Massachusetts School Teachers Sued After Allegedly Encouraging Students to Alter Gender Identity

Parents with children attending middle school at Ludlow Public Schools in Massachusetts have filed a lawsuit against a group of teachers and administrators over the district's gender policy and failure to disclose students' gender identity to their parents.

A lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court by the Massachusetts Family Institute and the Child and Parental Rights Campaign on behalf of two separate sets of parents, who claim their children were encouraged by their Baird Middle School teachers to change their names and pronouns without parental consent.

The students were also told they could use restrooms corresponding with their new gender identity, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit alleges that the district's policy affirming the gender identities of transgender students violates both state and federal law.

And while the lawsuit did not identify the school policy, The Boston Globe Magazine reported in the fall that the district allows students to adopt new names and pronouns, and school staff are barred from discussing a student's gender identity with their parent unless the child offers their consent.

But in Tuesday's lawsuit, the parents claim the district has not implemented a formal written gender policy, violating a state requirement.

The parents said that guidance from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education was issued to school districts in 2012 after state law was changed to include gender identity as a protected class.

The guidance states that transgender students may sometimes not wish to disclose their gender identity to their families due to concerns about safety or acceptance. Because of this, teachers are expected to talk with the student before discussing their gender identity with their parents.

However, the guidance also explains that, when "young students" are involved, parents should be notified regarding issues on their child's gender identity. The guidance fails to define what is meant by "young students."

The suit asserts that one defendant, former middle school librarian Jordan Funke, publicly expressed to the school community that they were "nonbinary," told students to use gender-neutral pronouns on each other and encouraged children to "experiment with alternate gender identities without notifying parents or obtaining parental consent."

Funke is also accused of telling incoming sixth-graders in 2019 to make videos that featured their gender identity and preferred pronouns. The child of two of the parents involved in the suit, then 11, was among those students. Funke had not sought parental consent, according to the complaint.

Ludlow School Committee Chair James P. Harrington said in a statement to MassLive, "We want to support our students the best we can. But we should bring parents to the table, and hope they respond in a loving and supportive way as well."

But the parents' attorney, Massachusetts Family Institute President Andrew Beckwith, told The Boston Globe that the lawsuit is about parental rights.

"This lawsuit is about protecting the right of parents to raise their children without the interference of government officials," Beckwith said. "By deliberately circumventing the authority of parents over the mental health and religious beliefs of their children, activists at the Ludlow schools are violating time-honored rights guaranteed under the US Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution."

This comes after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) recently signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade and limiting age-inappropriate discussions of sexuality in other grades.

Dubbed by critics as the "Don't say gay" bill despite there being no mention of a ban on the word, Florida's legislation also allows parents to access their children's education and health records and requires schools to notify parents of changes to their child's mental, physical or emotional well-being. The bill exempts schools from disclosing information to their parents if a "reasonably prudent person" would be concerned that doing so could result in abuse, abandonment or neglect.

Legislation mirroring Florida's parental rights law have since been introduced in other states, including Alabama, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee and Ohio.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/04/15/massachusetts-school-teachers-sued-after-allegedly-encouraging-students-to-alter-gender-identity-n2605951

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WA School District Launched an 'Ethnic Studies' Program Teaching Students to Resist 'Systems of Oppression'

The Northshore School District in Washington state launched an ethnic studies program early last year in which an Ethnic Studies Pilot Work Team was offered materials to learn about "transformative ethnic studies in schools that will aid in the development of an Ethnic Studies Framework."

According to a slide presentation from October, the purpose of ethnic studies is "to transform student lives by promoting healing from historical trauma, humanizing and empowering all students, and promoting civic and community engagement through action in solidarity with others."

"Ethnic Studies pedagogy promotes collaboration in learning, higher level thinking and critical analysis of racism and other forms of oppression," the slide continues. "Ethnic Studies further provides students with the opportunity to understand themselves and their intersectionality in relation to society."

And in a November slide presentation, the work team listed several bullet points detailing what "we are talking about" when ethnic studies are being discussed.

These bullet points include that ethnic studies intend to "eliminate racism by critiquing, resisting, and transforming systems of oppression," and that ethnic studies are "responsive to students' cultural, historical, and contemporary experiences."

A December presentation included a draft of the work team's "Framework Components" the team was working on. The themes from this unit were "Identity," "Power and Oppression," "History of Resistance and Liberation" and "Healing."

In a presentation in January of 2022, the work team was told that "Safe, brave spaces are growing" and that the ethnic studies framework should consider "Decolonization through self-determination and cultural resurgence."

Last month, a presentation on "Disability Justice" was delivered and team members were tasked with watching the video, "Paulo Freire and the Development of Critical Pedagogy" prior to the next meeting.

Students at the November, January and March sessions were asked to read a guide entitled, "This Book is Anti-Racist."

Each presentation began with a "Land Acknowledgement" that the Northshore School District is located in areas that have been "colonized, occupied, and renamed."

"We acknowledge the experiences of genocide, forced relocation, ethnic cleansing, and land theft of Indigenous peoples and sacred lands so we can build our awareness of how settler colonization still exists today," the acknowledgment reads. "We honor the ways of knowing and ways of being of Indigenous peoples and tribal nations, who are still here and thriving, in our district-community."

