Category: Education & Schools

Christian Science Monitor: If You Don’t Like Public Schools Proselytizing for Islam, You’re a Racist

The Christian Science Monitor did its bit Friday for the left’s propaganda barrage, reminding us all that America is a benighted, sinister land full of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, such that only Old Joe and his henchmen can save us. The Monitor painted a picture of an innocent World Cultures and Geography class in a New Jersey public school teaching about Islam and getting accused by racist redneck yahoos of proselytizing for Islam. As far as the Monitor is concerned, it’s a story of evil Trump followers hating the sainted Other; in reality, however, it reveals how Islamic indoctrination is becoming increasingly common and accepted in public schools.

At Chatham Middle School in New Jersey, students were shown “a five-minute video introduction to Islam that included statements like ‘Allah is the one God,’ The Quran is a ‘Perfect guide for Humanity,’ and ‘May God help us all find the true faith, Islam.’” Now just imagine what would have happened if a public school had been found to be teaching that “Jesus is the Son of God,” “the Bible is a perfect guide for humanity,” and “May God help us all find the true faith, Christianity.” But when it comes to the left’s favored religion, it’s a different situation altogether.

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Guilting: Kindergarteners Forced to Recite “Acknowledgements” That They Occupy Stolen Land

As with language, kids learn all things best when they’re young — and hate-America-first propaganda is no exception. Thus is the daily indoctrination of American schoolchildren troubling, and brought to light last night is a striking example of it: kindergarteners being forced daily to recite “land acknowledgements,” which are admissions that they live on stolen land.

The outrage occurred in Renton, Washington, and was recorded by a shocked mother during online learning. “The struggle sessions went on endlessly,” reported Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson Friday night. “One went on for 17 minutes — all for the benefit of the Duwamish tribe, who didn’t in the end, of course, benefit; they got nothing” (video below).

In other words, the teacher did not, shockingly, practice what she preached and donate her land to the Duwamish.

One more time parents!
Do you know the curriculum of the school you’re sending your children to?

Critical Race Theory Is Coming to Your Suburban Community

Radicals pushing a Marxist and racist pedagogy called Critical Race Theory (CRT) have achieved their goal of destroying quality education in K-12 school systems in New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and other large, progressive-controlled cities. But if suburban parents think they are safe from these depredations due to the existing quality of their school systems and parental involvement, they are wrong. CRT has already quietly established residence in affluent suburban communities under the benign-sounding guise of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-S) under the aegis of state education departments, teachers’ unions and the burgeoning CRT industry.

For example, in 2018, the New York State Board of Regents engaged the New York University/Steinhardt Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools to develop a “framework for culturally-responsive-sustaining education. As a result of the Regents’ adoption of the resulting guidance document, students and parents in the affluent suburbs in Westchester County, which is immediately north of New York City, are being subjected to efforts to perform “equity audits”, “cultural proficiency training” and culturally responsive educational programs.

While the language of CR-S may seem benign at first sight, these programs are based on CRT, an ideology that seeks educational “equity” by uprooting the biases between the oppressors (white, privileged students) and the oppressed (non-white students). The New York State Department of Education gave its blessing to these efforts in its guidance document, available on the state’s website, which has the starting point that our current educational system has failed the diverse needs of children

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Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is bankrolling an activist educational group that believes math is racist and that arriving at an objective answer is an example of “white supremacy.”

Yes, really.

A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an “inherently racist practice.”

The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.

“In fact, over the past decade, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded over of $140 million to a variety of groups associated with Pathway. Their “antiracist resources” are at the epicenter of a new training course for teachers offered by the Oregon Department of Education throughout the state,” reports National File.

“Three of the most prominent organizations receiving grant money from the Gates’ are The Education Trust, Teach Plus, and WestEd, all non-profit 501c organizations.”

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Let’s just be blunt about this.
This ‘teacher’ realizes that many black students – for whatever reasons, poor primary schooling/cultural rejection of ‘whitey education’/what have you – aren’t able to keep up with high school level math/algebra/geometry and instead of working on fixing the reasons that cause this, wants to provide an excuse. This lets the education system ‘off the hook’ for its failure and reinforces the notion that black ‘culture’ need not be educated but can rely on welfare to live on.

Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo ‘racism in mathematics’
A toolkit includes a list of ways ‘white supremacy culture’ allegedly ‘infiltrates math classrooms’

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

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BLUF:
My tax dollars have paid for this.

Of course, it was only months ago that days of devastating riots took place in Minneapolis, just a few miles from the schools these districts administer. Those riots were infinitely more destructive than the one last week in Washington, but they drew no analogous response from the public schools–certainly not one that criticized the mayor, city council and governor who tolerated and even encouraged rioting and lawlessness. But that’s different: they are Democrats.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WEIGH IN

America’s public schools are owned lock, stock and barrel by the Democratic Party, so it is no surprise that they are now echoing their party’s line on last week’s events. I have seen several partisan emails from school districts; this one comes from my own district:

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Sending your children to public school is parental malpractice

Cops Threaten To Arrest Mom Who Wouldn’t Show ID When She Picks Her Kids Up From School
“I pulled the kids and I’m homeschooling.”

You may recall the saga of the South Carolina mom who granted her kids—ages 9, 10, and 11—permission to walk the mile home together, without her.

School officials refused to let them to do this, on the grounds that a nearby intersection (with walk/don’t walk signals) is too dangerous. This particular mom’s kids happen to cross it at other times, unaccompanied, on their way to and from extracurriculars.

Has the school never heard of crossing guards? No matter. The children were required to be picked up by an approved adult. If not, they would have to take the school bus.

The mom, Jessie Thompson, didn’t understand why it was up to the school to decide what her kids did after leaving school property. She offered to sign a liability waiver. This did not move the needle and the issue came to a head this past week. Continue reading “”

Kamala Harris’ husband lands teaching gig at Georgetown University.

Georgetown University Law Center has announced Doug Emhoff, the husband of Sen. Kamala Harris, will teach an “Entertainment Law Disputes” course during the upcoming Spring 2021 semester.

Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor released a statement about Emhoff’s new course and said that students will “greatly benefit” from his experience.

“I am delighted that Douglas Emhoff will be joining our faculty. Doug is one of the nation’s leading intellectual property and business litigators, and he has a strong commitment to social justice. I know our students will greatly benefit from his experience and insight, and I am eagerly looking forward to his arrival,” Treanor said.

According to the statement, Emhoff will also serve as a Distinguished Fellow of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, as part of a new entertainment and media law initiative that will include a speaker series and other projects.

Emhoff said in the statement that he was “excited to join the Georgetown community.”

“I’ve long wanted to teach and serve the next generation of young lawyers,” Emhoff said, according to the statement by Georgetown.

Currently, Emhoff is a “litigator and strategic advisor” for global law firm DLA Piper.

According to his profile on the DLA website, Emhoff is currently transitioning his practice as he prepares to take on new responsibilities in light of the presidential transition, which the Trump administration authorized in late November.

Andrew Jose, a student at Georgetown University, told Campus Reform that he is excited to have the opportunity to potentially take Emhoff’s class.

“Mr. Emhoff is a man, who due to him being Mrs. Harris’ husband, has exposure to different experiences that would be of good use to Georgetown students when he shares them through his classes. I look forward to being a student of his, regardless of my political sentiments,” Jose said.

Campus Reform reached out to Georgetown Law for further comment; however, a reply was not received in time for publication.

Now They Are Coming After the Pioneers

The public display of “woke” sensitivity is certainly contagious, and this virus has infected all levels of academic and corporate worlds. There are no issues too trivial to be affected, including team mascots and logos. Marietta College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, has recently announced to its alumni that the College’s Pioneer mascot and logo are “under review” in light of “recent events.” This “review” is a symptom of a much larger story.

It is not too difficult to figure out just what are these “recent events,” as manifested by the current war on the name Redskins and on the monuments that include those of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The name Pioneers may soon join the forbidden ranks of Redskins. Apparently, any respect for those of European ancestry who first ventured into the Ohio River valley may now be unacceptable for a college that once proudly referred to itself as the Pioneers.

In and of themselves, any team’s nickname, logo, and mascot, are not very important. Who really cares if the team is called the Pioneers or whatever? Unfortunately, this proposed “review” by the College has a much broader, nationwide context, and is being driven by those who would radically transform and thereby diminish American society.

