Monday, August 01, 2022



Many school districts across the nation are actively resisting curriculum transparency measures and bending over backward to hide the truth about what students are being taught

As parents sound the alarm on critical race theory and gender politics in the classroom, school administrators are doing everything in their power to gaslight them—telling them that these topics aren’t being taught and calling parents who question them racist or transphobic.

The teaching of radical ideologies, including critical race theory, is becoming pervasive throughout the country, but nowhere is it pushed on students more forcefully than in California. For example, the state-mandated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is chock-full of leftist propaganda.

It is no surprise that a California school board member recently called for a boycott of the Fourth of July. And while it is still concerning, it is no longer surprising that dozens of schools named after Founding Fathers like George Washington are facing renaming battles. While I support removing statues of figures who actively fought for racism or other evils (like leaders of the Confederacy), trying to erase our Founding Fathers is a different story.

California is not an outlier on these issues. Look north to Seattle and you will find school districts that proposed spending more on “racial equity” programs than on math and science, despite a steep decline since the pandemic in math and reading scores. Additionally, 56% of Seattle students were found not to be competent in science.

In classrooms all around the country, the controversial and historically inaccurate 1619 Project is being utilized to teach that our country’s core value is not equality but racism. According to a RealClearInvestigations report, critical race theory is pervasive in many schools and is found in professional development courses for teachers and staff as well as in lesson plans and assignments.

Instead of lying directly to parents, many of these schools are hiding controversial curricula by giving programs seemingly innocuous names like “culturally responsive teaching” or using so-called social and emotional learning to smuggle in controversial material.

According to a Fox News report, one of the more egregious ways school districts are hiding curricula from parents is by charging exorbitant fees for public records requests. Nicole Solas, a mother from South Kingstown, Rhode Island, requested the curriculum of her daughter’s kindergarten class. After being denied this request and exhausting every other option, Solas filed a Freedom of Information request for which the district reportedly charged her $74,000.

This was not an isolated incident. The Oregon Department of Education charges $10 per email, and in one instance, it charged a parent $1,525 for a single document.

Parents are not the only ones facing such high fees: journalists are subject to them, too. A journalist in Iowa who sought information related to “Transgender Week” at Linn-Mar High School in Marion was told that his request would cost $604,000. Using such exorbitant fees to dissuade parents and journalists from accessing public records is an abuse of power and a tactic clearly intended to keep parents in the dark.

These school districts are disregarding parents’ rights to have a say in their children’s education. The belief that the education bureaucracy, not parents, should decide what children learn is a growing and concerning trend. For example, in his race for Virginia governor, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe said parents should not influence what schools teach. Nikole Hannah Jones, 1619 Project founder, seemingly agreed, saying, “K-12 educators, not parents, are the experts in what to teach.”

And what happens when parents fight back, affirming their right to know what their children are being taught? The entire force of the education bureaucracy, including teachers unions and federal institutions, turns against them.

For example, the Rochester Community School District in Rochester, Michigan, was accused of monitoring the social media accounts of 200 parents. In one case, the district was forced to pay $190,000 to a parent who had advocated on social media for a return to in-person learning. The district had contacted her employer, leading to her termination.

Lest we wonder if these are isolated incidents, we recall that the National School Boards Association asked the Biden administration to use counterterrorism tools to investigate parents at school board meetings.

Parents are also being targeted for opposing the left’s gender ideology. Throughout the country, parents who refuse to provide “gender-affirming care” to their children risk losing custody or being accused of child abuse.

We already know that forcing such an agenda can have tragic consequences. In Florida, a 12-year-old girl attempted suicide twice after being given secret gender-transition counseling at school. Why weren’t her parents told about their daughter’s transition or her counseling? According to her father, it was because of his and his wife’s Catholic beliefs.

Parents aren’t the only ones in danger. Just last month, the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia voted to increase punishments for students who “misgender” or “deadname” their peers—that is, calling them by their given name or the pronouns that correspond with their biological sex rather than their newly chosen name and pronouns.

Things could get worse. Under President Joe Biden’s proposed changes to Title IX regulations that were originally meant to protect women and girls from sex discrimination in K-12 and higher education, it won’t be long before such actions could be considered sexual harassment.

This is where the country is headed, but we can take action to stop this train. The Parents Bill of Rights will protect parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children rather than letting schools usurp that authority. It will also create more transparency so parents can see how schools are spending money and what their children are being taught.

Safeguarding parental rights is the line drawn in the sand. If we lose this battle, the consequences for individual liberty will be wide ranging and devastating.

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What Title IX really says

by Jeff Jacoby

THIS SUMMER marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, the federal civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any school or educational program funded by the federal government. It is widely regarded as a law to guarantee gender equity in sports, but Title IX makes no reference to athletics. It was not intended to spur the buildup of women's sports programs. Its purpose was to ensure equality in education, as the original text signed into law by President Richard Nixon made clear:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Senator Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, was Title IX's chief sponsor. In his floor remarks upon introducing the legislation, he made clear that it was designed to promote equality:

"We are all familiar with the stereotype [that] women [are] pretty things who go to college to find a husband [and] go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again," he said. "The desire of many schools not to waste a 'man's place' on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts contradict these myths about the 'weaker sex' and it is time to change our operating assumptions." He called the amendment "an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs — an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice [and] to develop the skills they want.

