Did Anti-white, DEI Bias Steal a State Final Spot From a White Basketball Team?

Some say it was the worst call they’ve ever seen in high-school basketball.

The scene was the recent NJSIAA Group 2 state semifinal game between New Jersey team Camden — a powerhouse that hadn’t lost to another NJ public-school squad in five years — and underdog Manasquan. Down 46-45 after Camden player Alijah Curry sank a couple of free throws, Manasquan drove down the floor with 5.8 seconds left on the clock. One of its players took a long shot, which bounced off the rim — into the waiting hand of teammate Griffin Linstra, who laid the ball up through the hoop, releasing it with 0.6 seconds left on the clock.

The Central Regional High School gymnasium erupted in celebration, with Linstra’s shot being called good. But then it happened.

A Camden coach ran over and tapped one of the exiting officials, Kevin Torres, on the shoulder, and “a group of Camden coaches pleaded for the referees to meet,” reported NJ.com. The refs then consulted for a short time — and overturned the call. Incredulity among sober observers was the result.

Then there was a secondary result: accusations of anti-white bias.

You see, Camden appears an entirely black team, while Manasquan appears entirely white.

Know that subsequent video review left no question that the call was errant. “In an email to the NJSIAA [New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association], cited in the legal papers, Torres admitted his call was wrong after seeing videos of the play,” NJ.com also writes. The NJSIAA made the same admission and issued an apology.

So the whole situation was most odd, indeed. As NJ.com further related, the “sequence of events” that led to the reversed call “is not standard…,” and a veteran official “told NJ Advance Media on Tuesday morning, ‘That [ref group] conversation never should have happened.’”

Manasquan appealed the decision and even filed a lawsuit to delay the championship game, scheduled for four days later (3/9), until the matter could be settled. But despite its apology, the NJSIAA “pointed to its bylaws that say once the referees leave the court after a game, the final score is official and cannot be appealed,” NJ.com tells us. As for the lawsuit, a judge rejected Manasquan’s request.

The CBS News segment below includes the video evidence of the blown (biased?) call.

This may not be popular, but I understand NJSIAA’s decision. Rules are rules, and if they dictate that a game’s outcome is to be considered irreversible once the referees depart, this standard must be followed. The rules can be changed if they’re deemed insufficient, of course. But our society’s increasing disregard for rules and laws (as reflected in the ignoring of 2020-election ballot standards) is a sign of civilizational decline. I also accept the judge’s ruling: It’s not a good idea having courts make any and all societal decisions from the monumental to the mundane.

What I don’t accept is the racial double standard apparent here. Good luck finding mainstream media that even allude to it; anti-white prejudice is their Voldemort of biases. However, the blogosphere addressed it, as did Internet commenters.

“A DEI call if there ever was one,” wrote a YouTube poster here. (Another respondent then asked him what DEI was, proving that Rip Van Winkle wasn’t alone in being able to sleep 20 years straight.)

“Can’t let the white kids win,” opined a tweeter on X.

“-2pts for white privilege,” stated another.

And while we can’t read minds, five questions do suggest themselves. Were the situation reversed:

  1. Would the Manasquan coaches have similarly importuned the refs to reverse their call?
  2. If they had, would the officials have likewise complied?
  3. If so, would the story’s racial aspect be ignored by media?
  4. Would the NJSIAA have still adhered to their no-reversal ex post facto rule?
  5. Would the judge still have rejected an appeal?

My answers:

  1. This would’ve been less likely.
  2. No, the probability is vanishingly low.
  3. Not a chance.
  4. Probably, but it’s not a given.
  5. Most likely.

It’s hard to imagine the refs reversing such a call for the white team. And had they, the media would’ve made a federal case out of it, screaming “Racism!” all the way. The pressure on the NJSIAA would’ve consequently been extreme, too, which is why we can’t be sure they would’ve taken the same principled rules stance.

To be clear, I think it’s unlikely the refs were purposely biased. In all probability, however, politically correct conditioning and social pressure — fashionable prejudice — did cloud their judgment. (The Left calls this “unconscious bias.”) Remember that many today are programmed to respond to and be intimidated by black grievance; no one wants to be that guy who robs a dominant black team of a title with a possibly bad call (that’s a career-ender). I also suspect that the errant decision reflects our time’s emotionalism, where principle is subordinated to feelings.

After all, what could the Camden coaches have said when pleading their case that was so convincing? “The shot was after the buzzer!”? That they claimed to have seen it differently than the refs is unsurprising and is neither proof nor even an argument. I mean, if non-official feedback matters, why didn’t the refs then just take a poll of all the players and spectators present?

Of course, with all our country’s problems, this is small potatoes. Significant, however, is what this incident may be an example of — that very real phenomenon called “black privilege” (see Fani Willis et al.),

Oh, Camden would go on to “win” the championship game. It’s a victory that should forever be accompanied by history’s biggest asterisk.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on X (formerly Twitter), MeWe or Gettr or log on to SelwynDuke.com

©2024. Selwyn Duke. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 10: Objective Reality Is Required for a Free Society

Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [upcoming release April 2024]


Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

The globalist War on America, documented in the Dodd Report, is a culture war fought without bullets that has targeted America’s children for over 100 years. The classroom is the globalists’ chosen battlefield, because whoever controls the educational curriculum controls the future. Why is this true?

Because children live what they learn. Education is an industry, and like all industries, it produces a product. The goal of America’s enemies is to produce an unaware, compliant citizenry groomed for life in the planned globalist Unistate. The War on America’s Children utilizes both informational and psychological warfare to achieve that goal.

The globalist social engineers are skilled strategists applying subversive wartime psychological tactics to “change the hearts and minds” of American children. The strategic goals are to replace parental authority with governmental authority, and to move society from objective reality, the adult world of facts, to subjective reality, the childish world of feelings.

Interfering with a child’s developing ability to reality-test is a staggering deceit and a monstrous abuse of power. Education reformer Deborah DeGroff’s 2019 handbook Between the Covers: What’s Inside a Children’s Book?[i]exposes the deceit and documents the sad reality of illiteracy in America today.

