I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Wisconsin mom says school district threatening legal action to 'bully' her criticism to silence
A Wisconsin mom alleges that the Oconomowoc Area School District was trying to quell her criticism of materials, such as books, within the district by threatening her with legal action.
After Alexandra Schweitzer, the president of a No Left Turn in Education chapter in the state, raised concerns about the appropriateness of materials in the district, the district responded with a cease and desist letter that threatened the possibility of future litigation if she continued to make "defamatory statements" via meetings or in email. Her counsel, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, responded Friday stating that Schweitzer "will not be revoking any statement she made" and accused the district of using taxpayer dollars to silence a parent.
"In fact, use of outside counsel by the Oconomowoc Area School District… to send threatening letters to parents who speak in good faith about their experiences with a school district is antithetical to our Constitution and to your clients’ obligation as public officials," the law group said in response.
"This is a really serious claim that the district is making in response to really trying to be a bullying tactic to parents," the mom's attorney, Libby Sobic, told Fox News Digital. "They do not have a legal claim available to them, not only where our client statement's true, but secondly, she doesn't meet any of the requirements of defamation under the law."
"The… Supreme Court made clear that damages cannot be awarded to a public official for statements concerning his or her official conduct unless it is made with actual malice… You can’t come close to establishing that standard," the response said. The mom's counsel further argued that some of her statements are "conditionally privileged" since it was "given as testimony during a legislative proceeding." Regarding an email the district objected to, the response said it was "non-actionable opinion" that was also "made without actual malice."
"I definitely feel as if I'm being bullied into silence," Schweitzer added.
"My biggest message to parents and taxpayers is the parent is the primary educator of the child. And we have a right to know what's going on inside the classroom… And I'm here because many, many parents don't want to stand up... They're scared their child will get bullied or they're scared they'll get blacklisted themselves. And I'm not going to stand down to tyranny like that," she said.
In the cease and desist, the district said that Schweitzer's defamatory claims included her statements regarding the district's use of a book called "The 57 Bus," which the mom said contains sexually explicit texts. The district said that only portions of the text were read to students "for the purpose of critical thinking and writing craft" and were not available to students. They also claimed that books Schweitzer deemed inappropriate were not available "to… students in the library for checkout… [or] in the District's curriculum."
The district further claimed that the parent was given notice that "texts… deemed inappropriate [were] not available to Oconomowoc Area School District students in the library for checkout, nor [were] they used in the District’s curriculum."
The letter demanded the parent "cease and desist" from making "defamatory statements" about the district, and issue a retraction email "indicating the information is false."
"Oconomowoc Area School District and its Board of Education are entitled to take legal action to prevent you from further distribution of statements containing the false claims in the letter and testimony referenced above, and to seek monetary damages against you," the cease and desist said.
"If the school district wanted to silence me, they have failed. School districts need to know that parents won’t back down and legal threats won’t deter us from looking out for our kids," Schweitzer said. "It's difficult to get a letter like that. It shocks you. But I had faith in knowing what I was doing… – advocating for the community.
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Educators respond to NPR report on COVID-19 impact on student development: 'Told ya so'
NPR spoke with teachers who said that COVID-19 school closures did lasting damage to their students, and they sensed a coming mass exodus of their fellow educators, which some academic readers described as delayed reporting.
Schools nationwide often enforced at-home instruction during the pandemic. Tiki Boyea-Logan, a 4th grade teacher in Rowlett, Texas, remarked on how many of her students failed to progress in their studies as a result and how she and her colleagues struggled to close the learning "gaps" in the piece titled, "We asked teachers how their year went. They warned of an exodus to come."
"I feel like at the beginning of the school year, I basically got second graders, because that's the point where they were in school full time," she told NPR.
"Though you're a fourth grade teacher, you're teaching kids who are emotionally at the second grade level," Boyea-Logan explained. "And academically, we're back to working miracles, like, 'Hey, we need to get these kids caught up, we need to fill these gaps."
Students' academic struggles were compounded, the teachers said, by mental health issues.
