Tag: education

Rep. Jamie Thompson: Despite age of consent being 16, state BOE wants to teach ‘safe and healthy’ sex to 8-year-olds

Michigan’s Department of Education has proposed major updates to the state’s health education standards, reshaping how schools teach about sex, relationships, and identity. The draft guidelines, still under review, emphasize inclusivity, consent, and respect, and have sparked debate among educators, parents, and lawmakers across the state.

The proposal moves away from the state’s longstanding abstinence-focused framework toward a more comprehensive model. It calls for lessons that explicitly address sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, encouraging respect for all individuals regardless of their background.

Students in middle and high school would learn to define and distinguish between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, treating each as a distinct part of personal identity. The framework also asks students to practice empathy and show courtesy toward those whose sexuality or gender differs from their own.

Rep. Jamie Thompson, R-Brownstown, who has been a vocal critic of the new guidelines, told The Midwesterner that “it shifts essential aspects of child development from parents to schools without sufficient oversight. It uses a classroom to push radical and unproven ideologies and downplay the real consequences of adult decisions.”

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Why It’s Impossible For Public Schools To Be ‘Neutral’ About Politics And Religion

Robert Pondiscio had a superb piece recently that’s circulating widely, both on the left and the right. In it, he points out that many public school teachers are trained to see themselves as agents of societal change. The examples he gives are almost exclusively liberal or left-wing: teachers as “change agents” challenging alleged “systems of oppression” to “transform society,” commit to “diversity,” and adopting a “social justice orientation” that turns the classroom into a “platform for identity.” He also chides as equally-misguided recent Republican responses attempting to, as he sees it, fight fire with fire.

Besides the most fundamental and correct point of his piece — that humility is a necessary virtue for teachers — Pondiscio suggests that teachers (and policymakers) should aim above all for neutrality. But, I’d argue, this is mistaken. Properly understood, public schools are not, cannot, and, in fact, should not be neutral.

A Brief History Lesson

In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention was drafting a new form of government in Philadelphia. At the same time, the original U.S. Congress was still governing, and on the 13 of July they passed the Northwest Ordinance to govern much of what is now the American Great Lakes region. Besides facilitating the orderly transfer of federal lands to American farmer-settlers and outlawing slavery, the Northwest Ordinance established that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

To support the education of American children, the Northwest Ordinance built upon the Land Ordinance of 1785 which had guaranteed a plot of land in each township to be set aside “for the maintenance of public schools.” Public education dated back to colonial New England, but this marked a national prioritization of the institution. Indeed, the Land Ordinance made public education “go national.” Since then, public schooling has been as American as apple pie. We have the American founders to thank.

Why did they do this?

To teach those things (in this case, “religion, morality, and knowledge”) “necessary to good government.”

Pondiscio rightly echoes this purpose for public education, arguing that teachers are “not to change society but to sustain it,” and “to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends [emphasis added].” Teachers must acknowledge “that their authority rests not on self-expression, but on self-restraint [emphasis added].” Indeed, as Pondiscio says, “Public schools are not platforms. They are civic institutions.” Public schools are the government and teachers are “state actors.”

Which brings us back to the present purpose of America’s public schools: to provide education that is necessary for citizens to have a “good government,” to “sustain” society, to “transmit” that “upon which self-government depends.” In other words, the very raison d’être of America’s public schools is to support the government, i.e., the government established by the U.S. Constitution and the principles and civic norms upon which it rests.

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United Nations Finally Recognizes Homeschooling — By Demanding Government Ruin It

For decades, families around the world have fought for the freedom to homeschool their children, often against hostile laws, heavy-handed bureaucracies, and, in some cases, outright persecution. I’ve walked alongside many of these families as a global advocate for homeschooling rights, challenging oppressive regimes and urging governments and international institutions to recognize what should be obvious: Parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

That’s why UNESCO’s new report, “Homeschooling Through a Human Rights Lens,” is significant. For the first time, a major United Nations agency has taken homeschooling seriously — not merely as an educational alternative, but as a legitimate expression of the human right to direct the upbringing of one’s children. As a member of the report’s panel of experts, I can attest to the thoughtful and at times tense dialogue that shaped the final document.

While I commend UNESCO for the report, I reject its unwarranted recommendation that calls on governments to register homeschooling families and evaluate them according to state-imposed standards. This recommendation is antithetical to the principles of liberty upon which the United States, and even the United Nations itself, was founded. American homeschoolers are rightly skeptical of any report that calls for greater regulation, but because international policymakers are influenced by international human rights notions, this report has the potential to help families who live in countries where parental freedom in education is not favored.

