Tag: public schools

California’s new educational guidelines say math is racist

California is set to adopt new math teaching principles that are based in critical race theory. These changes, which include deemphasizing calculus and pulling programs for academically gifted students, will “apply social justice principles to math lessons.”

These guidelines do not instruct educators to teach critical race theory, but rather use critical race theory as a guide for the formation of teaching principles. Critical race theory is not being taught to students, but taught to teachers, who are then meant to use it to formulate their own practices.

The goal of the new math framework is “to maintain rigor while also helping remedy California’s achievement gaps” for black, Latino, and poor students. the reason for the changes is that California students are falling behind in math.

“We were transforming math education, and change is hard and scary,” Rebecca Pariso, a math teacher at Hueneme Elementary School District told the San Francisco Standard. “Especially if you don’t understand why that change needs to occur. But I didn’t expect it to go this far.” The inspiration for these new guidelines came from San Francisco educational standards.

In the new guidelines, which will up for consideration prior to their potential adoption in July, reading in Chapter 2, “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” reads that “Cultural relevance is important for learning and also for expanding a collective sense of what mathematical communities look and sound like to reflect California’s diverse history.”

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Fairfax Public Schools Reinstates Pornographic Books As A Commitment To ‘Diverse Reading Materials’

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) has reviewed two books previously contested by parents as pornographic and pedophilic and decided to put them back into the district’s libraries, according to a statement released by FCPS on Tuesday.

A two month committee review process conducted by FCPS as a result of a “formal challenge” found “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe and “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison appropriate for high schoolers, according to the FCPS statement.

The books will be put back in the school system’s libraries, which were removed in September after Stacy Langton, a FCPS mom went to a Sept. 23 school board meeting and denounced the nature of the books.

Langton previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the books depicted pedophilia and sex between men and boys, including one book that showed a fourth-grade boy performing oral sex on what appears to be an adult male.

“Please describe to me what do you call this image of the adult bearded male with an erect penis fondling the genitalia of the child male? What is that?” Langton said in response to the district’s decision to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “He’s twice the size of the other character too. And I mean his erect penis is also twice the size of the boy’s penis.”

Langton said she somehow expected the district “could do the right thing” but “it’s clear to me now, they have no intention of doing the right thing about this.” “This is about an agenda they’re pushing and they’re not interested in protecting kids.”

“The other book has detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy,” Langton said to the school board in September while she unfolded copies of the illustrations. “The illustrations include fellatio, sex toys, masturbation and violent nudity.”

The board cut her off before her time was up and turned off her microphone, but she shouted that the board members were in violation of the law of Virginia, citing Virginia Code section 18.2-376, which says it is “unlawful for any person knowingly to prepare, print, publish, or circulate, or cause to be prepared, printed, published or circulated, any notice or advertisement of any obscene item proscribed in § 18.2-373, or of any obscene performance or exhibition proscribed in § 18.2-375.”

After the district received the formal complaint, two different committees of school administrators, librarians, parents and students were formed to examine and consider the books as “optional independent reading material” for high school students.

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Biden’s Education Department Wants to Roll Back Effort to Catalog Teacher Sex Crimes

The Department of Education wants to roll back a Trump-era effort to collect data on teacher-on-student sex crimes.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights will not ask school districts questions regarding teacher-on-student sexual assault allegations as part of its 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection, proposed Thursday. The change is designed to “reduce burden and duplication of data,” an Education Department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon. But critics say eliminating the question is the Biden administration’s attempt to appease teachers’ unions.

“This is the ultimate act of bowing to the teachers’ unions,” Kimberly Richey, who served as acting assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights in the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon. “Through this proposal, the Biden administration is actively helping schools cover up these incidents, which we were intentionally shining a light on.”

The Education Department will still ask districts to report documented cases of rape and sexual assault. But it will not ask school officials to report allegations that resulted in the resignation or retirement of the accused. Former secretary of education Betsy DeVos added those optional questions to the 2020-2021 data collection, which was delayed one year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The department also won’t ask districts to report pending cases or cases in which a school staffer was reassigned to another district school prior to the conclusion of an investigation.

Reporting alleged sex crimes in addition to documented cases provides a fuller picture of sexual violence in schools, as the accused may retire, resign, or seek employment elsewhere before a district can reach a conclusion in the case.

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Seattle won’t remove homeless encampment from school grounds before students return to campus

Six weeks after Seattle Public Schools hosted a public meeting to address a dangerous homeless encampment on a public school property, pinning their hopes on one-man organization with an extensive criminal record to solve the problem, it was announced that the encampment behind Broadview Thomson K-8 School will not be removed before classes start on Sept. 1.

