Tag: education

Cal State Schools Require Students To Take DEI Classes To Graduate. Options Include ‘Queer Crip Lit’ and ‘Decolonize Your Diet.’

The University of California system made news earlier this year when it eliminated mandatory diversity statements for new hires. But at California’s other public university system, DEI isn’t in retreat—it’s required.

Nearly every California State University campus requires students to pass at least one diversity and cultural competency class, according to graduation criteria identified by Do No Harm, a group that opposes identity politics in medicine. The exact requirements vary across schools, but they typically prescribe a specific course or allow students to pick from a list of classes that “explore the interrelatedness and intersection of race and ethnicity with class, gender and sexuality, and other forms of difference, hierarchy, and oppression.”

San Francisco State University has among the most demanding criteria, requiring students to take courses in “areas that the campus feels are important to graduates”: American ethnic and racial minorities, environmental sustainability and climate action, global perspectives, and social justice. Some classes cover several requirements, like “Queer Crip Lit,” which examines “connections between ableism and other forms of discrimination, such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia” in literary works. Another class that covers multiple requirements: “Decolonize Your Diet: Food Justice and Gendered Labor in Communities of Color” focuses on “food justice in communities of color addressing issues including sex/gender and food production, racism and attacks on traditional food systems.”

Some Cal State schools require students to take two DEI courses, one with a domestic focus and another centering on global issues. Students at the Humboldt campus can satisfy the domestic requirement with “Decolonizing Public Health,” which applies “decolonizing methodologies and anti-racism interventions to analysis of public health frameworks.” The options on the international side are more straightforward, though among the classes offered is “Sex, Class and Culture: Gender and Ethnic Issues in International Short Stories.”

Do No Harm senior director of programs Laura Morgan said the Cal State system “is all in on politicized propaganda.”

“These classes are based on concepts that have roots in critical race theory and promote ideology instead of sound learning principles,” Morgan told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. “As a taxpayer-funded system, [Cal State] is obligated to prioritize education instead of operating a factory for politically indoctrinated activists.”

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UC-San Diego Report Indicates Shocking Number of Students Entering College in California Lack 8th Grade Math Skills

A new report from the University of California San Diego indicates that a shocking number of students entering the University of California system lack the math skills one would expect from a middle school student.

Some of this can be blamed on school closures during Covid, but not all of it. At the end of the day, this is a failure of the schools and teachers that failed to impart these basic skills.

It’s also an excellent reminder that not everyone needs to go to college. If you can’t do high school level math, why should you even be considered?

Newsweek reported:

Students at California University Without 8th Grade Math Skills Skyrockets

A sharp rise in students entering the University of California system without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators.

A new internal report from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) reveals that the percentage of incoming students scoring below Algebra 1 on placement exams—a math course typically completed by the end of eighth grade—has tripled over the past five years.

Why It Matters

In 2020, just 6 percent of first-year students at UCSD placed below Algebra 1. By 2025, that number had surged to 18 percent, according to the UCSD Senate Admissions Working Group (SAWG) report.

The findings reflect a growing disconnect between high school transcripts and actual college readiness. The SAWG report links the increase to pandemic-era learning disruptions, long-standing inequities in California’s K–12 system, and the elimination of standardized testing requirements in UC admissions.

What To Know

The number of UCSD students requiring Math 2, a course originally designed for less than 1 percent of the incoming class, surged from under 100 students annually to over 900 by fall 2024.

This example of an easy question failed by many students is just stunning.

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One in FIVE students entering UC San Diego can’t write properly, new data reveals

Roughly one in five Americans entering UC San Diego cannot write at an entry level standard, a new report revealed. 

About 20 percent of incoming students to the California university had to be placed in analytical writing courses after failing to meet the requirements of a writing placement exam, which forced them into specialized courses called ‘AWP’.

The report published by a UC San Diego admissions committee added that writing skills and literacy are in decline across the entire US. 

According to the university’s faculty, freshmen students’ vocabulary was ‘increasingly’ limiting their ability to engage with longer and harder texts. 

As a whole, the school had seen a ‘steep decline in the academic preparation’ of its domestic freshmen students.

The November 6 report read: ‘Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure.’

One possible solution offered was ‘moving beyond GPA and course titles’ in high school to evaluate how ready students actually are for writing at a college level.

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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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