Freedom of Choice in Education: the Origins of a Slogan

American Federation of Teachers leader Randi Weingarten is currently taking heat for her attempts to revive an old smear against school vouchers. In a recent interview, the teacher’s union boss claimed that pro-voucher slogans about “choice” were really coded dog whistles from the segregationist era.

Weingarten has a long history of falsely claiming that vouchers originated as part of the backlash against the 1954 desegregation ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. In reality, the concept of school choice traces back centuries prior. It can be found in the works of classical liberal philosophers Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill, all of whom were also outspoken antislavery men. As a matter of education policy, the first voucher programs came to the United States in the late 19th century, when towns in rural New England set up a town-based tuitioning system that offered students a choice in public schooling.

Voucher opponents have nonetheless pushed the line that the idea grew out of the segregationist backlash to Brown v. Board in the 1950s south. In addition to its anachronism, this claim is at odds with historical evidence. In Virginia, which adopted a voucher-like tuition grant system in 1959, several segregationist hardliners mounted a campaign against the program. According to their openly racist arguments, vouchers would open the door to the “negro engulfment” of formerly all-white public schools by giving African-American students the ability to transfer schools. This practice undermined some of the main segregationist tactics for slowing the implementation of Brown: the use of enrollment caps, geographic zoning, and other barriers to impede the enrollment of black students.

Weingarten’s own union forebears had direct culpability in these racist actions. The Virginia Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, linked arms with segregationist attorney John S. Battle, Jr. to attack the tuition grants. In 1961, the union launched a lobbying campaign to restrict their use after a Richmond newspaper reported that many parents were using the grants to move their children out of segregated schools and into integrated institutions.

In this case, Weingarten’s latest argument carries the added twist of a new historical falsehood.

In January of 1959 that year, the Virginia assembly was thrown into chaos after a pair of court rulings struck down the segregationist “Massive Resistance” program of US Senator Harry Flood Byrd and his political machine. Seizing the opportunity to outflank Byrd, an unusual coalition of moderate segregationist “cushioners” and anti-segregationists, the latter mostly from the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., crafted a race-neutral tuition grant program as part of a replacement for “Massive Resistance.” Supporters dubbed the tuition grant system a “freedom of choice” program, which is the basis of Weingarten’s claim about language and the coding thereof.

As we dig deeper into the evidence though, an added complication emerges. The tuition grant provision originated on a subcommittee of the specially-convened Perrow Commission on Education, which was tasked with a legislative response to the court rulings. On that subcommittee sat Sen. John A.K. Donovan, an anti-segregationist from Northern Virginia. During the Massive Resistance era, Donovan provided one of the only consistent votes against the Byrd machine. He made a name for himself after Brown v. Board by denouncing legislative harassment of the NAACP by the Byrd machine.

Senator Donovan was also a voucher supporter with close ties to the Catholic voucher advocacy group, Citizens for Educational Freedom (CEF). Records from the legislative proceedings indicate that Donovan was one of the main drafters of the tuition grant bill’s language

This historical detail matters, because in 1961 Donovan recounted these events in a letter to Father Virgil Blum, a priest at Marquette University who directed CEF’s national voucher advocacy efforts. Blum himself was an outspoken anti-segregationist, and encouraged his organization—with Donovan’s assistance—to file amicus briefs in the ongoing court battles against Prince Edward County, Virginia, a “Massive Resistance” holdout that shuttered its school system to prevent integration.

In their 1961 correspondence, Blum noted that he had made use of the “freedom of choice” slogan to advocate for vouchers. As Donovan quipped in return, “incidentally, I am to blame for Virginia’s school plan being titled ‘freedom of choice.’” He recounted that he used this phrase in a press statement as the bill was being unveiled. Thereafter, “the Governor and the press called it the ‘freedom of choice plan.’”

Blum responded to Donovan, stating “I am happy that you supplied the title ‘freedom of choice’ to the Virginia school plan. If this term should receive a general acceptance throughout the United States, it would serve to point up the fundamental issue of the civil rights of parents in the choice of a school for the education of their children.” Blum had a reason of his own to appreciate the slogan. Around the same time as the events in Virginia, he published a short book entitled Freedom of Choice in Education, laying out the philosophical case for school vouchers.

