Tag Archives: education

A Start

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But it’s a move that could—and should—be made irrelevant by a larger move.

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL) and Kevin Cramer (R, ND) have reintroduced their Protect Equality and Civics Education (PEACE) Act, which is intended to eliminate the ability of the Department of Education to commit tax dollars to any plan or program to push Critical Race Theory into our schools.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a larger solution that more broadly addresses this mess.

The US Department of Education needs to be eliminated altogether—not merely defunded, but erased from the Federal government. This is a Cabinet entity that our nation did without just fine for nearly 200 years. It was created out of whole cloth just 43 years ago in 1979, and over the last several years, all it’s done has been to interfere with our children’s education by moving teaching away from serious subjects and into inherently racist and sexist ideological indoctrination. Additionally, DoEd has become a facility that seeks to deny due process to students accused of sexual misbehaviors. DoEd’s usefulness has disappeared.

Moreover, DoEd’s FY2024 budget request of $90 billion is money much better allocated to other purposes: items like plussing up our defense establishment with equipment, logistics, and combat training, as well as our defensive and offensive cyberwar capabilities; strengthening our government and private cyber security capabilities outside of our defense establishment; strengthening our energy and water distribution networks; supporting relocation of our economic supply chain sources and intermediate stops away from enemy nations. The personnel of the department should be transferred completely out of Federal government employ into the private sector, where their existing experience will easily facilitate their finding gainful employment.

Maybe, Instead…

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Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, has decided it’s had enough of parent input regarding its program of “storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and same-sex romance for elementary-age children. The MCPS, in its magnanimity, had allowed parents to opt their children out of such things, but the parents, en masse, opted their children out.

MCPS responded by issuing a blanket policy of no exceptions and no notifications—no more opt out for all those uppity recalcitrant parents.

Never mind that

the storybooks…explicitly encourage[e] children to “question sexuality and gender identity, focus on romantic feelings, and embrace gender transitioning[.]
Pre-kindergarten students, for example, are required to read Pride Puppy, which “promotes pride parades as family-friendly events without cautioning about the frequent nudity and sexually explicit conduct….”

Maybe, instead, there should be a blanket removal of the program altogether. It’s time, also, for a blanket removal of the MCPS school board and its Superintendent and staff.

Optimism

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Scott Fitzgerald (R, WI) and Aaron Withe, Freedom Foundation CEO, have it in spades regarding the National Education Association. The headline on their Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed illustrates it:

America’s Largest Teachers Union Isn’t Beyond Reform

Yes, it is. The NEA is utterly beyond redemption as its managers insist on pushing CRT, child transgenderism, and more from its pantheon of woke ideologies onto children, all the while deprecating the role of those children’s parents in their kids’ education.

The failure is sealed by NEA President Becky Pringle’s hysterical rant earlier this month at the NEA’s 2023 Representative Assembly, excerpted here.

The NEA is a Congressionally chartered teachers union, and Fitzgerald and Withe think it would be sufficient to amend the union’s charter

by adding 11 accountability and transparency provisions commonly found in other federal charters, such as prohibiting the NEA from engaging in political activities and lobbying, requiring it to submit annual reports to Congress, and requiring that its officers be US citizens.

However, the relationship between a union so chartered and Congress is tenuous at best. Congress doesn’t even supervise its chartered organizations; it only receives nominally annual financial statements. In the NEA’s case, its Congressional charter enjoined the union to promot[e] “the cause of education in the United States.” Yet, by Fitzgerald’s and Withe’s own admission,

[t]he NEA has worked not to fulfill its original purpose but to promote a left-wing social and economic agenda at odds with many Americans’ values. The union has used its institutional heft as leverage to influence nearly every major policy debate, from the debt ceiling and abortion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Second Amendment. Meantime, it has opposed efforts to reform failing schools by such means as school choice, curriculum transparency and performance pay for teachers.

What makes them think the NEA’s management would do any better at obeying an adjusted charter?

No, Congress is better off withdrawing the NEA’s charter altogether. Fitzgerald and Withe and their respective colleagues should work more locally to get the NEA decertified in as many school districts as possible.

Do What I Tell You

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Nice little school you got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

In response to the Temecula Unified School Board’s decision not to adopt a controversial social studies textbook in May, California [Progressive-Democrat] Governor Gavin Newsom challenged the board’s decision and threatened it with legislative consequences if it does not reverse course.

Here’s Newsom putting it plainly:

If the school board won’t do its job by its next board meeting to ensure kids start the school year with basic materials, the state will deliver the book into the hands of children and their parents—and we’ll send the district the bill and fine them for violating state law.

Nor is it Newsom alone. It’s the Progressive-Democratic Party at large, as illustrated by State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D, 29th District):

The antics of the Temecula Valley Unified School District are intolerable and damaging to its students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed. Book bans betray the most basic of California’s core values. I hope the members of the school board are able to reflect on their decisions and come to make better decisions for our children’s futures.

Aside from the all-too-typical Progressive-Democrat lie—no books are being banned by Temecula—students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed depend on their being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic instead of being indoctrinated with the racism and the professional victimhood and oppressor class sewage of CRT.

The antics, to use Rivas’ distortionate term, center on protecting our children, and that’s something the Progressive-Democrat Governor and his cronies object to.

A Bogus Beef

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Some academics object to Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott moving to ban TikTok from Texas government devices and from personal devices used to conduct Texas official business. Texas’ legislature passed the bill creating the ban, and Abbott signed it into law last December. Now a New York State-headquartered organization, ironically named The Knight First Amendment Institute, which is a facility of New York City’s Columbia University, is suing Abbott among other governors, over the ban, claiming free speech violations.

The lawsuit said the state’s decision…is comprising teaching and research. And more specifically, it said it was “seriously impeding” faculty pursuing research into the app—including research that could illuminate or counter concerns about TikTok.

This is, to use the legalese technical term, a crock. It’s also, to use a legal technical term, a frivolous suit.

Banning TikTok in no way inhibits what these academics say or collaborate over, nor does it in any way impede those academics’ speech or collaboration; it only bans one tool, a national security risk, from being used for the speech/collaboration. There are, after all, a plethora of communication and collaboration devices available other than TikTok. To name just a few (located after 10 grueling seconds on Bing search):

  • Slack
  • Zoom
  • Miro
  • MindMeister
  • Loom
  • Asana
  • Notion
  • Microsoft Teams

There are, also, freeware tools like Hugo and Scribe.

It’s hard to believe these So Smart persons aren’t aware of these tools. Maybe they should listen more to the students in their freshman orientation courses.

It’s even harder to understand why these Precious Ones insist on leaving their personal information; their research ideas, techniques, and progresses; their speech and thought available for People’s Republic of China government personnel to freely exploit; they should be called to explain that.

Their free speech interference claim is especially pernicious, given that these august personages are of the same guild that so zealously blocks, even with violence and firings, the speech of those with whom they disagree.