Meeting attendees said the campers are being made a higher priority than the children who attend the school and officials set no timeline for when the tents will be cleared.

Teachers, parents and neighbors have been calling for the encampment’s removal for over a year but have been stymied multiple times by the school board. In that time, the encampment has grown and currently 55 people are still living in tents on the property.

During a meeting Thursday night hosted by deputy superintendent Rob Gannon, school board member Liza Rankin, and Mike Mathias of Anything Helps, Mathias falsely claimed that the encampment was not a security threat despite numerous lockdowns in the school, violence in the encampment and overdose deaths. Due to the encampment, the district was forced to hire security guards after having banished police officers as school resource officers from campuses in 2020.

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Enemies of the School Board

School boards have always attracted their share of controversies: disagreements over curriculum, bitter election fights, and personality clashes. But in recent months, as parents express their frustration over Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and critical race theory, local school districts and federal law enforcement have upped the ante by monitoring parents, requesting undercover agents at school board meetings, and even arresting parents who attend board meetings to express dissent.

The latest and most egregious example comes from Round Rock, Texas. In a series of school board meetings this fall, two fathers—a minister named Jeremy Story and a retired Army captain named Dustin Clark—spoke out against alleged corruption and school officials’ hostility toward parents. Journalist Pedro Gonzalez reported that at an August meeting, Story had calmly “produced evidence that the board had covered up an alleged assault by the superintendent, Hafedh Azaiez, against a mistress.” The superintendent and school board president cut him off midsentence and ordered officers to remove him from the premises.

At the next meeting, in September, with the district’s controversial mask mandate on the agenda, the school board locked the majority of parents out of the room, preventing them from speaking. Clark and other frustrated parents asked the board to open the nearly empty room to the public. Instead, school board president Amy Weir directed officers to remove Clark from school property. As he was dragged out by two officers, Clark shouted to the audience: “It’s an open meeting! Shame on you. Communist! Communist! Let the public in!”

A few days later, the school district, in coordination with law enforcement, sent police officers to the homes of both men, arrested them, and put them in jail on charges of “disorderly conduct with intent to disrupt a meeting.” Families and supporters of Story and Clark held an all-night protest outside the jail, until the men were released the following morning. They are now raising funds for their legal defense.

The school board was able to do this because the Round Rock Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has the power to order the arrest of citizens in their homes. For many parents, the school board is sending a message: if you speak out against us, we will turn you into criminals. When reached for comment, the school district’s police department confirmed that it initiated the investigation and that “one board member requested details from the RRISD Police” prior to the criminal referral.

Round Rock is not the only school board to resort to repressive tactics to stifle dissent. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, where parents have protested against critical race theory and a sexual assault cover-up, the superintendent asked the county sheriff to deploy a SWAT team, riot control unit, and undercover agents to monitor parents at school board meetings. The sheriff refused, telling the superintendent that he had not provided “any justification for such a manpower intensive request,” but the mere attempt was astounding.

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ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN skip DOJ whistleblower revealing ‘threat tag’ targeting parents at school board meetings

The media have largely ignored the explosive allegation made by a DOJ whistleblower about the counterterrorism targeting of outraged parents that appears to undercut sworn testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

On Tuesday, a whistleblower revealed the FBI created a “threat tag” to aid in tracking alleged threats against school board officials, teachers, and staff as part of its implementation of a controversial memo issued by Garland last month.

An Oct. 20 internal email from the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions, released Tuesday by House Republicans, instructed agents to apply the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” to all investigations and assessments of threats directed specifically at education officials.

“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” the email stated.

The email also directs FBI agents to consider whether the criminal activity being investigated is in violation of federal law and what the potential “motivation” is behind it. 

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School Forces Unmasked Kids to Wear Yellow Badges

A school in the UK is forcing children who don’t wear face masks due to them having an exemption to wear yellow badges on school premises and in class.

Yes, really.

An email form the school, which is not named, was posted on Twitter by journalist Allison Pearson.

The school cites an “increase” in the number of COVID cases, despite the fact that infection levels in the UK have been flat or even in decline over recent weeks, as a justification for re-introducing mandatory mask rules.

“Those pupils who were exempt from wearing a mask last academic year will once again be exempt and should wear a yellow badge,” states the email.

The yellow badge is historically understood to symbolize a “badge of shame” and was imposed on Jews at numerous points throughout history to denote them as ethnic or religious outsiders.

While no one is comparing the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany to kids being forced to wear yellow badges, the use of such a symbol is still odious and morally bankrupt.

“Does the school have teachers who know their history?” asked Pearson.

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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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