Millions of families have demonstrated across every continent and culture that homeschooling works — and it works well. To its credit, the UNESCO report acknowledges the diversity of homeschooling approaches, the growing body of research supporting its efficacy, and the sincere motivations of parents who choose this path. It even cautions against assuming that homeschoolers are outliers or abusers. That acknowledgment matters. For decades, the homeschooling movement, even here in the United States, has fought against statist and misbegotten assumptions. At the international level, this report marks an important shift in that conversation.

For all its positive acknowledgments, its recommendation reveals a strong assumption of state supremacy. But families are not wards of the state; they are the primary and natural educators of their children. The oldest of the United Nations’ declarations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), itself acknowledges in Article 26.3 that parents have a “prior right” to decide how their children are educated, and Article 16.3 describes the family as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

Far from being a threat to educational quality or child welfare, homeschooling is often a lifeline for families seeking safety, excellence, or authenticity in education. When parents take responsibility for their children’s education, they are exercising freedom in its purest form: the freedom to order their lives according to conscience and conviction. Homeschooling reflects the principle of self-governance at the heart of our American experiment, and these basic truths are articulated in the UDHR.

While refuting Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s fringe view that homeschooling should be banned, I have explained that the U.N.’s “statist” worldview is rooted in a “positive rights” mindset, which sees government not merely as a protector of liberty but as the central actor in nearly every aspect of human life. Under this paradigm, rights are granted and fulfilled by government, and education becomes a public utility — monitored, managed, and molded by the state.

The dangerous assumptions here are that freedom requires supervision, parents can’t be trusted, and kids are just future workers, or worse, weapons in a war for cultural domination via compelled government indoctrination. However, our Constitution and Declaration of Independence reflect the opposite idea: that rights should limit government power. The First Amendment does not grant the right to speak; it prohibits the government from infringing on it. The Second Amendment doesn’t create a right to bear arms; it forbids the government from restricting it. Our concept of liberty assumes rights come from our Creator and governments are instituted to secure them, not to create them.

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Here’s An Inside Look At The Radical Dogma Being Taught At The No. 1 Elementary Teaching School

“Even my teacher at the first day of class, she said, ‘everything is political,’ and I didn’t understand what she meant until I started doing the content.”

Adrianna Mobley should have been excited to be accepted to Michigan State University’s elementary education program, ranked the top elementary program in the nation. Excited, that is, until she stepped into her “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education” class this fall. Required for all elementary education majors, the class dives deep into the demonization of free market principles, meritocracy, and American values.

Higher education isn’t a vacuum. Colleges of education and far-left teachers unions are known to push curriculum saturated in Critical Race Theory, breeding K-12 educators ready to pass the narrative to the next generation. It should be no surprise that 58 percent of K-12 teachers in America lean towards or identify with the Democrat Party, disproportionate to the 47 percent of the general public, Pew Data shows. A study of 2022 campaign contributions from the Educational Freedom Institute revealed that 68 percent of K-12 teachers and 93 percent of college professors donated to Democrat candidates or committees.

But how bad is it in the classroom? Take the course mentioned above from Michigan State University’s supposedly top-ranked elementary education program. It’s described on MSU’s website as “understanding self, schools, and society; emphasizing racial justice, equity, and social identity markers.”

According to Mobley, the course materials and conversations have a constant focus on race and a consistent dismissal of capitalist principles unlike anything she had experienced. “As somebody who’s grown up in the school system … I don’t remember anything like this happening before,” Mobley told The Federalist. 

Course materials shared by Mobley show that one of the class units included an interview with activist and educator Angela Davis, formerly an official member of the Communist party and collaborator with the Black Panther Party.

“Racism is integrally linked to capitalism,” Davis said in the video, “and I think it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.”

“This is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism,” the video concludes. It would seem that MSU agrees.

In a class assignment, Mobley referenced an article from The Federalist arguing that a system has no moral agency, and thus “systemic racism” is a misnomer skirting the actual problem in legitimate instances of racism – people.

In response, Mobley’s professor (LinkedIn pronouns listed as “she/they”) argued that “Systems are in place and gain traction over time, momentum which builds into norms. Therefore there ARE operators constantly putting forth the systems which we see as normal – it’s us!” 

She went on to reply to Mobley that “if we’re teachers going about our business as usual in a school which perpetuates inequitable outcomes for students of color or low-income students, we are … perpetuating those inequalities,” according to assignment records Mobley shared with The Federalist.

Another required video claims that “America can never be a meritocracy” until it provides “an equal starting point and equal resources.”

After one class discussion, Mobley’s professor asked to speak with her. “She told me that it seems like I’m going to have a really hard time. It was kind of like pushing me, almost, to think that I wasn’t going to do well, or it was going to be too difficult for me because I had opposing views,” Mobley told The Federalist.

