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.

More Coverup

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Recall that President Joe Biden has had (and still has?) classified documents squirreled away in his garage at his house in Delaware, albeit protected by the presence of his Corvette. Recall, further, that Biden has had classified documents squirreled away in a variety of unsecure locations ever since he walked away with them when he was a Senator and had no legal ability to possess them anywhere. Among those unsecure locations is the library at the University of Delaware. And now,

Delaware’s highest court has blocked a request by conservative groups seeking to access President Joe Biden’s Senate papers at a state university.
The July 6 ruling by the Delaware Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that sided with the University of Delaware in denying a request from Judicial Watch and another group seeking access to the records, which Biden gifted to the public university in 2012.

But,

The university says Biden donated the documents on the condition they not be released until they have been “properly processed and archived.”

But, but: that was 11 years ago. Why is the University so slow in the processing and archiving? Its slowness raises other questions in my pea brain:

What classified documents are among those documents?

What information regarding Tara Reade, who accused Biden of sexual assault in 2020, is among those documents?

What else is the university hiding for Biden’s sake?

CIOs, Affirmative Action, and Diversity

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Company CIOs, Chief Information Officer inhabitants of the C-Suites, claim to be worried about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling banning colleges’ and universities’ use of race as an admission criterion on their own access to a suitably “diversity”-laden work force.

By removing race from college admission considerations, the pool of tech talent entering the workforce may not only be less diverse, it could also be smaller if underrepresented minorities don’t see the field as a welcoming or viable option, those executives say.

No, rather than looking to plus up their virtue credentials, these executives should be more worried about (prospective) employees’ ability to do the job than about whether their departments have the “correct” balance of skin colors and sexes.

There is this from Juniper Networks‘ CIO:

“I worry about, in universities, if we’re not making it a more hospitable environment, that we make it harder than it is,” said Sharon Mandell…. That means companies and IT leaders need to work to convince diverse workers that technology is “a compelling place, and a welcome place for them.”

That hints at a good start (but only hints); however, by beginning at the college/university level, it renders itself too late to be an effective start. Of course, I’m also, probably naively, assuming a benign definition of “hospitable.”

Hence my question: if these CIOs and their companies are serious, and not just virtue-signaling, what are they doing to improve K-12 education and the resulting better preparation for all students? If all students get an equal opportunity at a quality education, the resulting population of job applicants—whatever the job—will pretty much automatically have a requisite diversity, artificial as that criterion is.

Unless, of course, these CIOs (they wouldn’t be alone in this regard) actually think some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior in ability to other groups of humans and so those lesser groups need special handling and protection.

A Good Move

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It needs a parallel move, as well. Sadly, both are pipe dreams in the current government.

Recall that President Joe Biden (D) has pushed, through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his Loan-Level Price Adjustment rule which penalizes Americans with good credit scores by requiring mortgage lenders to charge them higher interest rates in order to lower the rates charged those mortgage borrowers who have poor credit scores.

Senator Roger Marshall (R, KS) and Senator Mike Braun (R, IN) have introduced the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act that would block Biden’s move.

This is a good initial move, but it wants a separate, parallel move: reduce the funding of the FHFA by the aggregated dollar amount of the loan rate increase that Americans with good credit scores would be forced to pay were the Biden Rule left intact. Leave that reduction in place, and freeze the FHFA’s remaining budget at its current level for a minimum of five years (to remove it from election cycles), with automatic extensions of the freeze until Congress is satisfied that no one in the agency is working on ways to get around the MCBPA’s bar.

Sadly, both are pipe dreams at present: there are too many Progressive-Democrats in the Senate for either legislation to pass.

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.