In the past, when children were told that every student was a butterfly, the children knew it wasn’t true because they could see for themselves that some students were extremely smart and others weren’t–––no matter what the teacher said. At that time, children were still learning to read with phonics. It was a time before sight-words and whole-word instruction became ubiquitous, and well before “hi-lo” reading even existed.

I had never heard of hi-lo reading before reading Deborah DeGroff’s book. Basically, instead of teaching children to actually read, a deceitful system was developed to address and adapt to the alarmingly low reading levels across the country. Hi-lo is a reference to the fact that the book content is considered upper-grade (high school interest), but the actual reading level is lower grade—sometimes as low as second- or third-grade level!!

In a 2012 article directed at the American Library Association, “ALA 2012: What’s Up with Hi-Lo?,”[ii] Publishers Weekly journalist Shannon Maughan wrote:

Many librarians, teachers, parents—and even students—are aware of the grim, oft-cited statistic: only one-third of eighth-grade students in the U.S. read at or above the proficient level (source: the Nation’s Report Card/National Assessment of Educational Progress 2009).[iii] While solutions to the problem are always being debated, those who work with struggling and reluctant readers every day want tools they can use right now. Hi-lo books frequently fit the bill….

Schools, by far, remain the biggest market for hi-lo books, largely because it is the setting where intervention for struggling readers is most likely to occur. In addition to searching for compelling general fiction and nonfiction, publishers are always on the lookout for ways they can create appealing curriculum-related titles. A number of companies offer such ancillary materials as workbooks and teacher guides to support their hi-lo series, as well….

Most encouraging about the hi-lo market is that librarians, educators, and publishers are seeing the books fill an important need. Becky Williams, a literacy consultant in Iowa who works with teachers, notes, “It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s something. They are a wonderful resource for kids that never ‘got it.’ Having these books has truly made a difference for these kids.”

So, instead of improving reading skills by teaching phonics, the education industry dumbed down the books. They moved the goalpost, disingenuously marketing hi-lo in glowing terms as an attempt to encourage “reluctant readers.”

In her book, DeGroff quotes Andrew Wooldridge of Orca Book Publishers, one of the largest suppliers of hi-lo books, saying, “We don’t use the term hi-lo because it has a bad connotation; we call the books fiction for reluctant readers or struggling readers.”

In reality, hi-lo reading is a system that presents great literature as summaries, like Cliffs Notes, or even as comic books deceitfully labeled “graphic novels.” Students today who are functionally illiterate because they never learned to read are offered summaries and comic books to read instead of original text.

For me, the horror of hi-lo reading goes far beyond the deliberate illiteracy it supports. The most devastating impact is that students actually BELIEVE they have read great literature. They feel the pride of achievement without the achievement. They have entered the realm of subjective reality where facts and feelings merge.

Moving the goalpost and changing the name of a thing does not change the objective reality of that thing, but it can change the hearts and minds of individuals responding to that thing. So, telling children they are all butterflies does not change the fact that some students are extremely smart, some are not; some can read, and some cannot. But it can change the children’s response to that fact, which means that in subjective reality it no longer matters whether you can read or not, whether you are reading a classic text or a comic book. In subjective reality, literacy and illiteracy are equivalent.

The American education industry has replaced meritocracy with educational indoctrination, facilitating deliberate dumbing down of our children. The industry’s informational warfare is facilitated by its psychological warfare, because parents and students alike BELIEVE the student has read the novel Moby-Dick, not the dumbed-down comic-book version!

Deborah DeGroff’s exploration of the content of children’s books also exposes the staggering, pervasive, inappropriate, pornographic, and confusing sexual content of books in classrooms K–12 and school libraries. Her research documents how weaponized education targets children’s most primary identity, their sexual identity.

The campaign to destabilize and destroy a child’s sexual identity is a particularly insidious effort to destroy the child’s individual identity. It is catastrophic to the child, and to freedom in a society of ordered liberty.

In every society anywhere in the world, the first words spoken when a baby is born are “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”

The globalist social engineers are trying to redefine what it means to be human by attacking the biology of maleness and femaleness, and insisting that gender is a choice––a child’s choice. Globalism’s War on Children is a long-term, well-planned, well-funded, well-executed mass-casualty campaign. The attack on a child’s sexual identity is a catastrophic assault on humanity itself.

In schools, libraries, movies, games, churches, and synagogues, transgender role models are presented as normal human beings. The most bizarre aspect of this particular assault on biology and objective reality is that so many parents actually believe that supporting this false, destructive, and confusing sexual narrative is being inclusive and compassionate!

Our nation’s children are being groomed to become compliant, submissive wards of the globalist Unistate, where they will have no individual rights, no freedoms, and no personal or sexual identity. They will be fodder for technocracy and transhumanism without the need of armies or policemen.

America’s weaponized education industry is not teaching Johnny to read or to write. It is teaching Johnny that he is a butterfly—and a boy who can become a girl if he so chooses. Take a moment to try to imagine a society of Johnnys, and then you will understand how destroying a child’s ability to reality-test is a weapon of mass societal destruction.

Without the ability to reality-test, Johnny remains frozen psychologically in the subjective reality of childhood. He never develops into an independent autonomous psychological adult capable of living in the world of objective reality. Freedom is an adult enterprise, and objective reality is the requirement for a free society.

Pleas visit my Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: lindagoudsmit.com

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: IN FOCUS: Protecting Children Against Indoctrination with Alex Newman – OAN


[i] Between the Covers: What’s Inside a Children’s Book?, Deborah DeGroff, 48 Hour Books, 2021; https://www.whatsinsidechildrensbooks.com/about-the-book/

[ii] ALA 2012: What’s Up with Hi-Lo?https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/52124-what-s-up-with-hi-lo-ala-2012.html

[iii] National Assessment of Educational Progresshttps://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2009/2010458.pdf

BBYO Survey Reports that 71% of Jewish Teens Have Experienced Anti-Semitism

Research shows high-schoolers encounter hate both in person and online. 

BBYO has released the results of a new survey of 1,989 Jewish students conducted from Jan. 23 to Feb. 5.