Mobley told The Federalist that her professor has not been hostile toward her. However, her professor did warn her that the tone taken in Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education was not unique to that class. 

“She said that this is a [recurring] theme throughout all of the teaching program. So Critical Race Theory and DEI are all concepts that elementary education is centered around,” Mobley told The Federalist. 

The Federalist asked MSU whether it supported the professor’s remarks advancing a narrative of systemic racism and asked whether the school supports using materials from a self-professed communist and former Black Panther Party collaborator to teach its students. The Federalist also asked whether the school agrees with the assessment that its education program is apparently so dependent on radical concepts like DEI and critical race theory that students with opposing viewpoints could have a hard time succeeding, but did not receive a response to the questions.

Other required classes in MSU’s elementary education sequence echo leftist ideology, including “Pedagogy and Politics of Justice and Equity in Education,” and three one-credit seminar classes titled “Justice and Equity.“ Mobley is enrolled in another required class, “Engaging Elementary Learners in Science: Culture and Equity. “

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New York High Court Blocks Race-Grifters From Using Courts To Indoctrinate Children

our years ago, a group of race-grifter activists in New York City tried to sue their way into government-enforced racial quotas and race-centric curricula. But New York state’s highest court just decided they are not allowed to use the judicial system to mandate the indoctrination of children.

According to Defending Education (DE), which intervened in the case in 2021, far-left group IntegrateNYC’s attempt to abuse courts to create racial quotas for students and blame the racial make-up of school staff and a “white and Eurocentric curriculum” for poor education outcomes among the city’s black and Latino populations was put to an end Friday when the New York Court of Appeals dismissed the case.

The Education Article in the New York state constitution “does not permit judges to micromanage matters of educational policy, which are broadly entrusted to local control,” wrote Judge Michael J. Garcia, an appointee of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y.

As laid out by Garcia, IntegrateNYC alleged that the city’s public education system “discriminates against and disproportionately affects Black and Latino students, leading to unequal educational opportunities and negative outcomes for those students” because of its systems for admissions and screening, the content of curricula, and the purported lack of diversity among teachers.

They claimed further that the school system was segregated because black and Latino students underperform on admissions exams because of “discriminatory standardized testing policies,” shuttling them to “inferior schools that are deficient in terms of physical facilities and instrumentalities of learning, resulting in poor educational outcomes.”

As DE put it, activists “sought to use the courts to inject race into all aspects of the city’s education system. … Plaintiffs claimed that the city’s school system is discriminatory because, in their eyes, not enough students from their preferred races are admitted to the city’s selective academic programs.”

Sarah Parshall Perry, DE’s vice president and legal fellow, noted that “the challengers to New York’s gifted and talented program had demanded consideration of race in order to prevent race discrimination.”

However, suing into existence a wide variety of political and policy preferences is a tried and true left-wing political tactic used in places where their political movement is incapable of getting their candidates elected to bodies — like legislatures or city councils — that should actually be responsible for dealing with these issues.

The fact that New York City, and more broadly the state of New York, is run by people who largely agree with IntegrateNYC’s premise means that the high court’s ruling against them is at the very least a credit to the state’s ability to maintain separation of powers (in this instance) — but also a testament to how weak the group’s claims were.

IntegrateNYC could not prove any kind of systematic racism or injustice, and they could not point to an operational law or ordinance that blocked black or Latino students from attending the schools they wanted to “integrate.” Rather, they essentially tried to blame poor student outcomes on racism.

Those students are also apparently negatively affected because they are apparently subjected to a “white and Eurocentric curriculum.”

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Teachers’ Lounges Turned Into Political War Rooms

A whistleblower inside the Los Angeles Unified School District has come forward with shocking evidence — stacks of left-wing flyers, posters, and propaganda pulled straight from teachers’ lounges across the district. These weren’t lesson plans or student materials… they were political rally cries — “No Kings,” “Workers Unite,” “Protest!” — the kind of radical messaging you’d expect from activist groups, not classrooms.

Grant Stinchfield exposes how these angry liberal educators are using taxpayer-funded schools to push their ideology, not teach America’s kids. This is a deep dive into the political indoctrination hiding behind classroom doors — and why parents must take back control of what’s being taught in our schools.

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Ohio Health Agency Grants $400,000 To Fund Psychedelics Education And Training For First Responders, Doctors And More

An Ohio health agency is providing a state university with a $400,000 grant to educate first responders, law enforcement, emergency departments and behavioral specialists about how to deal with potential adverse psychedelic experiences as more people use the substances for medical or recreational purposes.

