RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/joe-biden-teacher-union-toady-larry-sand/

As a presidential candidate in 2019, Joe Biden agreed with National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García’s claim that charter schools – independently operated public schools of choice, that don’t have to follow the litany of rules and regs that traditional public schools do and are rarely unionized – are “very misguided school reforms.” The fact that charters are very popular, which over a million waitlisted students will attest to, doesn’t make a whit of difference to Biden or teacher union leaders.

Then in May 2020, Biden said that if he is elected, “Charter schools are gone.” Period. His policy advisor Stef Feldman tried to soften the statement, explaining that Biden doesn’t want to get rid of charters, but instead would “require them to be authorized by and accountable to democratically-elected school bodies such as school boards and be held to the same levels of transparency and accountability as district schools.” In other words, he would not eliminate charters, but he would eviscerate them.

To assist Biden with policy decisions, the National Education Association came out with a “policy playbook” in November 2020, which details specific actions the union wanted the Biden administration to adopt. Predictably, their prescriptions are all far left and cover a multitude of issues, including some harsh words for charters. In a nutshell, NEA wants to regulate them to death, so that there is no effective difference between them and traditional government-run schools. The union also vaguely states that it opposes “all charter school expansion that undermines traditional public schools.”

https://www.city-journal.org/radical-gender-lessons-for-young-children

The Evanston-Skokie School District adopts a curriculum that teaches K-3 students to “break the binary” of gender.

The Evanston–Skokie School District has adopted a radical gender curriculum that teaches pre-kindergarten through third-grade students to celebrate the transgender flag, break the “gender binary” established by white “colonizers,” and experiment with neo-pronouns such as “ze,” “zir,” and “tree.”

I have obtained the full curriculum documents, which are part of the Chicago-area district’s “LGBTQ+ Equity Week,” which administrators adopted last year. The curriculum begins in pre-kindergarten, with a series of lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity. The lesson plan opens with an introduction to the rainbow flag and teaches students that “each color in the flag has a meaning.” The teacher also presents the transgender flag and the basic concepts of gender identity, explaining that “we call people with more than one gender or no gender, non-binary or queer.” Finally, the lesson plan has the teacher leading a class project to create a rainbow flag, with instructions to “gather students on the rug,” “ask them to show you their flags,” and “proudly hang the class flag where they can all see it.”

In kindergarten, the lessons on gender and trans identity go deeper. “When we show whether we feel like a boy or a girl or some of each, we are expressing our gender identity,” the lesson begins. “There are also children who feel like a girl and a boy; or like neither a boy or a girl. We can call these children transgender.” Students are expected to be able to “explain the importance of the rainbow flag and trans flag” and are asked to consider their own gender identity. The kindergartners read two books that affirm transgender conversions, study photographs of boys in dresses, learn details about the transgender flag, and perform a rainbow dance. At the end of the lesson, the students are encouraged to adopt and share their own gender identities with the class. “Now you have a chance to make a picture to show how you identify,” the lesson reads. “Maybe you want to have blue hair! Maybe you want to be wearing a necklace. Your identity is for you to decide!”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/inclusive-segregation/

The following is an excerpt from A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild.

The idea of “inclusion” was born in debates in the 1980s over how colleges and universities should deal with disparities in academic performance, mainly between black students as a category and all other students. Any explanation that pointed to average differences in ability, especially as measured by standardized tests, were deemed outrageous and insulting. Explanations that focused on the inadequacy of earlier academic preparation were more bearable but still carried the implication that black students as a whole were not capable of performing at the level of other students. The socially acceptable explanation that emerged was that the black students were victims of multiple forms of racism. American society had short-rationed their schools; college teachers treated them as racially inferior; racist assumptions were built into everyday life in America; and universities were “structurally racist.”

This last is the bridge to the conception of “inclusion.” Inclusion means recognizing that black students must be recognized as possessing their own cultural standards of expression, achievement, and excellence. Judging them by “white standards” is racist—structurally racist. A non-racist college or university would accommodate black students by judging them by black standards.