The researchers found that 71% had experienced antisemitic hate or discrimination. Those who have faced it in person numbered 61% while 46% saw it online, and 36% had experienced both forms. Of those who had experienced in-person hate, 46% said it occurred at school and 45% chose not to report the incident.

For the teens who encountered online anti-Jewish hate, they reported that the most common platforms were Instagram (33%), TikTok (23%) and Snapchat (17%).

Matt Grossman, CEO of BBYO, called the survey “a critical wake-up call, revealing the stark reality that Jewish teens are enduring.”

The Jewish youth organization said in a statement that “the data indicates that the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas and the subsequent spread of misinformation and antisemitic rhetoric and violence have had a traumatic impact on Jewish high school students’ safety, well-being, and mental health.”

According to the report, 74% of BBYO members have seen more discrimination since Oct. 7.

Grossman emphasized that “every Jewish teen deserves to feel safe and supported, and it is incumbent upon us to ensure they have those safe spaces, as well as the tools and assistance they need, to navigate these turbulent times with strength and pride. We are so proud and grateful that involvement with BBYO has played such a significant role in helping teens cope with elevated levels of stress and anxiety.”

The uptick in antisemitic incidents and even hate crimes on college campuses has also come to play an important role this year for 64% of respondents in deciding which school to attend.

ABOUT BBYO

BBYO is the leading pluralistic teen movement aspiring to involve more Jewish teens in more meaningful Jewish experiences. For over 95 years, BBYO has provided exceptional identity enrichment and leadership development experiences for hundreds of thousands of Jewish teens.

For nearly a century, BBYO‘s leadership programs, the Aleph Zadik Aleph (AZA, high school fraternity) and the B’nai B’rith Girls (BBG, high school sorority) have been providing exceptional leadership programs and identity enrichment experiences, shaping the confidence and character of more than 350,000 alumni who are among the most prominent figures in business, politics, academia, the arts, and Jewish communal life. Now, BBYO’s network of teens, alumni, parents, volunteers, and philanthropists serves as the Jewish community’s most valuable platform for delivering to the post Bar/Bat Mitzvah audience fun, meaningful, and affordable experiences that inspire a lasting connection to the Jewish people.

EDITORS NOTE: This JNS – Jewish News Syndicate column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Bribing Future Generations for Marx?

Can anybody name one-square inch on the planet where Communism has done anyone any good? Anywhere? Not for the ruling elites, but for the people themselves?

It doesn’t exist. How, then, do they continue to manage to create new recruits? Well, a story out of California last week explains one strategy.

Writing for The Free Press for Free People, Francesca Block reports (3/7/24): “An activist group in California has paid nearly 100 public high schoolers $1,400 each to learn how to fight for racial and social justice.”

This is the brainchild of a group called Californians for Justice (CFJ), and they’re working in Long Beach to create a new breed of Communists, who are interested in learning “restorative justice practices.”

Here is an example of where CFJ stands on the issues. After the brutal October 7th Hamas attack against some 1200 Israeli men, women, and children in the Gaza area, Californians for Justice described Israel (the victim) as being guilty of “ethnic cleansing and apartheid orchestrated by white supremacist settler colonialism bent on the goal of wiping out the indigenous Palestinian population.”

Dividing the world into the supposed oppressors (Israelis) and the oppressed (Hamas) is Marxism at work.

The Free Press for Free People notes a recent social media video helping to recruit other students to join the movement for so-called “social justice.” One student was asked: “Why should students join CFJ?” The student replied, “You get paid good.”

But, all bad grammar aside, do these naïve students realize what they are defending?

Years ago, I read a fantastic book by a former socialist and idealist on the problem of socialism and Communism.

His name is Joshua Muravchik, and as a young man, he was the president of the Young Socialists. But as he matured intellectually, he came to be a major critic of that which he had earlier espoused.

He wrote the book called, Heaven on Earth. The basic thesis is that the Communists promised heaven on earth and instead delivered hell on earth.

And how could they not? It always begins with the premise that there is no God and that man is basically good. Thus, from the very outset, it is always doomed to fail.

As Muravchik noted in an interview I once did with him for Coral Ridge Ministries for our video expose on socialism: “In terms of the most terrible kinds of socialism, the kinds that engaged in mass killing, I think there’s, at the root of that, this idea that you can make a perfect society here in this world, that you can make a heaven on earth. And that’s just a false idea.”

Muravchik observed that when you start from that premise, and you refuse to learn from experience and reality, you’re in for trouble. And the Communist and socialist radicals didn’t learn. “They just kept insisting that their ideas were perfect, and it was only the human beings who were getting in the way of achieving it. Then it’s not such a big step to start killing these human beings until you get all the bad ones out of the way, to build your little utopia out of the ones who are left.”

And the result, per Muravchik? “The Communist countries did prove to be the greatest killers of all time.”

One of the remarkable books I have in my office was published by Harvard University Press in 1999. It’s The Black Book of Communism.

At the end of the 20th century, this bold book, written by many authors, dared to tell the truth that the vast killing fields of the 20th century were the fruit of communism in one form or another.

In a review of the book, Publishers Weekly notes: “Essentially a body count of communism’s victims in the 20th century, the book draws heavily from recently opened Soviet archives.”

America’s founders showed the world a better way to promote lasting good in the world. You begin with the foundational truth that our rights come from God, not the state. Our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, indeed mentions God four times.

And then, building on that clear structure, because of man’s inherent sinful nature, you divide power so that no one man or small group can seize all the power for themselves. As James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, summed up well: “All men having power ought to be distrusted.”

Communism works the opposite way. It says man is good, but the system is bad. Let’s tear down the system and implement “social justice,” and we’ll usher in the long-awaited millennium. But as Muravchik notes: They promised heaven, but only delivered hell. If only more young people could learn the lessons of history and resist the temptation of intellectual bribery, before it’s too late.

©2024. All rights reserved.

The Smartest Person in the World Wiffs. Marilyn vos Savant makes a major gaff!