As these details reveal, the language of “choice” traces back to a voucher-supporting state senator and a voucher-supporting Catholic priest. Incidentally, that state senator provided a lonely voice against the very same segregationist “Massive Resistance” movement that Weingarten invokes to smear voucher advocates today. And the same Catholic priest denounced the segregationist alliances that Virginia’s teachers union embraced.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14675&omhide=true&trk=title

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Pennsylvania Students Protest Pro-Trans Bathroom Policy

High school students in the Keystone State are protesting transgender ideology in their bathrooms. Hundreds of students in the Perkiomen Valley School District north of Philadelphia staged a walkout on Friday, in response to the school board allowing students who identify as transgender to use whichever bathroom they like.

A policy barring students who identify as transgender from accessing bathrooms that don’t correspond to their biological sexes was proposed at a school board meeting Monday of last week. After a four-hour board meeting, five board members voted against the policy and four voted in favor of it.

John Ott, the student who organized the subsequent walkout, explained, “Kids were upset. Girls—we wanted to protect them. They were upset. They didn’t want men in their bathroom.”

Ott’s mother, Stephanie, added, “The safety of females is so important and these students that stood out that walked out, they are to be commended. They have courage and they exercised their First Amendment rights. This is about protecting our children and our privacy and boys and girls. It’s simple biology.”

Student Victoria Rudolph said, “There needs [sic] to be some changes. It’s just uncomfortable, seeing 19-year-old men or 18-year-old men in the bathroom.”

The Perkiomen Valley walkout comes in the midst of a nationwide debate over the transgender agenda in classrooms, including in school bathrooms.

In California, for example, the state’s attorney general is suing school districts for implementing parental notification policies, requiring staff and faculty to alert parents when students attempt to socially transition genders, including when students use bathrooms that don’t correspond to their biological sexes.

Despite this, a growing number of Golden State school boards are implementing these policies, and parents have introduced ballot initiatives to combat pro-trans legislation. Those ballot initiatives make parental notification policies mandatory and require students who identify as transgender to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams that correspond to their biological sexes.

In August, a judge in New Jersey also barred Garden State school districts from implementing parental notification policies, despite a wide number of New Jersey residents—including a majority of Democrats—favoring such policies. In Maryland, a federal judge ruled that parents can’t opt their children out of LGBT propaganda sessions in elementary schools, even when invoking religious liberty.

Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia first drew national attention to the transgenderism-in-schools debate back in 2021 after implementing numerous pro-trans policies and firing or suspending teachers for refusing to go along with the program.

Perhaps most notably, the school board was intensely criticized for allowing at least two female students to be raped and sexually assaulted by a male student who identified as “gender fluid,” and attempting to cover up the assaults.

The first rape occurred in a women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School, when a 12-year-old girl was forcibly sodomized by a male student. Later, when attempting to approve a policy allowing trans-identifying students to use the bathrooms of their choice, the school board denied any knowledge of the rape, even when questioned by the victim’s father.

Just as students are now doing in Pennsylvania, students at Broad Run High School in Loudoun County staged a walkout after the school board’s complicity in the rape was revealed.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/20/pennsylvania-students-protest-pro-trans-bathroom-policy

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School District Can’t Punish Teachers Who Refuse to Lie to Parents About Their Children, Court Rules

A federal judge has blocked a Southern California school district from punishing teachers who notify parents about their child’s purported gender transition in violation of district policy.

One of the lawyers who represented the teachers claims the ruling provides a “framework” for striking down policies banning parental notification across the country.

“It’s hard to overstate the significance of this ruling. There’s really nothing like it nationwide,” Paul Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society and partner at LiMandri & Jonna LLP, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “These gender policies at schools are dangerous and unconstitutional, and this ruling provides a framework for striking them down nationwide.”

“We know this fight is far from over, but the Thomas More Society is committed to seeing it through to the end,” Jonna added. The Thomas More Society, a not-for-profit public interest law firm, focuses on cases involving life, family, and freedom.

The Thomas More Society represents Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, two teachers in the Escondido Union School District with 55 years of experience between them. The teachers sued the school district after it established policy Administrative Regulation 5145.3, which mandates that teachers and school staff will immediately accept a student’s expressed gender identity and bars teachers from revealing the student’s claimed gender identity to parents or guardians unless the student consents to notifying them.

In a training session on Feb. 3, 2022, a district instructor told teachers that if they revealed a student’s stated transgender identity to parents or to other “individuals who do not have a legitimate need for the information,” that would be considered discriminatory harassment punishable under a policy the district adopted in 2003.