"They're very worried about the students that they had this year, because they saw a lot of depression. Someone even brought up cutting, they were afraid that a student would begin cutting again," Suzen Polk-Hoffses, a pre-K teacher in Milbridge, Maine, said of her colleagues' concerns.
"Students were learning in isolation, then they came back, and they're overwhelmed, and they've experienced a trauma," she continued. "And unfortunately, all schools aren't equipped to deal with the trauma that the students have experienced during the pandemic."
Seventy percent of U.S. public schools have reported an increase in students seeking mental health services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) on June 1. The same study, conducted between April 12 and April 25, found that more than three-quarters (76%) of public schools reported an increase in concerns from staff regarding their students' depression, anxiety and trauma since the coronavirus pandemic began.
Some academic experts responded to NPR by arguing their reporting was delayed, with one teacher referring to it as "gaslighting."
"File this in the ever-growing file of things we warned about 2 years ago but were ignored, cancelled, and shunned for," radio host Phil Holloway tweeted.
High school teacher Dan Buck said he wished he didn't have to say, "told ya so" after reading the report.
"This, which everyone paying attention knew was coming for two years, being spoken about as if a revelation, feels a little like gaslighting," Wisconsin public school teacher James A. Fury tweeted.
"For two years, many teachers and education writers (such as Robert Pondiscio or Daniel Buck) have been warning about learning loss and other ill-effects of school shutdowns all while more established media has all but ignored it or, in a gaslighting fashion, commented on the effectiveness of online learning or praised schools for the decision to stay shut down, ignoring the negative consequences in favor of a narrative in which we're protecting everyone," Fury told Fox News Digital. "Now, left-leaning publications such as NPR are turning around to report on the effects of the shutdowns on students, ignoring voices who were speaking about this since the pandemic's beginning."
Fury joined others in hitting the NPR piece for also appearing to center on teachers instead of the students, which Fury said "feeds into the ever-growing (within the profession at least) narrative of teacher-as-martyr."
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Parents’ Guide to Children’s Rights Aims to Save America’s Public Schools From CRT
“The most important battleground in the fight to save our American republic is the public schools.”
So says Kimberly Hermann, general counsel at the Southeastern Legal Foundation, in the introduction to the foundation’s guide for parents, “Your Child’s Rights and What to Do About Them: A Parent’s Guide to Saving America’s Public Schools.”
Hermann’s outlook is increasingly common among anyone taking stock of the proliferation of lessons on critical race theory (a radical worldview that advocates for the primacy of racial identity) in public school curriculums. And her foundation, a national nonprofit law firm that has litigated numerous cases arising in public schools and universities, is ready to persuade anyone else who will listen.
Renewed interest in curricular content is not coming from conservative quarters alone—parents of various political stripes have been galvanized by their children’s encounters with critical race theory-based lessons to oppose its dominance in classrooms. That’s the audience the Southeastern Legal Foundation addresses in its guide—those who “have had enough.”
Why should any parent feel they’ve had enough of critical race theory? To many parents, the theory’s doctrines of “white supremacy” and black/brown victimhood are anathema to their civic or religious convictions on the nature of the person, his or her agency, and the sources of his or her goodness, guilt, and redemption.
To others, critical race theory is just a time- and resource-intensive distraction from their schools’ persistent failure to bring students somewhere near a grade-level competence in reading and mathematics.
Fair-minded parents can and should be skeptical of the pedagogic value in a theory that dismisses “legal reasoning” and “rationalism” as mere instruments of white supremacy. After all, critical race theory-based impulses led the Smithsonian to opine that “objective, rational linear thinking” was only an “assumption of whiteness.”
Yet for all the legitimate concern parents feel when they find this racialist thinking in their child’s homework, there is often a gap between their desire to oppose critical race theory-based instruction and their ability to advocate effectively for that outcome. The foundation’s guide is meant to bridge that gap with introductions to the core legal concepts in play when a public school introduces a critical race theory-based curriculum.
The foundation’s “Parent’s Guide” begins by briefly engaging the threshold question: What is critical race theory? It’s a broad heading, covering the writings of legal activists who have wedged racial antagonisms into Marxism’s framework for class warfare.