Marilyn vos Savant is reportedly (according to the Guinness Book of Records) the person who has the highest IQ of anyone in the world — maybe ever!… Although I’ve been accepted into Mensa, Marilyn would be considered to be a Super-Mensa person.

I’ve read Marilyn’s weekly column (Ask Marilyn) for several years, and she uniformly has good answers — which is why I read it. However, even the smartest person in the world can make mistakes. I recently saw this interestingly question she was asked:

“I know a young woman who failed all her classes during her first (and only) semester of college. How could the school have admitted her?”

Marilyn’s very surprising poor answer (where I bolded three key parts):

Plenty of students bomb as freshmen, with no one having a clue beforehand. Reasons vary wildly (from stress to finances and being just plain sick of schooling), but they have little to do with ability or intelligence.

Spending much of one’s youth sitting in classrooms, doing homework and taking tests is unnatural and taxing. And then in college, students must study subjects in which they have no interest and will never put to use

Marilyn: here are some “beforehand clues” that are in bold flashing neon signs:

  1. In K-12 there is rampant grade inflation — so freshmen assume that all they have to do is show up for a good grade. Not so in a quality school, or the world.
  2. In K-12 they are indoctrinated with Woke ideology — so freshmen go into college with an entitlement mentality. But in a good school that won’t cut it.
  3. In K-12, Critical Thinking is not taught — so freshmen who have to do things like write papers are unable to produce more than superficial work. That won’t be sufficient at a good school — or the real world.

Marilyn, you also surprisingly stated that students are FORCED to “study subjects in which they have no interest, and will never put to use.” OMG!

  1. Typically, in college it is up to the Student to choose their major — i.e., something they are interested in. That would mean that the majority of resulting subjects would be consistent with (or necessary for) the student’s selected major.
  2. My degree was physics, and as a freshman at Boston College I was assigned an advanced English class. I thought it would be boring and not relevant, but I applied myself anyway! It turned out to be one of the most useful and interesting classes I EVER took! I’ve put that class to use thousands of times — like write now!
  3. Students also get to choose electives. Again, how is that consistent with your statement that they are forced to “study subjects in which they have no interest”?

My takeaway is that the above “Ask Marilyn” woefully inadequate answer was likely written by a staffer while Marilyn was away on vacation.

A more representative observation from Marilyn is: Don’t be afraid to challenge conventional wisdom; sometimes the greatest breakthroughs come from questioning the norms.

©2024. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.


Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

My Substack Commentaries for 2023 (arranged by topic)

Check out the chronological Archives of my entire Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.orgdiscusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.infocovers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.infomultiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2023 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

Does America have a brilliant or woeful future? Watch, ‘The Millennial Job Interview’ to understand

A reader sent us this short video that struck us as so funny but sadly so true. The public education system has created a generation of youth who are addicted to social media, with no job skills or knowledge of how to succeed. They aren’t taught how to think, rather they’re taught what to think.

WATCH: The Millennial Job Interview

In a December 11, 2019 Daily Signal column titled Students’ Test Scores Unchanged After Decades of Federal Intervention in Education Lindsey Burke wrote,

Federal “Highly Qualified Teacher” mandates. Adequate Yearly Progress requirements. Smaller learning communities. Improving Teacher Quality State Grants. Reading First. Early Reading First. The dozens of other federal programs authorized via No Child Left Behind. School Improvement Grants. Race to the Top. Common Core.

All of that has been just since 2000. Over those past two decades, while federal policymakers were busy enacting new federal laws, creating mandates for local school leaders, and increasing the Department of Education’s budget from $38 billion in 2000 (unadjusted for inflation) to roughly $70 billion today, the math and reading performance of American high school students remained completely flat. That is to say, stagnant.

The U.S. is now above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average in reading, but alas, not because U.S. reading performance has improved. Rather, other countries have seen declines in reading achievement, despite increases in education spending.

In mathematics, however, U.S. performance has steadily declined over the past two decades.

Those are the findings from the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA exams, released last week.

As The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein reported:

About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the exam.

What’s more, the achievement gap between high- and low-performing American students has widened.

The international findings mirror last month’s National Assessment of Educational Progress report, which revealed that math and reading scores across the country have continued a years long stagnation, with students largely showing no progress in academic achievement.

Just one-third of students in the fourth and eighth grades reached proficiency in math and reading nationally on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is administered every two years.

As with the Programme for International Student Assessment’s findings that the achievement gap stubbornly persists for American students, the National Assessment of Educational Progress highlighted similar findings within the U.S.

The scores of students who are among the lowest 10% of performers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have dropped significantly since 2009.

The stubborn achievement gap is not new, but the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Programme for International Student Assessment provide additional data points on its persistence.

As Harvard professor Paul Peterson writes in The Heritage Foundation’s new book “The Not-So-Great Society”:

The achievement gap in the United States is as wide today as it was in 1971.

The performances on math, reading, and science tests between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students differ by approximately four years’ worth of learning, a disparity that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.

One of the more recent, major pieces of federal intervention sold as a way to improve American standing in education was the Common Core State Standards Initiative promoted during the Obama administration.

Common Core national standards and test, proponents argued, would catapult American students to the top of the math and reading pack. It was time, they argued, for the U.S. to have the same “epiphany” Germany did in the late 1990s, and adopt centrally planned national standards and tests.

Germany now lags the U.S. in reading, according to the new Programme for International Student Assessment data, and is far below Canada, a country that does not have national standards.

Indeed, our neighbor to the north has performed consistently well on the Programme for International Student Assessment since 2000, significantly outpacing the United States, and has neither national standards, nor a federal education department.

Canada’s is a decentralized education system, in which Canada’s 10 provinces set education policy.

The fact that Common Core didn’t catalyze improvements in the U.S. isn’t surprising. Large-scale government programs rarely, if ever, do.

But neither have the myriad federal programs created since No Child Left Behind in 2001, nor have the more than 100 federal K-12 education programs created since President Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society initiative in 1965 designed, ostensibly, to narrow opportunity gaps between the poor and the affluent.

