Friday, March 24, 2023



Debate Over Parents’ Rights in Education Shifts to Capitol Hill From State Houses

Later this week, the House of Representatives will consider a “Parents Bill of Rights,” catapulting an issue pioneered in states like Virginia and Florida onto the national stage and solidifying its position in the GOP’s platform.

According to the bill’s sponsor, Representative Julia Letlow, the legislation is aimed at giving parents more control over what students are taught and what their children do while at school.

“As a mom of two and a former educator, I believe for a child to succeed, they need families and schools to work together as partners throughout the learning process,” Ms. Letlow said.

The bill would federally guarantee parents many rights that are already enjoyed in most states and set new federal requirements for school districts and state education departments.

The bill represents the legislative culmination of an issue that has become a core issue for Republicans after Governor Youngkin was swept to victory in 2021 touting a platform of “parents’ rights.”

Speaker McCarthy has hailed Ms. Letlow’s legislation as a “milestone.” In his 2022 Commitment to America, the speaker promised to introduce a bill addressing parents’ rights.

“It doesn’t matter [what] the color of your skin [is] or your wealth, when you have a child that is the most important thing in your life…. One thing we know in this country, education is the great equalizer,” Mr. McCarthy said. “We want parents to feel empowered and that’s what we’re doing here.”

Some Democrats in Congress, such as Representative Frederica Wilson, have called the bill a mostly redundant “waste of time” that would cultivate an oppositional relationship between parents and teachers.

“You are crafting a ludicrous, fake waste of time, a bunch of bull that you call a Parents Bill of Rights to monitor the most dedicated sacrificial workforce in our nation with some cheap stunt, pretending like you really care,” Ms. Wilson said at a hearing earlier this month.

The bill would guarantee parents the opportunity to meet with teachers twice a year and the right to address the school board. It would also require parental consent for medical exams that happen at school, something already required for students under the age of medical consent in a state.

The bill of rights would also impose new requirements on school districts, including that districts post their curriculum publicly and provide parents with a list of books available in the school library. It also would require states to notify parents of any changes to the state’s academic standards and require public disclosure of school district budgets.

The bill would also guarantee parents “the right to know if a school employee” refers to a minor by an alternate set of pronouns, a preferred name, or if there is a change to a “child’s sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”

A parent would retain the right to know if a student is receiving help with cyberbullying, an eating disorder, mental health issues, and suicidal ideation, among other things.

The bill would also guarantee “parents and other stakeholders the right to assemble and express their opinions on decisions affecting their children and communities.”

If passed in the House, the bill is almost certain to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate without a filibuster-proof majority, of which there is currently no sign.

In addition to opposition from Democrats, the bill has been panned by the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.

One critic, a dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education, Leslie Renwick, has argued that the push for parents’ rights is comparable to the outcry that followed Brown v. Board of Education.

“White parents burned books, physically threatened White teachers who tried to teach the more inclusive curriculum, and pressured school boards not to adopt books and curriculum that featured anything Black, by asserting that doing such was a divisive and communist trick,” Ms. Renwick told the Washington Post.

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Alliance Defending Freedom Sues After Arizona School Board Ousts Christian Student Teachers

Our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom report that for more than a decade, Arizona Christian University had a partnership with a nearby school district that helped student teachers gain valuable experience and provided quality teaching for elementary students in the district.

But in February 2023, the district school board abruptly—and unconstitutionally—ended that agreement, harming both students in the district and student teachers from the university.

Background

Arizona Christian University is a private Christian university in Glendale, Arizona. It seeks to “educate and equip followers of Christ to transform culture with the truth.” It educates every student through a biblical worldview, and it encourages students to “serve the Lord Jesus Christ in all aspects of life.”

ACU has partnered with Washington Elementary School District, the largest elementary school district in Arizona, for the last 11 years. The partnership has allowed ACU students in the Elementary Education program to student-teach and shadow teachers in the district.

This partnership has benefited both Arizona Christian and Washington Elementary School District. ACU students have gained valuable teaching experience in the classroom, which they need to complete in order to graduate, and the district has enjoyed excellent service from student teachers. In fact, the district has hired multiple Arizona Christian student teachers to full time positions over the last 11 years.

But the district school board recently voted to bring this partnership to an end.

What Triggered The Lawsuit?

In February 2018, ACU and Washington Elementary School District signed their most recent partnership agreement. It was meant “to enable an educational experience for student teachers at [Washington Elementary schools] that may qualify for University academic credit as determined by [Arizona Christian].”

The agreement noted that student teachers needed to meet the standards of the district and follow all written policies at the schools where they were teaching. It also allowed either the elementary schools or Arizona Christian University to dismiss student teachers if they were not performing as they should be.

The agreement had a term of five years, with the option to be renewed on a year-to-year basis. Both Washington Elementary School District and ACU agreed to the renewal each year, up until this year.

Following that tradition, the School District sent ACU a notice earlier this year asking it if it wanted to continue the partnership. ACU signed that document, stating it would like to continue the agreement. But in February 2023, the district school board unanimously voted not to renew the partnership simply because of ACU and its students’ religious character and beliefs. During the meeting, multiple board members disparaged ACU’s Christian beliefs.