Stalin may have been a crude mass murderer, but he was cunningly perceptive. He recognized that an important element for the domination of the present is the control of the past. A ruler simply rewrites the past as necessary, airbrushes the pictures, turns persons into non-persons, all in a manner that justifies the agenda, no matter what or how brutal. This is an especially useful tactic if you accept the fantasy that history is necessarily progressive, and that there is “a right side of history” as Barak Obama used to assert.

The American Left has learned Stalin’s tactic well. Delegitimize the American past as incurably evil, convince people that there was nothing admirable in American system, fill the textbooks and lectures with the pathological dishonesty of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and any defense of contemporary American institutions and practices becomes next to impossible for those who don’t know better. Continue reading “”

Nothing earthshattering about this.
Our education indoctrination system at work, producing generations of stupid people.
I really like where the coed was asked – @ 2:42  – who would define it and she basically says ‘the goobermint’. You can see that she is in some manner aware of the utter irony of that and it makes her question her own statement.

Students call for national hate speech law…but can’t define ‘hate speech.’

I’d question if it actually is ‘relevant’.

It’s relevant, but is it really math?

Math teachers are asking students to analyze social-justice issues to make math relevant and compelling, reports Catherine Gewertz in Education Week. “Teachers are drawing on high-profile issues such as policing patterns, the spread of the pandemic, and campaign finance to explore math concepts from place value to proportionality and algebraic functions.”

In a social-justice math lesson, students may be asked to analyze data on the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

A new book with equity-based lessons for high school math teachers has become a bestseller.

Some districts are looking at teaching math through a “social-justice lens,” writes Gewertz. “The Seattle school district developed a framework last year that weaves questions of power and oppression into math instruction, along with explorations of ethnic identity, but it hasn’t been adopted.”

Detractors called the Seattle plan “woke math.” It wasn’t a compliment. Continue reading “”

Kentucky Religious Schools Have First Amendment Right to Reopen, Says Federal Judge.
The decision should also support secular private schools having similar rights as well. (Public schools are under control of the state government, and lack First Amendment rights against it.)

In Wednesday’s Danville Christian Academy, Inc. v. Beshear(E.D. Ky.), Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove’s granted a preliminary injunction that allowed religious schools to reopen in Kentucky; the governor’s closure order, the court concluded, violated the Free Exercise Clause. (The order was promptly appealed, and presumably Governor Beshear will ask the Sixth Circuit to hear the case on an expedited basis.)

[1.] The opinion concluded that there was sufficient evidence that the closure order burdened Danville Christian’s Free Exercise Clause rights:

To begin, the parties do not facially dispute that Danville Christian has a sincerely held religious belief in conducting in-person instruction. Nevertheless, the Governor argues that the fact Danville Christian halted in-person teaching earlier during the pandemic, when faced with an infected member of its community, seriously undermines the irreparable harm requirement of a preliminary injunction. By implication, this raises a challenge to the school’s sincerity. In response, Danville Christian argued that the halt in holding in-person instruction was a voluntary short-term act taken out of deference to the community, and now that more is known about the virus and other measures can be taken to allow classes to resume safely, it would violate Danville Christian’s First Amendment rights to force the school to hold virtual instead of in-person classes.

Exercising a judgment call to close for a short period of time when far less was known about the virus cannot now effectively counter its conviction. Danville Christian has presented evidence of the significance of in-person instruction, including the holding of weekly chapel services and corporate prayer throughout the day. The Court is also cognizant of the role of daily in-person mentorship of religious values that occur in religious schools that is simply not as feasible in a virtual setting. In extending the ministerial exception to private school teachers in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the Supreme Court expressed that in the First Amendment context, faith and education go hand in hand. “[E]ducating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school.” Therefore, insofar as it relates to the irreparable harm prong, the Court finds this to be sufficient to demonstrate Danville Christian’s sincerely held belief.

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I AM STRONG, I AM INVINCIBLE. I AM WOMAAAN!!!!
No! NO! NO!! Boys have cooooties!!!!!

Comment o’ the Day:
They’re actually doing men in fraternities an inadvertent favor, since due process does not exist for males accused of sexual wrongdoing. Especially at Duke, where 88 professors joined The New York Times, Nancy Grace and Dan Abrams in proclaiming the Duke Lacrosse Team members guilty of rape in advance of any trial.