Their views vary in the particulars, and their jargoned texts go mostly unread outside of academia. But what is transmitted to younger students comes from the core areas of agreement, which the Southeastern Legal Foundation summarizes as follows: “CRT holds that America was founded on white supremacy and oppression, and that racism is embedded in America’s legal system, government policy, and the Constitution.”
In a strange twist, however, theorists believe that discrimination is still necessary today. Black Americans do not hold enough power, though, and that’s one of the primary reasons, theorists say, that America is not to be reformed, but remade.
That principle, incendiary as it is, is perfectly at home in the media musings of critical race theory’s most prominent practitioners. It is a bracing reminder that critical race theory is not a program of reform and reconciliation, nor is it a project to promote historical awareness. Rather, it is a self-consciously revolutionary ideology that inspires its adherents to view much of the society in which they live with open contempt.
While critical race theory’s core axioms are revolutionary, it has somewhat subtler presentations. The foundation’s guide notes several of the anodyne headings—social justice, implicit bias, anti-racism, etc.—under which critical race theory appears in classroom materials. Critical race theory may be taught as a stand-alone topic, but advocates insert it, albeit awkwardly, into every subject, even the hard sciences, where the attempted applications seem most absurd.
Surely, the breadth of critical race theory’s pretensions, its vigorous self-importance, is part of what provokes a visceral reaction from parents.
Wherever critical race theory lessons are taught, the question of how they are taught and how school officials apply the theory in school activities are the most relevant from a legal perspective. The Southeastern Legal Foundation acquaints parents with the scope of students’ First Amendment speech rights, which are lawfully restricted, but not extinguished, in educational environments. Most noteworthy are the concepts of compelled speech and hate speech.
Just as students have a right to express their views in class, they enjoy a corresponding right to refrain from expressing views that are not theirs. This is a boundary that critical race theory-based lessons can easily transgress, given that they often require performative confessions of one’s status as “privileged” or “oppressed.” But no school official is permitted to compel students to adopt any views on a subject as fraught as socio-historical “privilege.”
As then-Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson memorably put it in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette in 1943, “[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
If that maxim applies to the promotion of patriotic devotion to country, as it did in Barnette, then it applies to “anti-racist pledges” and critical theories teaching that this republic is a continuing experiment in ever-more insidious forms of racial discrimination.
Concerning so-called hate speech, the foundation reminds parents that the very idea remains almost alien to First Amendment law, and the subjectively offensive nature of a student’s speech does not make it permissible for school authorities to restrict it.
As the Supreme Court reiterated in 2017, “Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.” Instead, the foundation explains that before a school can lawfully restrict a student’s “hateful” speech, that speech must “substantially disrupt” the school environment.
Other examples in the foundation’s guide cover questions of student privacy rights, parental consent, and parental oversight as they may be implicated by critical race theory-based lessons. But one point among them bears emphasizing: For parents concerned with critical race theory in schools, teachers are often allies, not enemies.
Though teachers may be the ones foisting racially obsessed lessons on students, just as often they are as disturbed as parents with curriculums and class materials purchased by administrators and school boards from outside advocacy groups. The foundation has represented such teachers in litigation, including one in Illinois who complained that her school was separating teachers and students into race-based groups for school activities.
Concerned parents, especially those looking for a non-litigated solution, would do well to enlist the help of sympathetic teachers.
Despite laudable efforts in the public charter school, private school choice, and homeschooling movements, a large portion of the nation’s families still rely on public schools to educate their children. Thus, there’s much at risk if conservatives abandon this arena.
When critical race theory is taught in grade schools, it’s delivered to an audience that has scarcely learned the vision of America that this theory is meant to supplant. What our public schools implant in young minds can’t be easily dislodged later.
And everything students learn afterward, in college or the workplace, they will interpret with the first set of tools they learned to use. So, if public school students are taught from kindergarten onward that racial grievance is the key to understanding history, politics, and their own daily social interactions, can we expect them to bring some other perspective to the tasks of adulthood?
Hermann and her colleagues are highlighting an important truth, something that has always been true about public schools: These schools are important settings for instruction, debate, and the transmission of values, and are the battlefields that will determine our nation’s future.
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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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