Christians Hijacking Homeschooling?

An opinion column by Anthea Butler for MSNBC flat-out accuses white evangelical Christians of hijacking homeschooling. Her premise focuses on the shift to homeschooling that, she claims, occurred as a direct response to Brown v. Board of Education — the 1954 Supreme Court decision that integrated schools. In other words, evangelical homeschoolers are segregationists. But her main thesis isn’t the tired bromide about supposed conservative racism, but that the movement toward homeschooling thanks to the pandemic “is part of a larger project about dismantling the public education system in the United States.”

Let’s start with her inevitable first claim of racism. To give Butler the benefit of the doubt, some parents may have withdrawn their children from public schools after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. But the claim that homeschooling was a direct response to the Supreme Court’s ruling ignores the grand history of homeschooling in the United States that was prominent before Brown and has gained significant traction between 2020-2022.

Her next charge that homeschooling was hijacked by the religious Right also ignores history. Homeschooling has always had a religious bent. Parents who were seeking to educate their children at home wanted them to be literate and to be able to read the Bible. To quote John Adams, this country and its laws are made for a “moral and religious people.” Parents wanted to ensure that their children could read religious texts for themselves.

Though irrelevant to her core argument, Butler’s final plea that public schools are underfunded and dealing with staffing issues and violence is still poignant to point out. She neglects to mention why. Schools are “underfunded” partially because progressive-minded teachers unions, school administrators, and school boards squander funds on nonessentials like “anti-racist” teacher training. Schools are dealing with staffing issues because of bad leftist policies (like refusing to hire teachers who might be conservative) and plain teacher burnout. Violence is a horrible tragedy in public schools, though this is due to societal ills exacerbated by bad leftist policy — fatherless homes, welfare-trapped poor, gangs, and guidelines that cripple public schools’ ability to address the problem in an effective way.

Butler does admit that besides racism, parents are leaving for other reasons. She touches on the fact that parents of every race and creed have started retreating to homeschooling after seeing firsthand the indoctrination of their children. Parents entrusted the public school system to teach their children reading, writing, math, history, geography, science, and other important skills to prepare them for the future workforce. Schools have betrayed that trust and are foisting the critical race theory worldview and “Queer Marxism” on children in lieu of actually educating them. It creates an ignorant, easily manipulated population for down the road. Yet Butler feels that homeschooling creates an environment rife with child abuse and indoctrination. Oh, the irony…

Butler neglects another core reason that parents are fleeing public schools. Their children might be struggling with a learning disability that requires more personalized attention that can be addressed more effectively in a homeschool setting. These disabilities are not effectively addressed in public school classrooms that are notoriously overcrowded. The increase in learning disabilities amongst children is a major issue that has grown exponentially over the past decade. It’s not just that more children are being diagnosed early with disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia; it’s that there has been an actual growth in cases. Some of the reasons for this increase in learning disabilities include: diets, environmental issues, genetic issues, lack of social interaction, lack of play in early education, parental unwillingness to teach, growing up in a digital age, and cultural priorities that deemphasize academic excellence.

Butler’s article is ultimately just leftist propaganda that doesn’t actually address why parents are deciding to homeschool their children. That’s because the fruits of the poisonous tree would lead back to these same failed leftist education policies. More and more parents are unwilling to sacrifice their children on the altar of the leftist agenda. It is unsurprising that Butler is trying to salvage that sinking ship the only way she knows how: by painting the homeschooling community as racist white evangelical Christians who are going to impose their fundamentalist views on you and your children.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/88429-christians-hijacking-homeschooling-2022-05-18

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Florida’s Kids Will Learn Their History

“Economics is not the central problem of this century. … Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem — but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom he enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in man.”

So said Whittaker Chambers in Witness, a book that this year celebrates 70 years since its publication, and a book that renowned critic Hilton Kramer called “one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American.”

We have no idea whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has ever read Witness, but a bill he signed into law last week makes clear that he understands not only the threat of communism, but the need to educate our children as to its man-centered atheistic wickedness. DeSantis called last Monday “a blockbuster day for freedom” as he signed a bill that will require public school students to observe “Victims of Communism Day” each year on November 7. As the Tampa Bay Times reports:

The new law, which went into effect immediately, describes the day as being geared toward “honoring the 100 million people who have fallen victim to communist regimes” across the world. The law also gives DeSantis authority to extend observance of the day beyond public schools, as it requires that Victims of Communism Day “be suitably observed by public exercise in the State Capitol and elsewhere as the governor may designate.”

The signing ceremony took place, fittingly, at Miami’s Freedom Tower, which marks the arrival of some 650,000 Cuban refugees in South Florida in the 1960s and ‘70s as they fled Fidel Castro’s brutal communist revolution.

Why teach kids about communism? Because, as historian David Satter wrote in The Wall Street Journal, these regimes have killed on an “industrial scale.”

“In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies,” Satter wrote. “This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics, and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.” And, he continues, when we count the victims of the various communist regimes linked to the USSR, “including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia,” the staggering death toll is about 100 million.

Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung’s denialist argument — that communism just hasn’t been done right! — is typical of those on the Left: “For any impressionable Florida kids that may be reading this, please note that there have never been any 'true’ communist countries, owing largely to violent intervention from the U.S. and other Western superpowers,” she wrote.

“We want to make sure that every year folks in Florida, but particularly our students, will learn about the evils of communism,” said DeSantis, “the dictators that have led communist regimes, and the hundreds of millions of individuals who suffered and continue to suffer under the weight of this discredited ideology.”

In doing so, the first-term governor, who’s up for reelection in November, drew yet another clear line of distinction between Democrat governance and Republican — the former known for its commie-sympathies and the latter known for its ardent anti-communism. A lot of young people “don’t really know that much” about the soul-crushing political ideology, DeSantis added. Indeed, as a poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found, one in five Millennials and one in three Gen Zers view communism favorably.

It can’t be stressed enough: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

And so, beginning in the 2023-2024 academic year, Florida high school students enrolled in U.S. government courses will get at least 45 minutes of instruction each November 7 describing how “decades of oppression and violence under communist regimes throughout the world” have caused incalculable “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech,” and how “the economic philosophies of Karl Marx … have proven incompatible with the ideals of liberty, prosperity and dignity of human life.”

“I think this tower,” said DeSantis, “is a reminder that freedom is not free, that you have to fight for your rights and that there are a lot of people out there that would love nothing more than to put you under some form of oppression.”

DeSantis may not be a witness in the same sense as Whittaker Chambers, who famously testified against his former fellow traveler, Alger Hiss, a communist spy. But DeSantis clearly understands the communist evils that take place yet today just 90 miles off our nation’s shore. Let’s hope other Republican governors do as well.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/88358-floridas-kids-will-learn-their-history-2022-05-16

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Before they can learn ‘antiracism,’ kids need to be literate — & too many aren’t

There’s an old joke about a chemist, a physicist and an economist stranded on a desert island with only a sealed can of food. The chemist and physicist each propose their own ideas about how to open the can. The punch line comes from the economist, who proffers: “First, assume a can opener.”

I’ve been brooding over this joke while watching “antiracism” teaching — some might call it Critical Race Theory (CRT) or social justice — take over the American education world with Omicron-like speed. Lesson plans, books, tips for in-class activities, discussion points, and curricula swamp the teachers’ corner of the Internet.

The proposals come from a metastasizing number of pedagogic entrepreneurs and activist groups, some savvy newcomers, some influential veterans like Black Lives Matter at School, Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), Teaching People’s History (the Zinn Education Project), the Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide (from the National Education Association), and, of course, the current star: the 1619 Project (the Pulitzer Center).

To me, all these ideas seem like the ruminations of desert-island economists. They start with an impossible premise: that the students of these recommended texts actually know how to read.

I am overstating, but not by much. A significant number of American students are reading fluently and with understanding and are well on their way to becoming literate adults. But they are a minority.

As of 2019, according to the National Association of Education Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, 35% of fourth-graders were reading at or above proficiency levels; that means, to spell it out, that a strong majority — 65%, to be exact — were less than proficient. In fact, 34% were reading, if you can call it that, below a basic level, barely able to decipher material suitable for kids their age.

Antiracist assumptions

Eighth-graders don’t do much better. Only 34% of them are proficient; 27% were below-basic readers. Worse, those eighth-grade numbers represent a decline from 2017 for 31 states.

As is always the case in our crazy-quilt, multiracial, multicultural country, the picture varies, depending on which kids you’re looking at. If you categorize by states, the lowest scores can be found in Alabama and New Mexico, with just 21% of eighth-graders reading proficiently. The best thing to say about these results is that they make the highest-scoring state — Massachusetts, with 47% of students proficient — look like a success story rather than the mediocrity it is.

The findings that should really push antiracist educators to rethink their pedagogical assumptions are those for the nation’s black schoolchildren. Nationwide, 52% of black children read below basic in fourth grade. (Hispanics, at 45%, and Native Americans, at 50%, do almost as badly, but I’ll concentrate here on black students, since antiracism clearly centers on the plight of African Americans.)

Black students suffer

The numbers in the nation’s majority-black cities are so low that they flirt with zero. In Baltimore, where 80% of the student body is black, 61% of these students are below basic; only 9% of fourth-graders and 10% of eighth-graders are reading proficiently. (The few white fourth-graders attending Charm City’s public schools score 36 points higher than their black classmates.)

Detroit, the American city with the highest percentage of black residents, has the nation’s lowest fourth-grade reading scores; only 5% of Detroit fourth-graders scored at or above proficient. (Cleveland’s schools, also majority black, are only a few points ahead.)

In April 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of former students suing Detroit schools for not providing an adequate education. The suit cited poor facilities and inadequate textbooks, but below-basic literacy skills were the primary academic complaint. One of the plaintiffs was a former Detroit public school student who went on to community college and ended up on academic probation, in need of a reading tutor.

His story is typical enough as to be barely worth mentioning — except for the fact that he graduated at the top of his public high school class. And as if this isn’t bad enough, the numbers appear likely to get worse, with the impact of COVID-19 disruptions.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/24/before-they-can-learn-antiracism-kids-need-to-be-literate-too-many-arent/

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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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