creation of Moms for Liberty. It was more of a response to an uneasy climate. Descovich and Justice were school board members with terms ending in 2020, and they were members of the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, where they met with other school board members from districts around the state with similar stories. Parents with concerns about masking or schools being closed weren’t being heard.

“Some were being mocked by the boards,” Descovich said.

Through the coalition, she heard about the parent of a deaf child explaining that masks prevent her child from lip-reading, who got no satisfaction and left a school board meeting crying.

“We’ve seen other groups organize, like Moms Deserve Action. They would come into board meetings with matching shirts and a message, and I’d watch other school board members just cave on an issue.”

When parents show up in numbers and have a consistent message, boards are more likely to represent them.

“The issue is the balance of power in education,” Descovich said.

She noted that education is controlled by three entities: the teachers’ union; school board members, many of whom are elected through the teachers’ union; and curriculum providers, including textbook and digital curriculum writers.

“Parents have allowed this to happen,” Descovich said. “We sat on school boards and watched as no parents came in to go over new textbooks. Nobody was paying attention. Families and community members need to be involved.”

It’s easy to think that everything is fine if you live in a nice school district and your child is getting A’s, she said.

“We’ve put a lot of trust in the school system and haven’t realized who was making all the decisions,” Descovich said. “The teachers’ unions have a full seat at the negotiations table with the board. And it’s more than salary negotiations. It’s what time school starts, days off, and early release days to give teachers more planning time. No one is representing kids and families.”

Chapters Across America

Originally conceived as a Florida-only organization, within the first month, people from several states saw posts on social media about Moms for Liberty and asked if they could start a chapter. It has continued to grow in the same fashion since then.

Moms for Liberty doesn’t drive issues for chapters. They teach local chapters how to read school board agendas and budgets and ask the chapters to advocate for the issues that the chapters themselves care about.

But Descovich said they’ve noticed some consistencies across the country: The same issues keep coming up. At first, parents were interested in getting schools open, and they wanted to weigh in on forced masking, COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccines being offered on school campuses. There have been many examples of critical race theory and other controversial curricula as well.

Moms for Liberty has heard about a Florida school that hired a third-party contractor to teach children about race. They held an assembly and divided the students in the room by race.

There was a South Carolina school that asked white students to examine their white privilege and male privilege and that taught that anyone who is white is an oppressor.

There was an Ohio school that gave high school students a writing prompt book that included instructions to “write a sex story you would never share with your mom, then rewrite it as you would tell your mom.” Another prompt instructed the students to write about their favorite part of the male body.

There was a Florida school that allowed children to declare that they were transgendered in school and be treated as a different gender, but they wouldn’t inform parents of the student’s request, potentially allowing the student to live a double life at home and school.

There was a Tennessee school that had emotionally wrenching and graphic books for 4th graders describing the miscarriage of a baby as well as a book for 2nd graders that depicted the suffering of migrant children while placing blame on white children, as well as other books that parents said weren’t age-appropriate.

As of late, some school boards around the United States have intimidated and curtailed the speech of parents who wished to make public statements at board meetings, Descovich said.

“The other side says we don’t want sex and race mentioned in schools—that we want to whitewash history. But that’s not true,” Descovich said. “We want to teach accurate, true history that is age-appropriate and isn’t racist. In other words, it doesn’t divide children at such a young age by race and doesn’t place blame on children of today for actions of the past.”

Moms for Liberty aims to have more than 3,000 chapters, one in each U.S. county, and a Moms for Liberty member at every school board meeting in the country in the near future, covering 13,000 school districts.

“You are not alone in your concerns for your child’s education, and it’s important that you get involved and speak up for your child,” Descovich said. “Because if you don’t, someone else will.”

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Arizona State University students campaign to kick out Kyle Rittenhouse after acquittal

A group of university students have rallied to kick out Kyle Rittenhouse despite the teen being acquitted of murder charges.

The New York Post reports four groups led by Students for Socialism are behind a rally planned for Wednesday to boot Rittenhouse, 18, who revealed that he was an online student at the Tempe school and would like to live a quiet life on campus.

“KILLER OFF CAMPUS,” reads the flyer, calling for the university to “protect students from a violent, bloodthirsty murderer.”

A list of four demands includes getting the 18-year-old cleared killer withdrawn from ASU, as well as for the school to “release a statement against white supremacy and racist murderer Kyle Rittenhouse.

The groups also want police funding to instead go to a multicultural centre and to get a CAARE “healing” centre.

The protest is also backed by Students for Justice in Palestine, the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition and the Mexican-American student group MEChA de ASU.

The groups concede that Rittenhouse — who has said he supports Black Lives Matter — was cleared of all charges over the triple shooting during riots last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The jury agreed that he had been defending himself after getting attacked.