Amid the expanding psychedelics reform movement, there’s been increased attention to the possible health benefits of substances like psilocybin and ibogaine. But only a handful of states allow for the regulated use of certain psychedelics, typically in medically supervised settings.

Ohio is not among those states yet, but Ohio State University (OSU) is now launching its Psychedelic Emergency, Acute, and Continuing Care Education (PEACE) initiative, with nearly half a million dollars of funding from the state Department of Behavioral Health’s (DBH) SOAR Innovation grant program.

“People have started to learn about the benefits of psychedelics while, at the same time, the federal government categorizes these as controlled substances,” Stacey Armstrong, associate director of the OSU’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE), said in a press release last week.

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Alaska Schools’ Social Studies Standards Omit Washington, Lincoln, And Christianity 

Alaska’s new social studies standards don’t mention the Nome Gold Rush. They don’t mention the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. They don’t mention William Egan, the state of Alaska’s first governor, and they don’t mention Sarah Palin, who ran for Vice President of the United States. There’s a lot more that’s missing in the Alaska social studies standards, but you can tell right away that something is wrong when Alaska’s social studies standards leave Alaska’s children ignorant of the headlines of Alaska’s history and the most famous Alaskans.

Education departments in every state are on radical autopilot when they make social studies standards. Americans expect blue states to use their state social studies standards to impose identity politics ideology and action civics (vocational training in progressive activism) on schools and students, strip out factual content, and ignore or slander the history of Western civilization and America, and call it “social studies instruction” — that’s what you get in states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Minnesota. But radical activists embedded in state education departments do the same thing in red states whenever policymakers and citizens aren’t looking. That’s what just happened in Alaska.

The Alaska Social Studies Standards (2024), produced by Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development, avoided the worst of the blue-state social studies standards’ extreme politicization, unprofessional vocabulary, and ideologically extreme content. That’s because there’s hardly any historical content. The standards’ absences include basic facts of American history, much of how our government works, and our foundational documents of liberty. The standards also introduced substantial new amounts of politicized material.

How did Alaska’s Department get its curriculum so badly wrong?

The department outsourced much of the standards to the radical activists who have captured the national social studies establishment. Alaska’s standards take their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) ideologically extreme definition of social studies, as well as from its College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. The C3 Framework replaces content knowledge with insubstantial and opaque “inquiry”; lards social studies with identity politics ideologies such as Critical Race Theory; and inserts ideologically extreme activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.

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Federal Judge Blocks Push to Remove Gender Ideology From Sex Ed Curricula

A federal judge in Oregon said during a hearing on Monday that she plans to issue an injunction stopping the Trump administration from requiring several Democratic-led states to remove references to gender ideology from their sexual health education curricula as a condition of receiving federal grant funding.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken, based in Eugene, made the comments in reference to a lawsuit filed by 16 states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia. The states of Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota are leading the group.

The lawsuit centers on an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20—the first day of his second term.

The order called for federal agencies to recognize two sexes, male and female, and to ensure that grant funds do not support “gender ideology.”

The Department of Health and Human Services published notices in August that recipients of grants from the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) and the Title V Sexual Risk Avoidance Education programs must not include content teaching that gender identity is separate from biological sex.

The department also sent 46 states and territories letters in which it mandated the removal of any such references from federally funded materials within 60 days. Non-compliance led to actions including the termination of California’s PREP grant after the state did not change its educational content.

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The Propaganda of American Schooling: A History of Lies and Indoctrinated Youth

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” These were the words of the infamous French dictator and military strategist Napoleon Bonaparte.

It is a well-known concept that history is often written by the victor—that when two cultures or ideologies clash, the one that prevails and gains more power and influence is the one whose side of the story the record favors. Yet, despite this being a fairly common idiom, it is often overlooked just how profoundly it shapes our understanding of the present—or, more aptly, our misunderstandings. 

Many still fail to grasp that the history they cling to so fervently—often as a cornerstone of political or national identity—is a carefully curated fable, designed to secure their allegiance through misbelief. Likewise, few recognize how the formalized education system of the early 20th century was deliberately shaped by the robber barons of the predator class, particularly Rockefeller and Carnegie, not as institutions of higher learning, but as tools for controlling the public and molding the minds of the masses to serve their interests.

Reverend Frederick T. Gates, the business advisor to John D. Rockefeller Sr. who helped him found the General Education Board in 1902, elaborated their vision in his book The Country School Of Tomorrow —

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.

For the task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are.”

In the context of modern American society, much of the mythology that makes up the concept of “American exceptionalism” is in fact a fabrication in line with this agenda, creating the docile public of Rockefeller’s vision.

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