Heritage’s Jonathan Butcher and I detail Yuval Levin’s theory of government failure in “The Not-So-Great Society.” Levin explains that large-scale government programs fail for three reasons:

  1. “Institutionally, the administrative state is ‘dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety.’”
  2. “Culturally and morally, government efforts to ‘rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility [have] undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government.’”
  3. “Fiscally, large-scale federal programs supporting the welfare state are simply unaffordable, ‘dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.’”

Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal. Even if there were a constitutional basis for its involvement—which there isn’t—the federal government is simply ill-positioned to determine what education policies will best serve the diverse local communities across our vast nation.

The sooner we can acknowledge that improvements will not come from Washington, the sooner we’re likely to see students flourishing in learning environments that reflect their unique needs and desires.

Lindsey M. Burke researches and writes on federal and state education issues as the Will Skillman fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation. Read her research. Twitter: .

©2024. All rights reserved.

NYC: High school students call teacher ‘dirty Jew,’ praise Hitler, write ‘Free Palestine’ on classroom door

It’s impossible to tell from this report whether these students are under the influence of the likes of Sneako, a popular “influencer” who has converted to Islam and praises Hitler, and Nick Fuentes, a supposedly “America First” agitator who mocks the Holocaust, or whether they are Muslim students. Either way, dark clouds are on the horizon.

Antisemitic teens terrorizing Jewish teacher with Hitler jabs, death threats as NYC school refuses to discipline them: ‘I live in fear’: lawsuit

by Susan Edelman, New York Post, March 2, 2024:

A Brooklyn high school has become a haven for Hitler-loving hooligans who terrorize Jewish teachers and classmates, The Post has learned.

On Oct. 26, just three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, 40 to 50 teens marched through Origins HS in Sheepshead Bay waving a Palestinian flag and chanting “Death to Israel!” and “Kill the Jews!” staffers said.

The hateful procession was shocking even for Origins, a school rife with bias and bullying, insiders told The Post.

“I live in fear of going to work every day,” said global history teacher Danielle Kaminsky.

According to interviews with multiple staffers, and a Jewish student’s safety transfer request, recent hate incidents include:

A student painted a mustache on his face to look like Hitler, and banged on classroom doors. When someone opened, he clicked his heels and raised his arm in the Nazi gesture, security footage shows.

Three swastikas in one week were drawn on teachers’ walls and other objects, a manager found.

A 10th-grader told Kaminsky, 33, who is Jewish, “I wish you were killed.”

Another student called her “a dirty Jew” and said he wished Hitler could have “hit more Jews,” including her.

Students pasted drawings of the Palestinian flag and notes saying “Free Palestine” on Kaminsky’s classroom door. One scribbled note that said simply, “Die.”

The teen tormentors have so far faced no serious discipline under interim acting principal Dara Kammerman, who has done little beyond contacting parents in an effort to practice “restorative justice,” staffers said.

“She is perpetuating an antisemitic environment and a school of hate,” said Michael Beaudry, campus manager of the Sheepshead Bay building that houses Origins and three other schools. “The students continue these behaviors because they know there won’t be any consequences.”

In response, the city Department of Education said it will launch a probe: “There is currently no evidence that these claims are true, but we are investigating the claims.”

In a disturbing instance in late January, a group of boys came into Kaminsky’s classroom at the end of the day, and cornered her, laughing, she said.

“Miss Kaminsky, do you love Hitler?” one asked.

“I was so taken aback,” she said. “I did not respond, and they all gave the heil Hitler sign.”

Frightened, Kaminsky quickly left her classroom….

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Experts Worry that Illegal Immigration Is Affecting the Education System

Since the beginning of the border crisis in which millions of illegal immigrants have flooded into the country, American citizens have been affected in various ways, most notably by the spike in crime.

Some sanctuary cities have recognized that crime is out of their control and have sought changes in their sanctuary policies. Saturating news headlines are cases of illegal immigrants stealing, assaulting, raping, or even murdering innocent American civilians. In addition, taxpayers are funding the housing, food, and health care of people who aren’t legally in the U.S., with taxpayer money funding gender transition procedures as well.

Experts are also pointing to how illegal immigration is affecting the education system, as Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, explained on Thursday’s episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.”

FRC President Tony Perkins highlighted that “the ongoing border crisis undermines our nation’s education system” and is “often left unmentioned.” But the reality, Kilgannon said, is that both poor and wealthy districts are affected by the illegal immigrant students coming in.

“Americans are very generous,” she said, “and it’s hard for us to turn down a student at the schoolhouse door if they present themselves to learn.” But even so, most schools don’t have a choice on whether they accept the illegal migrants, which then places an added and significant “strain on the budget,” Kilgannon added. And she explained how a lot of them come in without an ability to speak English, which requires special services.

Financial strains, in particular, are hard on the high poverty areas, Kilgannon described, because they’re already struggling to fund their schools. They hardly have enough money for the legal American citizens, she noted, but additionally, “it affects wealthy areas too because of the drug crisis.” As drug overdoses at schools increase, Kilgannon discussed the growing controversy over “whether or not the school is notifying parents when children overdose at school.”

She added, “But the reason that kids are overdosing at school is because, for one thing, there’s poor control over the environment by the people who are running the schools. But there’s [also] an increase in drugs coming across the border. … There’s more availability of these drugs, and it’s causing all kinds of pressures to be put on many, many areas of our society. And of course, it’s happening to our school system as well.”

As a former state legislator, Perkins highlighted that what he used to see were parents who had to deal with very strict rules about which schools they could attend based on the district they lived in. But with illegal immigrants, he shared that those same rules don’t apply. “I mean, we’re making our own citizens have to live within the boundaries and the rules, but then someone who’s not even a citizen of this country can come in and go wherever they want, and we have to pay for it,” he said. Kilgannon agreed and stated “there are so many rules that they do not have to follow that regular American citizens have to follow.”

