Tag: education

Shock Report: CA Teachers Urge Recruiting Kids Into LGBT Clubs

In a shocking report, Abigail Shrier, the author of the best-selling book “Irreversible Damage,” revealed that at a late October meeting at a conference of California’s largest teacher’s union, the California Teachers Association (CTA), documents show teachers were encouraged to recruit students into LGBT clubs, urging them to “have the courage to create a safe environment that fosters bravery to explore sexual orientation.” One teacher reportedly chortled, “We’re going to do just a little mind-trick on our sixth graders.”

Additionally, Shier wrote, “Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.”

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New Hampshire student sues school after being suspended for off-campus text messages

A high school student in New Hampshire is suing the school district after he was suspended from the football team for insisting there are only two genders in private text messages. His lawsuit argues that the suspension was a violation of his first amendment rights.

The suit states that the freshman at Exeter High School was suspended from the football team for one game after the administration obtained a text conversation, outside of school grounds, that he had with another student over gender identity. The suit, filed on the student’s behalf by Christian-based organization Cornerstone Action, argues that he stated his Catholic-based belief that there are only two genders.

The lawsuit further argues that the school’s non-binary gender identity policy is an infringement of the student’s First Amendment rights.

The policy states the school’s community should respect student’s preferred name and pronoun related to their gender identity. Failure to respect others’ gender identities is a violation of the policy.

The student does not deny violating the policy.

“He in fact denied, and will continue to deny, that any person can belong to a gender other than that of ‘male’ or ‘female’” the lawsuit says.

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Florida parents sue after school clandestinely orchestrated daughter’s gender transition

The parents of a Florida teenager have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after their daughter’s school directed their child to pursue a gender transition without notifying them.

January and Jeffrey Littlejohn of Tallahassee, Florida, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida last month, seeking to “vindicate their fundamental rights to direct the upbringing of their children” after Deerlake Middle School, where their 13-year-old daughter was enrolled, failed to notify them that their daughter had entered a school-sanctioned gender transition plan.

The lawsuit, which names the school superintendent, the assistant superintendent, and the Leon County School Board as defendants, says the Littlejohns’ daughter informed them during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 that “she was confused about her gender and believed she might be non-binary.”

The Littlejohns’ daughter, who is referred to as A.G. in court filings, “asked her parents to permit her to change her name to ‘J.’ and to use ‘they/them’ pronouns” as the 2020-2021 school year approached, the lawsuit says.

Her parents declined but told her she could use the “J” name in school as a nickname.

“We didn’t think it was in the best interests of our child,” January Littlejohn told the Washington Examiner in an interview. But, she went on, “we didn’t feel like we would stop her friends from calling her a different name.”

The lawsuit says the Littlejohns informed their daughter’s math teacher, Rima Kelly, about the teenager’s gender dysphoria and continued treatment with a mental health counselor on Aug. 27, 2020.

Kelly offered to inform the school about their daughter’s desires to identify as nonbinary, which the parents declined. The teacher is not a named defendant in the case.

A couple of weeks later, on Sept. 14, while she was getting into the car, the Littlejohns’ daughter mentioned that the school had asked her which bathroom she wanted to use, which the lawsuit says she thought was “funny.”

January Littlejohn told the Washington Examiner that was the first time she became aware that the school was meeting with her daughter and assisting the teenager in embracing a different gender identity in school settings. The school did not facilitate any transition-related medical procedures.

The school claimed nondiscrimination law barred them from informing the parents about the meeting with their daughter, which occurred on Sept. 8, 2020, unless the child authorized them to be there.

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Maryland Public School Teacher Asked 14-Year-Olds to Take ‘White Privilege Test’

An English teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools — the largest school district in Maryland — told students to take a “white privilege test” before reading a book that addresses themes of racism and police brutality.

Ninth-grade English students at Sherwood High School were given pre-reading questions for the book “All American Boys” on Monday, Nov. 8, according to a file reviewed by the Daily Caller. The questions linked directly to a Vox article titled “what it means to be anti-racist” and a test called the “white privilege test.” The Vox article promoted the work of “anti-racist” scholar and author Ibram X. Kendi.

The “white privilege test” was adapted by “research on white privilege” from anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh, according to the test. Students were told to answer “yes or no” to 25 statements.

Statements of white privilege include, “I can go shopping alone and be sure that I won’t be followed or harassed,” “In the history I have studied, my ancestors are given a lot of attention and credit,” and “I never feel out of place, outnumbered, unheard, feared, or hated in my clubs and activities. Instead, I feel tied in and welcomed,” among others.

