RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/revolt-of-the-parents-vol-3-wisconsin-waukesha-kenosha-oklahoma-school-board-election-11649280677?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

America’s fed-up parents on Tuesday sent another set of school board incumbents to the timeout corner to reflect on what they’ve done wrong. This time the elections were in Waukesha, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee. The races were nonpartisan officially, yet it was a win for a slate backed by the state and local GOP.

Three Waukesha school incumbents lost their seats, one in the primary, two on Tuesday. “Our children have endured an awful lot in the past two years navigating a pandemic that unleashed mandates, restrictive rules, remote learning and constant changes to their normal school routine,” one of the winning challengers, Mark Borowski, says on his website. He also criticizes—and he ran against—“equity initiatives” that “infiltrated district curriculum,” while dividing students and “espousing falsehoods about America.”

The incumbents protested that Mr. Borowski and the other challengers were running on national GOP talking points. But the arguments had local resonance.

Last year a Waukesha kindergarten teacher was suspended for a day after she refused to take down a gay and transgender pride flag she had hung in her classroom. The local teachers union urged staff to wear rainbows in solidarity. Parents could be forgiven for wondering about this seeming focus on ideological activism instead of education.

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2022/04/06/parents_should_guide_their_childrens_civic_education_825557.html

What should parents look for in a K-12 civics curriculum for their children? I’ve been asked that question a lot since the release of “Learning for Self-Government: A K–12 Civics Report Card,” a report I wrote that surveys popular civics curricula. One short answer is the Curriculum Sketch. Another answer is Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum, which is the gold standard for civics in 2022. But here’s a longer answer – an answer that will help parents ask their own questions as they examine the civics curricula used in their children’s schools.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that teaches the nuts and bolts of American government. Their children should learn what the Constitution is and how it works. They should learn how state and local government works. If they hear a politician say, “I’ll do this,” their children should know if he’d be breaking the law if he tried to do that.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that teaches the moral beliefs of the American Founders, so their children can learn why and for what purposes the Founders created our government. The Founders believed in limited government, because they saw that individuals were fallible. They believed in free government, because they reasoned that people were best suited to choose their own happiness. Students need to know our republic’s moral foundations to be able to pass on the blessings of liberty to future generations.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that gives students a vocabulary that accompanies being a free citizen. Their children shouldn’t rely on the paraphrases of teachers and textbooks. They should read the words themselves. They should study the Constitution and The Federalist, The Gettysburg Address and Brown v. Board of Education – all our documents of freedom. Children become citizens by reading the words of these key texts themselves, thinking about them, and acting on them.

Parents should look for a civics curriculum that instills pride in America without erasing Americans’ all-too-human faults. Our children should know that we are proud of our achievements – not least because we’ve struggled at times to follow our better angels.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/04/05/ohio-house-introduces-floridastyle-parental-rights-bill-n2605518

Two Ohio state representatives introduced legislation that mirrors Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill and also prohibits Critical Race Theory-inspired instruction.

State GOP Reps. Mike Loychik and Jean Schmidt on Monday introduced House Bill 616, which would ban public educators teaching grades kindergarten through third grade from teaching, using or providing any instruction or material on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Educators for fourth through twelfth grades will not be allowed to teach age-inappropriate content in accordance with Ohio’s “state standards.”

This comes after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law last week that bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade and would limit age-inappropriate discussions of sexuality in other grades.

Dubbed by critics as the “Don’t say gay” bill despite there being no mention of a ban on the word, Florida’s legislation also allows parents to access their children’s education and health records and requires schools to inform parents of changes to their child’s mental, physical or emotional well-being. The bill exempts schools from disclosing information to their parents if a “reasonably prudent person” would be concerned that doing so could result in abuse, abandonment or neglect.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-leads-the-way-in-reinstating-the-sat-admissions-policies-standardized-testing-college-students-11649185773?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

During oral arguments in a 2003 Supreme Court case about affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school, Justice Antonin Scalia told lawyers who were defending the school’s racially discriminatory admissions policies that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too.