The connection to multiculturalism is evident. Inclusion, as a doctrine, incorporates the idea that black students have a separate culture, the norms of which must be respected. Eradicating all the “white assumptions” that pervade the university, however, is no small task. It requires a deep dismantling, the name for which is “Anti-Racism.” We get to “inclusion” by identifying and removing anything that might make black students feel disrespected or that might cast their academic performance in unflattering contrast to the average performance of other students.

https://www.newsweek.com/whiteness-physics-latest-front-woke-wars-opinion-1696124

Science education is no stranger to America’s culture wars, but traditionally the battle involved right-wingers attacking biology textbooks. Fields like physics—which I teach—largely escaped this fate, probably thanks to being less directly connected to matters of evolution, sex or the origin of life. Nonetheless, education in any field is a social activity; physics instruction cannot forever stay aloof from social controversies. Thus the reported excesses of K-12 education—including claims that right answers or acronyms are white supremacy—now seep into college-level science education.

The latest salvo on the science front involves an article titled “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study.” Physics professor Amy Robertson and her collaborator Tali Hairston use critical whiteness studies (CWS) and critical race theory (CRT) to interpret a case study of three students working on a mundane physics problem. The article has—unsurprisingly—drawn harsh criticism online.

However, the high-profile publication venue (one of the most prestigious education journals in the physics community) and the public resources underwriting the work (a $495,847 grant from the National Science Foundation) indicate that the intrusion of CRT into physics has become mainstream. Those who value rigorous science and rational analysis cannot afford to merely mock this work. We must instead shine light on it, demonstrate how stifling and unproductive CRT and CWS can be when applied to science classrooms, and highlight missed opportunities for insight.

Robertson and Hairston recorded and analyzed a six-and-a-half minute video of three students (identified as Hispanic, Middle Eastern and white) working on a problem involving heat, energy and temperature change, with occasional input from an instructor (identified as biracial). The students were asked to solve the problem using a particular technique that the instructor had previously outlined for them. Robertson and Hairston also conducted follow-up interviews with the instructor and two students.

https://www.newsweek.com/under-threat-woke-curricula-parents-are-fighting-back-opinion-1699080

Parents are yanking their kids from left-wing public schools at an increasing rate and the problem will likely worsen in the country’s most progressive cities.

After more than a year of hysterical COVID protocols that were clearly not based in science or data, progressive educators switched their focus to pushing dangerous and confusing woke curricula on captive young audiences. But the indoctrination agenda is backfiring.

Public school enrollment started a downward trend after a year of unnecessary COVID regulations. Though children are the least vulnerable to COVID, they were parked in front of computer screens for hours a day, isolated from friends and classmates and forced to mask when in-person class finally resumed. Students’ academic achievement suffered as much as their emotional growth, with students underperforming on tests while growing increasingly depressed, anxious and angry.

Even when it was clear remote learning was hurting children considerably more than COVID ever could, teachers’ unions still demanded students be kept in masks or continue to stay home. Parents had had enough.

The 2020-2021 school year saw an astonishing 3 percent of pupils leave their public schools, with the largest number coming from the younger grades. This represents roughly 1.5 million students nationwide. Now, thanks to newly released data, we’re seeing the exact numbers on the local level. They’re not pretty.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/cnn-frets-children-are-being-brainwashed-%E2%80%93-mark-tapson/

Hundreds of righteously concerned parents gathered recently outside the Walt Disney Company’s Burbank, California, headquarters to protest the corporation’s woke stance on gender ideology. The following weekend, Moms For America hosted a rally at Florida’s Disney World for the same reason. Now a mainstream media outlet has finally chimed in to warn its readers about the insidious political indoctrination of children – by conservatives.

CNN’s website recently featured an opinion piece by Nicole Hemmer titled, “The right-wing children’s entertainment complex is upon us,” which attempts to discredit conservative efforts to counter the leftist brainwashing of children that is widespread throughout America’s schools and the entertainment industry. Hemmer, an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, paints such efforts as paranoid, cynical, exploitative, insular, and bigoted, while pretending the culture war being waged on impressionable young minds by the left is nothing more than a right-wing fantasy.

The essay is couched in phrasing which suggests that conservatives are “hand-wringing” about nothing (“conservatives claim”; “what the right sees as liberal indoctrination”; “supposed liberal indoctrination,” etc.). She never acknowledges that parents have legitimate concerns about identity politics being inculcated in schoolrooms and through children’s entertainment programming. Instead, she implies that the rise of conservative alternatives to such cultural Marxism stems from paranoia and greed.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/19/professor-wins-400k-settlement-over-universitys-pronoun-policy/

In Ohio, a university professor was awarded $400,000 after he sued his employers over their policy demanding that he refer to students by their “preferred” pronouns.