Nonprofit parent group Parents Defending Education, which obtained the work team's presentations, ripped the school district for prioritizing ethnic studies over subjects like reading and mathematics.

"Ethnic studies is being used as another avenue for schools to teach students, as young as pre-K, that the United States is systemically racist," PDE researcher Rhyen Staley said in a statement to Townhall. "The focus of curriculums such as the one Northshore is creating centers around the idea that society is filled with oppression and that students need to be trained activists to end that oppression. Schools should not be in the business of fixing alleged societal ills. Rather, in order to bring about real lasting change, they should be focused on how to best educate students in reading, writing, and math."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/04/15/washington-state-school-district-launched-an-ethnic-studies-program-that-teaches-n2605950

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Teachers Unions' Other Foes: Liberal Parents

Khulia Pringle would seem an unlikely critic of the local Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The St. Paul native embarked on a teaching career in the hope of improving a school system that she saw as failing her daughter. By the time she finished her training in 2014, she had grown so disillusioned with the public school system that she took a job with an education reform group, helping to recruit and place hundreds of tutors in schools across the state.

While she shares the union’s emphasis on pushing for higher pay and smaller classrooms, the self-described liberal education activist says the federation’s three-week strike last month provided final confirmation of her worst fear: The union and public education system place a higher priority on serving their own needs than they do on serving students and parents, 60% of whom are minorities.

"Students are just coming back to some sort of normalcy – they're already behind," she says. "These strikes aren't asking for any of the things that will solve the disparities between black and brown and indigenous children."

Pringle is part of a growing chorus of parents and educators across the country who are challenging the public education establishment. While much attention has focused on opposition by conservative parents and red state lawmakers to the teaching of critical race theory and gender issues, resistance is percolating among blue state parents like Pringle who have long championed teacher unions and progressive school boards.

The second front in the battle over public education is clear: From San Francisco, where voters ousted several left-wing, union-endorsed school board members in February, to Chicago, Massachusetts, and other blue enclaves, parents are demanding reform.

Teachers enjoyed immense support in the early days of the pandemic, but their unions’ reluctance to return to the classroom, even as scientific findings established children’s resilience against the disease, appears to have alienated a substantial number of parents.

In December 2020, Gallup found that three-quarters of those polled rated teachers as ethical and trustworthy, setting an all-time record since it began asking the question. When Gallup asked the same question in December 2021, the results were startling. In the space of 12 months, support for teachers fell about 15 percent, to “a point or two below their previous all-time lows,” according to the pollster. A 2021 survey from nonprofit think tank Education Next found the public held less favorable views of the education system than other public services. Americans nationwide were twice as likely to give police forces A or B grades than they were public schools – this despite the backlash against cops in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

The sagging poll numbers reflect a mounting challenge for public school teachers and their unions, which have long counted on public support when they have gone out on strike to secure better pay and working conditions.

“That trust has been so eroded because of what parents have gone through for the past 18 to 20 months, so now parents have to question what they are being told by teachers,” said Keri Rodriguez, a Massachusetts mother of five. “There's been so much overreach and they have asked for so much grace from parents across the country; well, unfortunately we have watched teachers respond with not much effort in remote learning.”

Rodriguez is an even more unlikely opponent of teachers’ unions than Pringle. She made a career in the organized labor movement, rising to an executive position at labor giant Service Employees International Union Local 1199 and served as chair of the Somerville Democratic Party. But even as she rose in progressive circles in the most progressive of enclaves – a city where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 89% to 10% – she began to question the party’s alliance with teachers’ unions.

“Only in the education system are parents treated as if we should be passively going along and allow others to not only run the system but run it in a way that's beneficial to adults,” Rodriguez says. “We started to see how kids are getting the short end of the stick.”

Critics see this dynamic as particularly pronounced in the labor movement’s embrace of lockdowns and remote learning. The results could be seen in Minnesota, where high school graduation rates dropped for the first time in 12 years in 2021. In a normal school year about 90% of Minneapolis students participate in statewide proficiency tests. But in 2021, only 48% of district students took the tests – significantly less than the 80% of students who took the tests statewide. Those Minneapolis students motivated enough to take the tests from home performed poorly, with only 35.5% considered proficient, down from the district's 42.2% proficiency rate in 2019. Test scores during the pandemic also revealed growing racial disparities in achievement. Proficiency rates in math among black and Hispanic children plummeted by 34% in 2021, compared with a 19% decline among white students.

The results in Minneapolis mirror those in other major school districts that resisted the return to the classroom. Washington, D.C. public schools enforced some of the strictest lockdowns in the country. Performance among its students, some 84% of whom are minorities, plummeted during the pandemic. Racial disparities in proficiency were particularly acute. White children fell 4% in literacy proficiency as only 70% met district benchmarks. By contrast, only 28% of the district's black students met benchmarks – a nearly 40% decline. Black students are now less likely to meet literacy standards than Hispanic students, many of whom come from households where English is not the primary language, even after those students experienced a 29% decline in proficiency during the pandemic.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/04/12/teachers_unions_other_foes_liberal_parents_826301.html

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