Perkins observed that it looks like “these schools are just expected to absorb the cost of the Biden administration’s immigration policy.” Kilgannon referred to it as “an unfunded mandate,” which can be defined as “regulations or other requirements imposed by a higher level of government on a lower one, but without accompanying appropriations to cover the cost of compliance.” Both Perkins and Kilgannon reflected on whether “local governments could take action against the Biden administration for that reason.” Kilgannon added, “I certainly would want to if I were running a school system that was dealing with these kinds of things.”

In addition, Perkins briefly mentioned how these education concerns caused by illegal immigration only add to the concern over declining test scores and proficiency rates with each year. Considering this push for schools to cater to the Biden administration’s open border policy, he concluded, “I would just think at some point a state’s got to draw the line and say, ‘We’re not doing it.’ … [T]his is absolutely out of control.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

UC Berkeley’s Hitler Youth Accost Jewish Speaker & Attack Jewish Students

University of California, Berkeley, administrators have offered no apology to Israeli lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat, whose speech to a campus Jewish group was abruptly canceled by the university after violent protesters choked a female student attendee, spit in another attendee’s face, and broke into the auditorium where Bar-Yoshafat waited onstage….more here.

Berkley Schools:  Nazi Youth/Hamas Chapter Running Loose in District

By

The Berkeley schools have declared themselves a chapter of Hamas.  Teachers and Administrators openly and quietly are going after Jewish teaches and students.  This is reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

“The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) “knowingly allowed its K-12 campuses to become viciously hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students,” according to a copy of the complaint, filed with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Parents who have signed onto the complaint say anti-Semitic incidents in the schools have “positively surged” since Hamas conducted its unprecedented Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“At BUSD, a virulent wave of anti-Semitism swept through its schools immediately following the massacre,” the complaint alleges. “Jewish and Israeli students have since been subjected to nonstop anti-Semitic bullying and harassment by their teachers and peers, in hallways, in classrooms, and in school yards.”

Reminder;  Like the Nazi’s, Communists, using Karl Marx principles are also Jew haters—so this should be no surprise that the Communist city of Berkeley promotes Jew hating.

Berkeley Public Schools Hit With Federal Complaint Over ‘Severe and Persistent’ Anti-Semitic Bullying

Complaint alleges hallway chants of ‘kill the Jews’ and anti-Semitic teacher rants in support of Hamas

Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon,  2/28/24  https://freebeacon.com/campus/berkeley-public-schools-hit-with-federal-complaint-over-severe-and-persistent-anti-semitic-bullying/

A public school district in Berkeley, California, was hit with a federal complaint on Wednesday alleging it has failed to stem an escalating series of anti-Semitic incidents that include hallway chants of “kill the Jews” and anti-Semitic teacher rants in support of the Hamas terror group.

The Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) “knowingly allowed its K-12 campuses to become viciously hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students,” according to a copy of the complaint, filed with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Parents who have signed onto the complaint say anti-Semitic incidents in the schools have “positively surged” since Hamas conducted its unprecedented Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“At BUSD, a virulent wave of anti-Semitism swept through its schools immediately following the massacre,” the complaint alleges. “Jewish and Israeli students have since been subjected to nonstop anti-Semitic bullying and harassment by their teachers and peers, in hallways, in classrooms, and in school yards.”

The complaint, filed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, follows a flurry of similar federal filings against many of America’s top universities, including Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania, among others. Like its college counterparts, the Berkeley school district stands accused of becoming a dangerous place for Jews and Israelis.

“Reported incidents of anti-Semitism include school ‘walkouts’ praising Hamas with students shouting ‘f— the Jews’ and ‘KKK,’” according to the complaint. “Teachers use class time to propagandize that the Hamas massacre was admirable ‘resistance.’ Following their teachers’ lead, students bully their Jewish peers and deride their physical appearance.”

Berkeley Unified did not respond to a request for comment.

Parents have reported this behavior to school administrators, the complaint says, but the district “has done nothing to address, much less curtail, the hostile environment that has plagued BUSD for over four months.”

The ADL and Brandeis Center are asking the federal government to open a formal probe into the school district to determine if the Jewish population’s civil rights are being violated.

Anti-Semitism is allegedly “normalized throughout BUSD. And teachers have responded with threats.”

In one case, a teacher approached a parent who had complained and said, “I know who you are, I know who your f—ing wife is and I know where you live,” according to testimony included in the federal filing.

Perhaps taking a cue from their instructors, students have harassed their Jewish classmates, telling them, “it is excellent what Hamas did to Israel” and “you have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” according to incidents relayed in the complaint.

“While Berkeley Unified School District plasters its buildings with ‘United Against Hate’ posters, Jewish hate is ignored,” said Berkeley Unified parent Ilana Pearlman.

In the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Berkeley Unified teachers and administrators have allegedly staged walkouts “denigrating Israelis and calling for the elimination of Jews.”

“Teachers, staff, and administrators,” the complaint states, “have participated in and encouraged students to join walkouts, depriving Jewish and Israeli students of a safe place to learn and all students of instruction.” In some cases, these events have taken place during school hours.

In another case cited in the complaint, an unnamed art teacher “spent significant class time imposing his anti-Semitic views on students by showing them violent pro-Hamas videos, projecting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic images during class.” This includes an image of a fist holding a Palestinian flag punching through a Star of David.

The complaint outlines other similar incidents, including anti-Semitic harassment, that has left Jewish students shaken and scared about going to school each day.

“The Berkeley public school district is just one of many districts in California and other states that are experiencing an extreme wave of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic language and incidents in the classroom and the schoolyard,” said Rachel Lerman, vice chair and general counsel for the Brandeis Center. “Since October 7, there have been continual anti-Israel rallies, taking kids off campus without parent permission, where students are provided with signs and permitted to call for the extermination of Zionists and Jews. Students feel free to engage in anti-Semitic speech and bully their Jewish classmates because a number of their teachers tolerate and even encourage it. Meanwhile the administration does nothing in the face of widespread parent complaints.”

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

FL Rep. Chase Tramont: ‘There is no objection to the teaching of facts and truth of history. In fact, we demand it!’

Republican Florida Representative Chase Tramont of Port Orange, Florida took to the floor of the House this week to defend our history and refute the “big lie” that Republicans are somehow trying to censor the teaching of history in a new bill that outlaws the use of ideology to interpret hard fast facts.