The New York Post reports Professor Nick Meriwether was first punished by Shawnee State University back in 2018 after he refused to refer to a male student with female pronouns, after the student claimed to be “transgender.” Meriwether said that, at the time, “I tried to find an accommodation with the student. I was willing to use his proper name, female proper name, and initially the administration was willing to go along with that.”

“But then the administration changed course and demanded that I defer to the ideology, that I refer to the student as a female,” Meriwether explained in an interview. “And I simply could not do that.”

In response to Meriwether’s stand for his religious beliefs, the university claimed that his beliefs were not protected under the First Amendment, since it was his job as a university professor to use whatever language the school ordered.

“I believe that God created men and women, male and female. But also the idea that my speech could be coerced, could be compelled by the administration…The college classroom is to be a place of debate and discussion and freewheeling ideas,” Meriwether continued. “The university has no place in telling professors how they are to think with the students. It was a coercion of my freedom of speech.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/duke-divinity-school-students-god-queer-robert-spencer/

It was inevitable that Leftist divinity students, marinating as they are in the relentless insanity of the Left’s pet causes, would end up making gods in their own image: gay, woke, and whatever else the Left is idolizing at the moment. Duke Divinity School is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, which is already like being affiliated with the Maoists (gay, gender-fluid Maoists, that is), so it was the perfect place for a recent “Pride worship service” in which participants offered prayers to “the Great Queer One.”

Hope Rawlson of the Institute for Religion & Democracy reported Tuesday that the Pride worship service was designed to proclaim “God’s acceptance and support for LGBTQ relationships.” The bizarre service was the brainchild of Divinity Pride, a Duke student group that “affirms the dignity, faithfulness, and strength of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and gender/sexuality non-conforming Christians! We are committed to intersectional advocacy, education, and support for queer people and our allies specifically in the Divinity School, but with a Kingdom-reaching vision. We facilitate educative dialogues for the whole community, and we are here to support anyone who is reconciling their gender/sexuality and faith, facing persecution, or desiring a safe space.” They succeeded: the Pride worship service was plenty safe for men who think they’re women, and vice versa.

Master of Divinity (M.Div) student Caroline Camp kicked things off, and set the tone for the proceedings, with a prayer to the “strange one, fabulous one, fluid, and ever-becoming one,” and the “drag queen, and transman, and gender-fluid.” All this fluid put me in mind of Moss Hart’s wicked parody of Noel Coward’s precious and pretentious song lyrics in his riotous play The Man Who Came to Dinner: “Softly a fluid Druid meets me, Olden and golden the dawn that greets me…” Moss Hart had nothing on the Duke Divinity School. Camp also prayed, more prosaically, to the “mother, father, and parent,” Oh brother — that is, Oh brother, sister, and sibling.

https://cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/pulitzer-prize-winner-david-mamet-teachers-are-abusing-kids-mentally-and

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and celebrated filmmaker David Mamet said if there is no community control over the schools, then many kids will be indoctrinated and groomed by teachers who are “sexual predators,” people who abuse the children “mentally” and use “sex to do so.”

Mamet, a former leftist-turned-conservative, also said that not a few “teachers are inclined, typically men, because men are predators, to pedophilia,” and that’s why strict community control of the schools is necessary.

Mamet, whose screenwriting credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, Hoffa, and The Untouchables, made his remarks on Fox’s Life, Liberty & Levin, hosted by author and talk-radio host Mark Levin.

During a segment about Mamet’s new best selling book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, Levin said, “David, I want to read something that you wrote, so the American people hear this and then I’d like you to comment further on this.

“‘Margaret Sanger believed in euthanasia and sterilization of ‘unfortunate’ and mentally challenged, and Blacks. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood, which, like all organizations expanded its brief, (originally one of control of sub-humans) in the control of all conception. Her insights were taken up in the 60s with ‘hygiene classes,’ which became ‘sex education,’ educators holding that because perhaps the children were not taught at home, the higher orders needed to take charge, and now we have kindergartens trained in a bizarre catechism of sexual identity politics.'”