There have been plenty of stories in recent weeks analyzing Title IX and its impact. Often as not, the analysts claim that the law hasn't gone far enough. But I am struck by how little acknowledgment there is that the relative position of the sexes in higher education has been almost entirely reversed. If young women a half century ago lagged far behind their male peers on college campuses and in the post-college labor force, today the opposite is true.

In a recent post on his Carpe Diem blog for the American Enterprise Institute, economist Mark J. Perry turned to Bureau of Labor Statistics data from October 2021 to highlight the astonishing disparities between young men and women in the United States today.

He noted, for example, that for every 100 young women in 2021 who graduated from high school and entered college, there were just 89 similarly situated young men.

For every 100 young women under 25 who were enrolled in college and working, there were just 69 young men.

For every 100 young women with a bachelor's degree, there were just 80 young men.

And for every 100 young women in their 20s with an advanced degree and a job, there were just 30 young men.

By contrast, for every 100 young women who were unemployed high school dropouts, there were 238 young men in the same position.

By numerous educational yardsticks, it is men, not women, who today lag far behind. In most academic fields — biology, communications, the arts, public administration, education, health care, psychology, English — women now earn a majority of bachelor's degrees.

"It is young men, more than young women, who are at risk and facing serious educational and work-related challenges," notes Perry. Those gender disparities carry over far beyond academics. Men are much more likely than women to end up with "a variety of measures of (a) behavioral and mental health outcomes, (b) alcoholism, drug addiction, and drug overdoses, (c) suicide, murder, violent crimes, and incarceration, and (d) homelessness."

For all that, Perry writes, it is girls and women who are favored with "a disproportionate amount of attention, resources, and financial support" at all levels of education — such as after-school and summer programs for girls, female-only scholarships and fellowships, and hundreds of women's centers and women's commissions.

Title IX, it is worth remembering, did not mandate unequal preferences for women. It mandated no unequal preferences for any person on the basis of sex. In the 50 years since Title IX was signed into law, the imbalance that so disfavored girls and women has been replaced by an imbalance that grievously disfavors boys and men. That isn't an improvement. Indeed, it's illegal.

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Oklahoma school districts disciplined after allegedly violating Critical Race Theory ban

The Oklahoma State Board of Education disciplined two school districts for violating a new law that prevents Critical Race Theory, from being taught in the public school system last week.

The board held a meeting on Thursday, where they determined both Tulsa Public Schools and Mustang Public Schools violated House Bill (HB) 1775 in separate incidents last year. They subsequently voted to give both school districts an "accreditation with warning," FOX 25 in Oklahoma City reported.

The warning is the third of the education board’s five-step accreditation tiers. It requires the districts to show they have made the required changes to re-meet the board's standards.

HB 1775 recommends disciplinary action for potential violators of "accreditation with deficiencies," the second step. However, the board voted to increase the penalty, FOX 25 reported.

The board first considered an incident with Tulsa Public Schools in which a third-party vendor allegedly held a training session for teachers that included elements meant "to shame white people for past offenses in history," Board member and State Representative Ajay Pitman said, per the report. The alleged training did not involve students.

The incident happened in August 2021, before HB 1775 was enacted into law.

The board voted four to two to discipline the school district.

A second complaint against Mustang Public Schools was also considered.

The complaint involved an anti-bullying lesson that a teacher within the district performed with their students. It was filed in January 2022.

The board similarly voted four to two to give Mustang Public Schools an "accreditation with warning," as it was "wanting to be fair" regarding the Tulsa complaint.

Governor Kevin Stitt signed HB 1775 into law on May 7, 2021.

The new law "protects our children across the state from being taught revisionist history and that ‘one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,’ or that ‘an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,’" said State Sen. David Bullard, R-Durant, in a statement after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against it.

The pair of school district penalties come as Oklahoma Education Secretary Ryan Walters recently highlighted explicit content from two books made available to middle school students by Tulsa Public Schools.

Appearing on "Fox & Friends" Friday, Walters criticized the school district’s superintendent for standing by the graphic material.

Walters made a Facebook post about the two books, "Gender Queer" and "Flamer," drawing attention to the graphic nature of their content, but his post was taken down by Facebook

The social media site said the material in the post was too graphic.

Walters doubled down, noting it’s "wild" that even Facebook’s guidance for its community (which requires users to be at least 13 years or older) is higher than that of the Tulsa middle school.

"We’ve got woke Facebook that's got higher standards than the superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools," he told host Steve Doocy. "It's just outrageous."

"This is indicative of why this is one of the lowest performing schools in our state. We've got folks in positions of power and administrators that are more focused on a woke ideology and an agenda rather than making sure kids can read and write," he added.

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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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