Men should NEVER have any sort of personal or romantic relationships with female coworkers or fellow students. If women don’t like that, they can address their complaints to feminism.

Duke sorority council bans events with male groups.

The Panhellenic Council at Duke University voted to ban chapters of member sororities from hosting “mixers” with all-male organizations, vowing to place chapters that violate the rule on social probation.

The Duke Panhellenic Association “unites women across 10 chapters” of various sororities and is the “largest unified body of undergraduate women at Duke University.”

According to a post on the Duke Panhellenic Association’s Instagram page, the Panhellenic Council voted to ban mixers with all-male organizations to focus on women’s empowerment. The post states that all-male organizations cause concern amongst other groups due to gender dynamics and the objectification of women.

The post defines mixers as “exclusive events between organizations.” Continue reading “”

Ohio Senate Approves Armed School Staff Legislation

There are already dozens of school districts across the state of Ohio that have armed school staff in place, but a lawsuit filed with the help of Everytown for Gun Safety is putting the legality of thousands of vetted and trained school staff in jeopardy. Parents in the Madison school district argue that under Ohio law, teachers and staff need to have the exact same training as police officers before they can legally carry, and the issue is currently before the state Supreme Court.

Lawmakers in the Buckeye State aren’t waiting for the court to decide if the current statutes allow for districts to determine their own training policies for armed school staff. On Wednesday, the state Senate approved legislation that specifically authorizes school staffers to carry without going through hundreds of hours of peace officer training.

State Sen. Bill Coley, a Butler County Republican sponsoring the bill, said the “court went off the reservation” with its ruling. The legislation, he said, would ensure that “school districts in my area of the state can have the same rights that all of your school districts in your areas of the state have.”

Gun-rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, have expressed support for SB 317, arguing local education officials should be allowed to determine the best policies for ensuring their schools are safe. The Madison Local School District put its policy in place after a 14-year-old student opened fire at Madison Junior-Senior High School in 2016, injuring four.

Several Democratic senators spoke against the legislation prior to the bill’s passage in the GOP-dominated Senate. They argued that the bill is unwanted by most Ohioans and makes schools less safe.

“No child in Ohio should have to worry about if there is a gun at school, or if the person with the gun has had proper training,” said state Sen. Hearcel Craig, a Columbus Democrat.

First off, no teacher or staff member in Ohio is carrying without first volunteering, being vetted, and then undergoing several days of training, typically through the Ohio FASTER program, which focuses specifically on stopping armed threats at school. Educators not only learn how to respond to an attack with their lawfully-carried firearm, but they learn de-escalation techniques, first aid, and other strategies to deal with an active assailant and the aftermath. Continue reading “”

Was That A Toy Gun In Your Living Room?

How bad has the anti-gun hysteria gotten among some in our educational system? So bad that a grade-school student from Colorado Springs, Colo., was recently suspended for having a toy gun—in his own home!

Isaiah Elliott, who is 12 years old, was home last August participating in an online class. His school was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Isaiah was sitting on his living room couch with his laptop computer. He was next to a friend who was also doing online class work with a different teacher. During his second-period class, Isaiah’s art teacher noticed the friend was holding a “gun” and asked Isaiah to move it off screen.

Isaiah then took the green toy pistol—which had the words “ZOMBIE HUNTER” emblazoned on one side—from his friend and placed it out of the teacher’s sight.

Afterwards, the art teacher informed her superior that a student had what looked like a gun. The school official called the police.

“They said they called the police for my son’s safety,” said Dani Elliott, Isaiah’s mother. “But, if they were so concerned about him and if they really thought his life might be threatened, why didn’t they call me immediately? And why did the police take four-and-a-half hours to get to our house?”

As was widely reported by local and national news media, Widefield School District 3, Isaiah’s school district at the time of this incident, repeated its “student-safety” mantra to explain the school’s reaction. The district also claimed Isaiah had violated school policy by bringing a “facsimile” firearm to school. Because of this, he was suspended for five days.

“But he was not at school,” said Elliott. “He was in our living room. Apparently, they have the right to dictate what goes on in our own home, over a Nerf gun no less!”