One board member suggested the university’s Christian beliefs would prevent ACU student teachers from properly caring for and respecting students and would make people feel “unsafe,” citing Arizona Christian’s “Core Commitment” to “be committed to Jesus Christ – accomplishing His will and advancing His kingdom on earth as in heaven.”

Another board member said he was afraid the student teachers would push their beliefs on the elementary students and implied ACU students would shame certain students.

In reality, Arizona Christian and its students’ Christian beliefs instruct them to show kindness, love, and respect to the elementary students they teach and other staff members within the school district.

The school district never cited any wrongdoing, complaints, or evidence of any ACU student teachers violating any school district policy during the 11 years the school district partnered with ACU. ACU and its students always abided by the district’s rules.

The Washington Elementary School District board voted to end its partnership with ACU simply because of the university’s and its students’ religious beliefs.

For this clear violation of the First Amendment, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a lawsuit against the school district to protect the religious freedom of both Arizona Christian University and its students.

What’s At Stake?

The First Amendment prohibits the government from showing hostility to and discriminating against people because of their religious beliefs.

The Washington Elementary School District terminated its partnership with Arizona Christian University specifically because of its religious beliefs, denying student teachers opportunities to teach and improve their future career prospects. This decision also harms students within the school district, in the midst of a nationwide teacher shortage.

If the court rules in favor of ACU, it will affirm that the government cannot treat religious institutions and religious students worse than everyone else.

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Who Owns the University?

American higher education is in crisis. The rise of diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies and a growing intolerance for dissent has spurred political battles for control of campus decision-making in North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. The fights point to a fundamental question: Who “owns” a university? Perhaps the question is better phrased: To whom does a school belong?

In the competitive private marketplace, ownership is clear. When Elon Musk buys a company like Twitter, few question his authority to fire staff or change access rules. While practices vary enormously among the thousands of American colleges and universities, seven groups often claim at least partial ownership and control:

* The board. Most schools, public or private, are overseen by a legally constituted governing board.

* The politicians. At public institutions, state government usually is the legal “owner” of the school.

* The administrators. A school’s president and senior bureaucrats are vested with executive responsibility, which resembles ownership.

* The faculty. The professors who administer academic offerings and conduct grant-inducing research often feel the school belongs to them.

* The students. They are a primary reason for the school’s existence and their families pay substantial tuition and fees.

* The alumni. Graduates constitute the donor base at most private schools and some public ones as well.

* The accrediting agencies. The federal Education Department charges these bodies with certifying an institution’s right to confer degrees.

Some schools don’t fit this mold. Religious schools usually have a somewhat different governing dynamic than do government-owned community colleges, state universities or elite private schools. At some institutions, labor unions have an effect on decision-making. This diversity of ownership historically has been one of the strengths of American higher education. In the U.S., the academy isn’t run by a stultifying monopolistic government education ministry.

The University of North Carolina, Texas Tech University and other large state schools have been the scene of recent high-profile contretemps. Many such schools are dealing with the fallout from declining public support, high tuition fees and falling enrollments. From roughly 1960 to 2010, state politicians increased funding regularly and largely stayed out of internal university affairs. In that period, somewhat clueless governing boards rubber-stamped administrative requests, with the university president wining and dining board members and purchasing their loyalty with tickets to sporting events.

Students had relatively little clout during this period, and an overproduction of doctorates eroded the power and marketability of professors too. Simultaneously, the professoriate, always a liberal bastion, moved to the extreme left. In recent years college professors have openly and aggressively promoted ideologies such as critical race theory.

A decade of enrollment decline after 2011 reflected an accurate perception: Most colleges had become overpriced indoctrination mills. Recognition of this stimulated increasingly aggressive efforts by state politicians to reform universities, eroding their previous near independence from the political process.

In some parts of the country, elected officials have decided to reclaim ownership of their public university systems. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s popularity soared when he demanded that Florida schools account for their DEI spending. He managed to get special state funding for a new conservative-oriented Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and he engineered a daring takeover of the small New College, calling on it to become the South’s answer to Hillsdale, a small liberal-arts school in Michigan that is famous for refusing money from the federal government.

Other states have joined the trend. The conservative North Carolina legislature engineered a GOP takeover of the UNC board of governors, who voted 12-0 to create a new school committed to free expression in higher education. A Texas state senator has introduced a bill to turn the free-market minded Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, into a formal college. The Free Market Institute—which “advances research and teaching related to the free enterprise system and the institutional environment necessary for it to function well”—flourishes at Texas Tech. In Ohio, legislators have vowed to cease rubber-stamping gubernatorial nominees to university governing boards. In the past, these nominees were often picked by university administrators.

Most state universities still depend on taxpayer funding to pay many of their bills. If those universities deviate too drastically from accepted norms of behavior, they can be punished with reduced subsidies, a loss of control, or both. Perhaps legislators will start moving to a new funding model: give state funds to customers (students) rather than to educational producers (universities) and then let education markets work. Ultimately, even militant faculty should realize that tenure isn’t worth much if there are no dollars to pay salaries—or students to listen to their lectures.

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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