In August 2022, the teachers received an email with a list of students, including their preferred names and pronouns. The list included directions on whether teachers could disclose the names and pronouns to the students’ parents or guardians. Mirabelli reportedly received an email with a list of students like this: “[student name]: Preferred name is [redacted] (pronouns are he/him). Dad and stepmom are NOT aware, please use [redacted] and she/her when calling home.”

Mirabelli and West sued the school district, the California Board of Education, and the state superintendent of public instruction, claiming AR 5145.3 violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.

Judge Roger T. Benitez in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled Thursday that the teachers are likely to prevail on their religious freedom claims, and he granted a preliminary injunction preventing the school district from punishing Mirabelli and West if they notify parents about their kids’ stated transgender identities.

Benitez, an appointee of President George W. Bush, noted that the district considers “communicating to a parent the social transition of a school student to a new gender” to be “discrimination/harassment” despite “having little medical or factual connection to actual discrimination or harassment.”

He ruled that Mirabelli and West “are entitled to preliminary injunctive relief from what the defendants are requiring them to do here, which is to subjugate their sincerely-held religious beliefs that parents of schoolchildren have a God-ordained right to know of significant gender identity-related events.”

Benitez cited nine Supreme Court rulings declaring that “parents have a right, grounded in the Constitution, to direct the education, health, and upbringing, and to maintain the well-being of, their children.”

“Parental involvement in essential to the healthy maturation of schoolchildren,” he wrote. “The Escondido Union School District has adopted a policy without parent input that places a communication barrier between parents and teachers. Some parents who do not want such barriers may have the wherewithal to place their children in private schools or homeschool, or to move to a different public school district. Families in middle or lower socio-economic circumstances have no such options.”

“For these parents, the new policy appears to undermine their own constitutional rights while it conflicts with knowledgeable medical opinion,” he added. “An order enjoining the new district policy is in the better interests of the entire community, as well as the plaintiff teachers.”

The judge cited Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist with 40 years of experience who claims to be a transgender woman.

“A school-facilitated transition without parental consent interferes with parents’ ability to pursue a careful assessment and/or therapeutic approach prior to transitioning, prevents parents from making the decision about whether a transition will be best for their child, and creates unnecessary tension in the parent-child relationship,” Anderson warned. “Nor is facilitating a double life for some children, in which they present as transgender in some contexts, but cisgender in other contexts, in their best interests.”

Benitez concluded that the school’s policy causes “a trifecta of harm.”

The policy “harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. It harms the parents by depriving them of the long recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children. And finally, it harms plaintiffs who are compelled to violate the parent’s rights by forcing plaintiffs to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students—violating plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.”

The judge ruled that it is unclear whether the teachers can prove the school district violated their rights to free speech, but the court can resolve that issue later, because the school district likely violated their religious freedom.

Both Mirabelli and West believe that God has ordained the relationship between parents and children and that God forbids lying and deceit.

Since teachers, rather than all school staff, were required to attend the February 2022 training, Benitez ruled that the school district’s policy was not “generally applicable” and, therefore, it is subject to “strict scrutiny,” a legal test to determine if the government violated essential rights. To pass this test, the government must prove that the policy is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.

The judge ruled that the district has not identified a “compelling government interest” in hiding a student’s stated gender identity from parents and that the district did not consider the “least restrictive means” in pursuing such a policy.

“In the end, Mirabelli and West face an unlawful choice along the lines of: ‘lose your faith and keep your job, or keep your faith and lose your job,'” Benitez ruled.

The judge’s ruling does not resolve the case. Rather, Benitez granted a preliminary injunction blocking the school district from punishing Mirabelli or West for disclosing students’ stated gender identities to parents. The injunction will only last until another order from the court, and the underlying case remains unresolved.

The ruling comes shortly after California’s Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, sued the Chino Valley Unified School District to block its policy requiring schools to notify parents if their children claim to identify as transgender. Earlier this month, a California superior court judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Chino Valley policy.

Bonta and other California officials will likely defend policies that hide the truth from parents, but Benitez’s ruling may well provide a “framework” for striking down such policies, as Jonna suggests. In any case, these issues are likely to rise to higher courts, and parental notification ultimately may reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/19/new-court-ruling-provides-framework-striking-down-policies-hiding-gender-changes-parents-lawyer-says

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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)

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

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