“I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to create an elite law school . . . [and] it’s done this by taking only the best students with the best grades and the best SATs or LSATs, knowing that the result of this will be to exclude to a large degree minorities.”

Scalia said that if Michigan wants to be an elite law school, that’s fine. But there are trade-offs involved if the school also wants to prioritize enrolling some predetermined percentage of underrepresented minorities for aesthetic reasons. “If [racial diversity] is indeed a significant compelling state interest, why don’t you lower your standards?” he asked. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.”

Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.

https://amac.us/new-variant-of-the-crt-virus-social-emotional-learning/

Amid the national backlash over Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and other radical political and social doctrines being peddled in K-12 classrooms, parents are sounding the alarm over a new “variant” of left-wing instructional dogma: “social-emotional learning,” or SEL. While the term sounds innocuous enough, mounting evidence suggests that SEL curriculum is often simply a rebranding of the same dangerous and divisive ideologies that have dominated education headlines in recent months.

If you ask proponents of the concept, they’ll tell you that SEL is all about helping students grow into well-rounded adults who can manage their emotions and interpersonal relationships. Casel, one of the leading organizations that sells SEL programming to schools, defines it as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”

Much of the terminology that advocates of the doctrine use to promote SEL is drawn from the mental health field. The assertion is that when students are confident in themselves and their identities, they perform better in the classroom. As the Washington Post explained in a recent feature piece on SEL, “social-emotional learning seeks to treat children as human beings with feelings, life goals and even traumas, not just students learning to write essays and solve math problems.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/schools-push-radical-gender-ideology-under-guise-of-social-emotional-learning-parents-warn/?utm_

During the pandemic, Traci Spiegel’s son and most of his Howard County, Md., classmates received virtually no mathematics instruction for five months.

What little ineffective virtual instruction he did receive didn’t prevent his grade from plummeting from an A to a C. So when he returned to the classroom as a high-school freshman, he became incredibly frustrated that he and his peers were asked to spend 40 minutes every Monday on so-called social-emotional learning (SEL).

Instead of spending as much time as possible making up the ground they had lost in math and other subjects, they were taught how to avoid committing microaggressions, how to use pronouns, and how to avoid offending gay people, according to Spiegel’s son.

Since conservatives at all levels of government embraced the fight against critical race theory, dissenting parents nationwide know how to recognize and counter racially divisive curricula. But a broader suite of radical ideas, couched in therapeutic language, is quietly being advanced under the banner of SEL, parents whose children have been exposed to such programming told National Review.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-short-sighted-ignoble-lie-of-dei/

Universities nationwide mistakenly yield to a revolutionary minority of students arguing for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ hoping to ward them off.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These three words are now the holy trinity of woke activists seeking to impose their ideology on institutions across the country. It’s worst at — though by no means exclusive to — universities. Ever since DEI-inspired protests at the University of Missouri caused that school’s president to resign in 2015 despite an absence of any wrongdoing, raging students, working hand-in-hand with activist administrators and sympathetic faculty members, have only grown more ambitious. Just this past November, at Coastal Carolina University, Steven Earnest was, at the behest of the school’s DEI committee, temporarily removed from teaching duties for uttering the following heresy (***Content Warning***): “I’m just sad people get their feelings hurt so easily.”

Based on such stories, it’s easy to assume that university administrators have lost their minds. The now-commonplace and well-funded DEI departments on campuses, which are consistent sources of identity-based propaganda, certainly give that impression. But in reality, the vast majority of statements and initiatives from such departments are half-baked, designed to quell the shrieks of a frothing, vocal minority — the one that’s actually in charge.

Unfortunately, this minority is not confined to academia. Its aims have spread elsewhere, including to the legal sector, helped in part by its proximity to academia in the form of law school.  As Aaron Sibarium has written, the American Bar Association has recently acquiesced to the woke aims of a petition from 176 law-school deans, including the likes of UChicago and Yale. Now, the ABA requires students to receive “education on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” for accreditation purposes.