Chase is a cosponsor of a bill that requires an honest rendition of our past, warts and all.

The bill prohibits teacher preparation programs, EPIs, and Level I and Level II school leader preparation programs from distorting significant historical events or including a curriculum or instruction that teaches identity politics, violates the Florida Educational Equity Act, or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.

The bill requires all teacher preparation programs and EPIs to afford candidates the opportunity to think critically, achieve mastery of academic program content, learn instructional strategies, and demonstrate competence

The bill requires Level I and Level II school leader preparation programs to afford candidates the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of program content, including instructional leadership strategies, coaching development, school safety, and continuous improvement efforts.

Representative Chase Tramont, “…[A]nd for the future education of my son who will be introduced to the world on Wednesday, I am proud to stand on the right side of protecting our history today.’“

WATCH: Representative Chase Tramont Defends History

©2024. Volusia GOP. All rights reserved.

Jewish Students Tell House Committee: ‘It’s Open Season on Jews on Our Campus’

Jews are fair game now. This is exactly what Jewish students and academics experienced in Nazi Germany.

For years, the growing Jew hatred on college campuses was ignored or excused. Before my colleagues and I were banned, we experienced vicious, violent hatred.

No one stood with us. Or took action.

What did they think was going. to happen?

‘I didn’t come to study in a living laboratory of antisemitism’

In DC, Jewish students tell House committee: ‘It’s open season on Jews on our campus’

Months after the Education and Workforce Committee hearing that contributed to the resignation of top school presidents, Jewish students say the hatred continues unchecked

By: Jordana Horn, Times of Israel, March 1, 2024:

NEW YORK — The House of Representatives’ Education and the Workforce Committee held a bipartisan roundtable Thursday with Jewish students from nine American universities to hear testimony about their experiences with antisemitism on campus.

Testimony given before the Education and Workforce Committee’s last hearing in December led to the resignations of Harvard University president Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.

“These students are dealing with antisemitism at their respective universities on a daily basis. Their courage to speak out and share their stories will give the American people a new look at what is truly happening on college campuses around the country,” Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said before the roundtable in a statement. “This roundtable will help inform the committee’s next steps in the antisemitism investigation as it continues to hold postsecondary education accountable for rampant antisemitism.”

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Democrats’ lawfare against Trump!

GUESTS & TOPICS

REVERAND BEN JOHNSON

Rev. Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand. His writings have also appeared in The (UK) Guardian, Human Events, The Stream, Real Clear Policy, Conservative Review, The Daily Caller, and have been cited by National Review, CBS News, and Fox News. He was managing editor of FrontPage Magazine and U.S. Bureau Chief at LifeSiteNews. He is the author of two books on tax-exempt foundations, as well as Party of Defeat (2008, Spence, with David Horowitz). Before turning to online journalism and editing, he spent more than a decade in all facets of radio broadcasting, including news and talk.

TOPIC: Teachers agree! Trans, CRT Lessons Hurt Rather Than Help Schools!

MARTHA ZOLLER

Martha Zoller is a conservative strategist, activist, policy expert, and pundit with extensive campaign and government experience. For twenty years, Martha has hosted radio programs and was named to the Talkers Top 100 Radio Shows in America multiple times. She was a regular contributor on Cable and Broadcast News and served as a longtime panelist on Fox 5 Atlanta’s The Georgia Gang. Martha is the host of “Morning Talk with Martha Zoller” heard weekdays on WDUN AM550 and WDUN FM102.9.

TOPIC: What are Georgians saying about Fani Willis?

©2024. Conservative Commandos Radio Show. All rights reserved.

10 Times as Many Teachers Say Trans, CRT Lessons Hurt Rather Than Help Schools

A new survey reveals a cavernous gap between teachers’ unions and the views of most parents, teenagers, and teachers on whether public schools should teach LGBT ideology to students — and whether parents should have the right to opt their children out of those classes.

While elite teachers’ unions such as the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) believe schools should teach sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) classes to children, their customers — parents and students — disagree, as do many of their members, according to a series of new polls released last week.

More than 10 times as many teachers said debates over LGBT ideology, including sexual orientation and gender ideology, “have had a negative impact on their ability to do their job,” compared to 4% who said they improve learning, according to the Pew Research Center: 41% to 4%. Social Studies and English teachers were the most likely to say SOGI topics harmed their teaching time; they were also the classes most likely to discuss those issues, the survey found.

Yet some left-wing activists are working to change that. MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, donated $10 million to a group that instructs math teachers to “infuse social justice into mathematics.”

Teachers, Parents, and Students Do Not Want LGBTQIA+ Issues in the Classroom

Half of all teachers say “students should not learn” about gender identity issues in school, including 62% of elementary school teachers, 45% of middle school teachers, and 35% of high school teachers. Among those who believe the school should weigh in on such divisive topics, 33% of teachers say gender “can be different than sex assigned at birth,” while 14% believe in biological sex. More than twice as many elementary teachers believe transgender ideology as believe in biology; the proportion reaches three-to-one among high school teachers (45% vs. 15%).

The poll apparently shows those supportive of transgender beliefs are more likely to address the topic in school. Just under one-in-three teachers say sexual orientation or transgender ideology come up occasionally (21%) or frequently (9%). But teachers who belong to the Democratic Party were 15 points more likely to confess that LGBT issues creep into their classrooms than Republican teachers (36% to 21%).

Although a plurality (48%) of teachers believe parents should be able to opt their children out of transgender ideology indoctrination classes, one-third of instructors believed such classes should be compulsory.

“On both topics, parents’ views were more evenly split than the views of teachers,” according to the Pew survey. For instance, a majority of parents (54%) believe they should be able to determine whether teachers can subject their children to trans ideology.

The largest percentage of teens do not want to hear about LGBT ideology in the classroom, either: 48% say the topics should not be taught at school. Teens are also slightly more likely to believe in biological sex than in transgenderism (26% vs. 25%). But Democratic students are 525% more likely than Republican students to say gender identity is not tied to physiognomy.

