RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/exactly_who_or_what_is_the_national_school_boards_association.html

I’m willing to bet that, before this week, most Americans, including parents whose kids are or were in public school, had never heard of the National School Boards Association (“NSBA”). When its president, though, wrote to Joe Biden suggesting that parents who complain about Critical Race Theory, masks, and transgenderism are domestic terrorists, it popped up on our radar. And when the DOJ promptly agreed with that suggestion by promising to send FBI agents to become involved with local school boards, people started wondering just who or what the NSBA really is.

Here’s how the NSBA describes itself:

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) is a federation of state associations and the U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands that represent locally elected school board officials serving approximately 51 million public school students regardless of their disability, ethnicity, socio-economic status or citizenship. Working with and through our state association members, NSBA advocates for equity and excellence in public education through school board leadership.

The NSBA claims to “represent more than 90,000 local school board members….” Those are big numbers.

There’s more but you get the gist: It’s a do-good lobbying organization for American public-school boards. It’s when you get into the details of exactly what constitutes doing good as far as the NSBA is concerned that you realize that it is a group completely dedicated to leftist policies.

The word “equity” crops up repeatedly. As we’ve learned in the last decade, while the Founders were concerned with equality, which means that all people are entitled to equal treatment under the law, along with a citizen’s right to a voice in representative government, equity is different. Equity is a zero-sum game of winners and losers, with the government determining who wins and who loses. It pits groups against each other, treats individuals based on external, immutable characteristics, glories in victimhood, and generally is antithetical to a free people and a free society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/educated-idiots-critical-race-theory-and-other-bad-bruce-thornton/

“Educated idiots” is how my old man described college-educated people who were completely devoid of common sense and moral intelligence, or what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” But what made them especially annoying was their arrogance, their assumption that because they were professionally credentialed in one area, they were equally knowledgeable about everything else.

This perennial character flaw was recognized by the ancients. Socrates in his defense speech noted this presumptuous claim among the Athenians he questioned during his search for someone wiser than he. The poets and artisans, for example, because they had many useful skills and technical knowledge, “thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” Nor were the highly educated immune: “There is nothing so absurd,” the Roman orator Cicero wrote, “that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” Humans by nature are vain and crave recognition for being superior to their fellows, which make us vulnerable to this willful error of thought and character.

But over the last 150 years, the broadening of formal education to include the masses, the increase and hyper-specialization in university disciplines, and the prestige of the natural sciences from the technologies that improved material existence, have made this bad habit ubiquitous. Worse yet, the aggressive promotion during the last fifty years of “college for everyone”–– which necessarily required lower standards and a decline in foundational skills––multiplied the numbers of people with this affliction, even as the quality of their degrees was degraded.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/10/05/epic-427000-parents-respond-to-national-school-board-association-labeling-them-domestic-terrorists-n1521936

Last week, PJ Media covered the hysterical and threatening letter written by National School Boards Association (NSBA) president Viola Garcia. In the letter sent to none other than President Joe Biden, Garcia accused America’s concerned parents of threats, intimidation, and even “hate crimes” rising to the level of “domestic terrorism” for having the gall to speak up at their local school board meetings. The NSBA also requested “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against school board members, school officials, and teachers.”

This week, however, the leaders of almost two dozen parent organizations fired back with a scathing letter of their own—and it is epic. The letter, written on behalf of members of several parent organizations, made clear that the NSBA’s claims of  “hate” and “terrorism” were shameful:

NSBA cites a tiny number of minor incidents in order to insinuate that parents who are criticizing and protesting the decisions of school boards are engaging in, or may be engaging in, “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” NSBA even invokes the PATRIOT Act. The association of legitimate protest with terrorism and violence reveals both your contempt for parents and your unwillingness to understand and hear the sincere cries of parents on behalf of their children. To equate parents with terrorists dishonors the thousands of victims of actual terrorism around the world. Have you no shame?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/06/liberal-states-flunk-the-education-equity-test/

Race-obsessed liberals talk a good game when it comes to “equity.” But they could learn a thing or two about delivering it from conservatives who focus on opportunity, not outcomes. That’s one conclusion you can safely draw from a state-by-state analysis of education equity by WalletHub.

In a report released in August, WalletHub looked at 12,927 school districts throughout the U.S. and ranked them comparing average household income and per-pupil spending at public schools in those districts. The bigger the difference, the worse the state scored on equity.

It’s not hard to see a pattern in the results. Of the 10 states with the least equitable school districts, seven are solidly blue: New York, California, Illinois, Oregon, Maine, New Jersey, and New Mexico. On the map below, the darker the color, the more equitable the schools.

Of the 10 with the best equity scores, all but one – Minnesota – are Republican-leaning states.