Elliott did receive an email from the school about an hour after the incident. She called the school and told them it was a toy gun. Bodycam footage (available on the internet) shows an El Paso County Sheriff’s office deputy at the school to take the complaint from school staff. The video shows one staffer admitting it was most likely a toy gun as they laughed over the incident.

“It really scared Isaiah when the deputy sheriff showed up,” said Elliott. “And I believe the school suspended my son to save face, to pretend they actually had some policy in place to cover this. They don’t. It’s our home, not the school building.”

Elliott soon pulled Isaiah out of the Widefield School District 3 and put him into a new school. Continue reading “”

Biden Wants to Prevent Armed Teachers From Protecting Themselves and Their Students

Preventing teachers from carrying firearms is just one of Joe Biden’s gun control goals. See his other priorities for rolling back Second Amendment rights here.

The idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings burst into the national conversation after Parkland, when President Trump raised the possibility in listening sessions with grieving parents. Shortly after the 2018 shooting at the Florida high school, he told attendees at the 2018 CPAC that as many as one out of every five teachers should be carrying a gun.

It provoked an uproar. But often lost in the bluster of that moment was the reality that teachers had already been carrying guns in U.S. schools for over 10 years. Trump had just become the policy’s highest-profile advocate yet. The first serious proposals to arm teachers cropped up after the Columbine shooting in 1999, and the first school district to announce such a policy was in Harrod, Texas, in 2008, after Virginia Tech.

The decision to let schools arm teachers is left to state governments. Since the 1990s, 19 states have passed laws and created programs to arm some teachers and other school staff, like principals or superintendents. In 24 states, school boards have the discretion to authorize anyone of their choosing to carry a gun on campus. A 2019 investigation by VICE News found that in the year after Parkland, the number of school districts arming their teachers more than doubled, from around 215 school districts to nearly 500, encompassing hundreds of thousands of students.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he strongly opposes arming teachers, but because it’s up to state legislatures—which stayed resoundingly Republican this election, including in armed-teacher states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah—it’s a policy that may be here to stay.

– Jen Kinney in Biden Hates the Idea of Arming Teachers, But It’s Way Too Late to Stop It

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” ~ Cicero

Few Students Know Anything About Our Civilization

Most American high school and college students can hector you all day long about an array of “social justice” issues, but if you asked them anything about the roots of our civilization in ancient Greece and Rome, you’d get a blank stare. Of course, that’s because their coursework fills their heads with trendy politics and neglects subjects that used to be the pillars of educated citizens.

A recent report published by the Independent Institute makes that point and in today’s Martin Center article, Shannon Watkins focuses on it.

Rather than the blatantly misleading “1619 Project,” the authors of the report argue in favor of a “490 B.C. Project,” that being the date of the first great clash between the Persian Empire and the Greeks. The authors say, “Our ideas about democracy, the idea that there is a natural law for all human beings, the question of whether slavery is natural, all come from the ideas and politics of the Greek poleis. Both Greece and Rome wrestled more than two thousand years ago with what citizenship meant, what freedom meant, what justice meant— just as we wrestle with them today.”

Watkins writes, “At UNC-Chapel Hill, for instance, students can fulfill the ‘Historical Analysis’ general education requirement by taking either a class on ‘Classical Greece’ or one on ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories in the United States.’”

She concludes, “At the university level, it is not enough to simply offer courses on the classical world. Students need guidance and should not be expected to discern what general knowledge is the most essential for them to learn to be well-formed thinkers and responsible American citizens.”

 

This is how freedom fails. When parents let their children get their heads filled with the mush of marxist professors let loose in our schools, colleges and universities.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”—Ronald Reagan

Kids today: 4 in 10 call Constitution ‘outdated,’ OK with silencing speech.

Free speech, support for the Constitution, and even having a variety of friends are taking a hit on America’s campuses as college undergraduates appear to be adopting a “my way or the highway” attitude.

A new survey of campuses developing the nation’s future leaders shows an antagonistic approach by students to views they don’t agree with. And worse, a majority feel that they can’t express a view different from those of their professors.

The survey for Yale University’s William F. Buckley Program, provided to Secrets, is the latest to show the fading of thought diversity on campuses and shrinking support for the First Amendment and the Constitution overall. Continue reading “”