But the groups dismiss that as proof of a “flawed ‘justice’ system” — insisting, “Kyle Rittenhouse is still guilty to his victims and the families of those victims.”

A spokesperson for ASU’s Students for Socialism told Fox News that they do not feel safe with a “mass shooter” being “so carelessly allowed” at the school, even if he appears to be just online.

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Australia: Sydney University academics’ fury over dumped departments

This is just about a new boss wanting to make his mark. The only possible reason for the rejig is to increase cross-disciplinary contact and co-operation. But that is a snark. It already happens when the parties concerned want it. I studied and taught in a "School" that comprised people from psychology, sociology and anthropology -- the School of Behavioral Sciences at Macquarie university. And I saw no instance of research co-operation across those disciplines.

Arts and social sciences academics at Sydney University are furious about a plan to refashion the faculty’s departments as disciplines, with many saying they have never seen such anger in decades at the institution.

Sixty senior faculty members, including more than 20 chairs of departments – including history, philosophy and English – and almost 30 professors within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, or FASS, have written to the university’s administration to express their alarm.

It is the first major skirmish between university management and academics under the rule of new vice-chancellor, Mark Scott.

Chair of Archaeology Annie Clarke said it would be more than a name change.

Departments were as old as the university itself, and were an integral part of its intangible heritage. She warned the proposed “disciplines” were nebulous and risked damaging the university’s reputation. She has been at Sydney since 2003 and said “I’ve never seen people so upset”.

“All the major universities in the world have departments, and this slippage into a different kind of culture around disciplines is increasing centralised control of what we do,” Professor Clarke said. “For us, it’s a line in the sand.”

A proposal presented to FASS academics this month said the faculty regularly failed to meet budget targets for domestic students, and only two of its schools – economics, and media and communications – attracted significant numbers of overseas students.

Those schools cross-subsidised the rest of the faculty, but, as COVID-19 border closures showed, the international market was volatile. Costs were growing at 2.8 per cent a year but revenue was only climbing by 2 per cent a year, which was unsustainable. “It makes sense for us to consider changes in the way we work,” the proposal said.

FASS is divided into six schools, which are in turn divided into departments, with a chair of each. In 2019, only two of its schools returned a surplus: Economics ($41 million) and the School of Languages and Cultures ($6m), the proposal said.

The loss-makers were the schools of Literature Art and Media ($91,000), Education and Social Work ($532,000), Social and Political Sciences ($5 million) and the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry ($13 million).

The proposed changes involve re-naming schools and shifting the subjects within them. A new School of Humanities would take in subjects from the old School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, while adding linguistics and religion but losing gender studies to social sciences.

All undergraduate units with fewer than 24 students would be scrapped.

The departments within schools would be renamed disciplines, to “move away from the administrative and financial silos”, increase interaction between similar subjects, and reduce internal competition. The department chair would become a discipline lead.

Other universities, such as Melbourne and Monash, have also adopted the “discipline” approach. The university defines a department as an organisational unit, and discipline as a sub-field of knowledge. Departments don’t have their own budgets.

However, academics are worried this will curtail their ability to manage their own subject.

The letter from angry FASS academics said the discipline concept was nebulous and risky, and their views had been ignored. “There is no clear reason or benefit for the proposed change, as no specific problems with the current structure have been identified,” it said.

Professor Clarke said students, alumni and staff strongly identified with departments. The new structure would lead to an “erosion and loss of identity,” she said.

“There is an increasing centralised control of academic life. In departments we have a fair degree of control over what we teach our students, what we do, and public facing, the engagement work we do. We feel that there’s a slow erosion of the structures of a university that we feel are really important.”

Not everyone agrees. Sociologist Salvatore Babones, who was not a signatory to the letter, said his colleagues were justifiably concerned about the consolidation of smaller departments into bigger ones.

“But relabelling departments as disciplines is the epitome of pro forma reform: departments become disciplines, department chairs become discipline leads, and the rest is business as usual,” he said. “It’s yet another missed opportunity for a genuine reexamination and long-overdue modernization of how we educate the next generation.”

A spokeswoman for the university administration said the FASS proposal involved significant consultation with staff, and the latest version involved smaller changes with no redundancies or reductions in employment.

More consultation was underway. “Like other institutions, we need to look for ways to ensure ongoing sustainability alongside continued high-quality teaching and research,” she said.

“The proposal to change from departments to a disciplinary structure – and to merge a very small number of disciplines – will allow our academic staff to collaborate more easily, reduce administrative double-up, produce a more consistent and flexible student experience and contribute to securing the future of our smaller disciplines.”

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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)

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