Exactly who or what is the National School Boards Association? By Andrea Widburg
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.
The NSBA has a whole disquisition on equity. Again, you can feel the Critical Race Theory mindset oozing out through the jargon:
We affirm in our actions that each student can, will, and shall learn. We recognize that based on factors including but not limited to disability, race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, students are often deprived of equitable educational opportunities. Educational equity is the intentional allocation of resources, instruction, and opportunities according to need, requiring that discriminatory practices, prejudices, and beliefs be identified and eradicated.
There’s even a 26-page booklet for “Reimagining School Board Leadership: Actions for Equity.” Using mangled punctuation, the booklet asks board members to determine whether they are “teaching the truth about American history from multiple perspectives? (slavery, white supremacy, Native American genocide, etc.)?” That doesn’t sound like “multiple perspectives” to me.
As always, this equity doesn’t extend to the Board or the management. While the Board president is Hispanic, and there is a sprinkling of Blacks and Hispanics, the leadership is lily-white.
The NSBA’s recommendations to the Biden/Harris administration could have been drafted by AOC and her Squad, for they include
- Having Mrs. Joe Biden lead a task form on “Public School Transformation and Equity.”
- Requesting COVID money.
- Reversing Trump’s 1776 Advisory Committee because it “would harm efforts by many school districts to offer comprehensive and unbiased subject matter concerning American history.” (That would be the “slavery, white supremacy, Native American genocide, etc.” discussed above.)
- Reinstating Obama’s illegal DACA program.
- Rescinding Trump’s order ending Critical Race Theory training in schools.
- Rescinding Trump’s order enforcing federal law prohibiting immigrants who are a public charge.
- Putting pressure on schools to engage in race-based punishment (that is, students of one race cannot be punished more than those of another even if they are misbehaving more).
- Opposing vouchers.
- Protecting “Dreamers” and promoting amnesty for illegal aliens.
You can wade through the NSBA website yourself. You’ll find yourself hip-deep in Marxist jargon, anti-Americanism, support for illegal immigration, and Critical Race Theory. There’s a reason the Department of Justice instantly acquiesced to the NSBA’s request to use FBI intimidation to silence parental opposition to school boards implementing radical policies. The Biden administration and the NSBA are reading from the same hymnal in the Church of Wokeness.
I have heard through the rumor mill—and have no evidence to support this claim—that public school boards face pressure to join the NSBA. If that’s true, why wouldn’t they? Unless they dig deep or are attuned to the meaning behind apparently anodyne phrases such as “equity” or “anti-racism,” they have no idea what they’re supporting when they sign on.
Now that the NSBA has come out into the open as a radical leftist organization, I hope that school districts all over America immediately drop their affiliation with this body.
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