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Grading Is Racist “White Language Supremacy” Says Arizona State Professor

Arizona State Professor Asao B. Inoue coined the term HOWL “Habits of White Language” and proposes a new model to grade students’ work.

To combat White Language Supremacy, professor Inoue promotes Labor-Based Grading.

“White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already,” said Asao Inoue, professor of rhetoric and composition at Arizona State University. 

Inoue said white supremacy culture “makes up the culture and normal practices of our classrooms and disciplines” in his online talk Thursday titled “The Possibilities of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies.” 

Inoue has emerged as one of the leading scholarly proponents within academia to denounce traditional spelling, grammar and punctuation grading norms as racist, and frequently gives talks to campuses to advance his argument.

Inoue has coined the term “Habits of White Language,” or HOWL, to describe the standard writing teachers use to grade students’ work.

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Maryland school system tells students ‘systemic racism’ is a pandemic in ‘psychoeducational lessons’

The most populous county in Maryland has implemented “psychoeducational lessons” that tell students there is a “dual pandemic” involving COVID-19 and “systemic racism,” according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch.

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) promoted materials like “Antiracist Baby” by Ibram X. Kendi in a PowerPoint obtained by Judicial Watch. The PowerPoint links to an audio reading of the book, which says “Babies are taught to be racist or antiracist, there’s no neutrality.”

Teacher notes in the PowerPoint said the book “is the perfect gift for readers of all ages dedicated to forming a just society,” even babies and toddlers.

Fox News first reported on the Judicial Watch documents Thursday.

“This material details how extremist race politics and CRT are being used to target children for political ends,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement on the documents, Fox News reported. “Politics should immediately be removed from the curriculum of Montgomery County Schools. These CRT-laden teachings have no place in any American classroom.”

Critical Race Theory (CRT) holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.

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Indiana school administrator: You’d better believe we teach CRT — and lie to parents about it

Perhaps the most useful 96 seconds in the post-Glenn Youngkin victory period you’ll spend, but let’s set the context up first. Before, during, and after Election Night, Democrats and the media insisted Republicans and Youngkin created a “dog whistle” campaign about critical race theory and education.  Terry McAuliffe insisted on arguing simultaneously that Virginia schools didn’t teach CRT, and that parents who opposed the teaching of CRT were probably racists.

This argument leached into practically every media outlet’s news coverage on Tuesday night as an explainer for McAuliffe’s loss and the red wave in Virginia. MRC/Newsbusters has a sampling that’s MSNBC-heavy, but the CRT-doesn’t-exist argument got heavy rotation on every network except (presumably) Fox. The Washington Free Beacon has a video montage that captures the moment as well (via Power Line).

The New York Times has a follow-up today in the Republicans Pounce!® genre, which is a bit more subtle about the actual status of CRT influence on education:

Seizing on education as a newly potent wedge issue, Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls “parental rights” issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism.

Yet it is the free-floating sense of rage from parents, many of whom felt abandoned by the government during the worst months of the pandemic, that arose from the off-year elections as one of the most powerful drivers for Republican candidates.

Across the country, Democrats lost significant ground in crucial suburban and exurban areas — the kinds of communities that are sought out for their well-funded public schools — that helped give the party control of Congress and the White House. In Virginia, where Republicans made schools central to their pitch, education rocketed to the top of voter concerns in the final weeks of the race, narrowly edging out the economy.

The message worked on two frequencies. Pushing a mantra of greater parental control, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of some white voters, who were alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America. He attacked critical race theory, a graduate school framework that has become a loose shorthand for a contentious debate on how to address race. And he released an ad that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to “Beloved,” the canonical novel about slavery by the Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

But at the same time, Mr. Youngkin and other Republicans tapped into broader dissatisfaction among moderate voters about teachers’ unions, unresponsive school boards, quarantine policies and the instruction parents saw firsthand during months of remote learning. In his stump speeches, Mr. Youngkin promised to never again close Virginia schools.

Note well that the NYT doesn’t float Youngkin’s argument as a lie or a falsehood. Ross Douthat’s column yesterday may be the reason for that, to which we’ll get in a moment. First, though, let’s hear from an actual school administrator, who explains that there is a campaign to lie about school curricula to parents — only it’s not coming from CRT critics. Tony Kinnett works as a school administrator in Indiana as well as conservative activist and commentator on education, and he translates how CRT gets baked into academic curricula as “anti-racism”.

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