Teenage students are more likely to feel uncomfortable hearing about transgender or sexual orientation issues than feel comfortable (33% vs. 29%). More than twice as many Republican students are more likely to feel uncomfortable hearing about such topics than to feel comfortable.

Only 14% of all teens say transgenderism or homosexuality “has never come up in any of their classes.”

The poll seems to indicate many teachers believe parents have too much say in their children’s education. While a plurality of teachers said parents had “the right amount” of influence, teachers were more likely to say parents had “too much influence” than not enough (32% to 19%). Democrats were 42% more likely than Republicans to believe parents had too much influence.

Republican-leaning teachers are more likely to honor parents’ views on these subjects, the poll found: 69% of Republican teachers say schools should not be in the business of teaching LGBT issues, and 80% say parents should decide whether their children attend such classes. Half of Democratic teachers say public school LGBT classes should be mandatory, and 53% say schools should teach transgender ideology.

A strong majority of teachers (58%) belongs to the Democratic Party, Pew noted.

Asian and “[w]hite Democrats are more likely than [b]lack and Hispanic Democrats to say parents should not be able to opt their children out of learning about sexual orientation and gender identity,” Pew stated. In all, 53% of Asian Democrats and “six-in-ten [w]hite Democrats say this, compared with 42% of Hispanic Democrats and 34% of [b]lack Democrats.” A plurality of black Democrats say parents should be able to opt out of LGBT indoctrination (46%, compared to 34% who oppose it).

Teachers’ Unions Out of Touch with Students, Poll Shows

The views of teachers, parents, and students strongly conflict with the stance of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, the three-million-member NEA and the 1.5-million-member AFT. The NEA provides model legislation to teach LGBT ideology in public schools and carries out numerous training sessions to promote gender ideology to teachers.

The NEA’s “Pronoun Guide” includes “Ze, Zim, Zir, Zay or Zee.” It urges teachers, “Inspire and encourage your student” with its two-page list of “LGBT+-affirming books.” It instructs teachers in 33 states how they can obtain a free “Rainbow Library” from GLSEN.

“You can use your work environment,” e.g., the classroom, “to show support for students of all backgrounds — for example, by hanging a Black Lives Matter poster or Pride flag or making clear that you will use a student’s personal gender pronouns,” the NEA advises teachers.

The union’s leadership has strongly emphasized its commitment to radical LGBTQ advocacy, regardless of parental objections or, seemingly, state law. “We will say gay! We will say trans!” bellowed NEA President Becky Pringle at the group’s 2022 Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly, taking aim at the popular “Parental Rights in Education” law, signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who went on to win a rousing double-digit reelection months later. The bill says teachers may not “encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth grade. The NEA stated its union members would “validate our students,” presumably when children’s gender choice conflicts with their parents’ values.

The NEA’s chief union rival, the AFT, “also coached its members on how to inject gender identity politics into the classroom,” found a report from the Defense of Freedom Institute. The AFT’s Together Educating America’s Children (TEACH) conference last July held sessions on “Affirming LGBTQIA+ Identities in and out of the Classroom” and “The TGNCNB [Transgender, Gender-Nonconforming, Nonbinary] Inclusive School and Classroom.”

Teachers in Tennessee’s Clarksville-Montgomery County School System, which strongly supported President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, learned that the U.S. operates as a “system of oppression” that confers “privilege status” on “white,” “able-bodied,” “men, cisgendered,” “heterosexual,” “Christian” Americans; but the U.S. allegedly brands an “oppression status” on any “person of color”; “woman, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer,” “LGBQ+, polyamorous”; and people whose religious views are “pagan.”

The LGBTQ movement’s advocacy goes outside the classroom to the restroom, locker room — even the hotel room. Last summer, teachers at Governor’s Ranch Elementary School in Littleton, Colorado, attempted to force a fifth-grade girl to share a bed with a boy who identified as a girl on an overnight field trip. Last July, the AFT adopted a resolution supporting “inclusive” policies allowing men to access female facilities, “including, but not limited to, bathrooms and locker rooms.” AFT President Randi Weingartenwalked away from a reporter who asked her about girls who do not feel safe undressing in front of boys in their locker rooms.

“Both teacher unions ignore the reality that most teachers want to teach, not affirm a student’s gender identity, either due to their personal values or their beliefs that doing so oversteps their authority and encroaches on the role of parents,” says the Defense of Freedom Institute.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Teachers Ran LGBT Education Program At Dallas School Without Approval: REPORT

An LGBTQ program that partnered Dallas Independent School Districts (ISD) teachers with a local transgender care-providing clinic was never approved by Dallas ISD officials, documents obtained in a public records request by the Dallas Express showed.

The Out for Safe Schools program reportedly partnered the district with a transgender-affirming clinic called the Resource Center, which allegedly provides transgender patients with hormones. The program educated teachers on how they could be “allies” to the LGBTQ cause, according to the outlet.

This partnership agreement was allegedly signed by the Resource Center, but not by any Dallas ISD officials, according to the Dallas Express.

“The department said there was no executed agreement,” JoAnna Talley, public information coordinator for Dallas ISD, told the Dallas Express.

Despite this apparent lack of support on behalf of the district, the program was reportedly operating anyway, the outlet reported. Further documents obtained by the Dallas Express allegedly show that the program was struggling to recruit teachers.

“Update. We still only have one person signed up for today,” Mahoganie Gaston, the LGBTQ youth support services coordinator for Dallas ISD, said in an April 2021 email, according to the outlet.

“Ok. Let’s go ahead and cancel today & ask today’s participant to attend in May. Hopefully, the trustees can push out the training in the areas they represent & attendance will be higher for the final two sessions,” Rafael McDonnell, an employee of the Resource Center, responded, according to the outlet.

Mentions of the Out for Safe Schools program were allegedly taken off the websites of Dallas ISD and the Resource Center after the Dallas Express exposed the program previously, according to the outlet.

The Dallas ISD LQBTQ support center did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Recently, the Illinois Attorney General’s Office permitted Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to refuse to hand over documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) pertaining to the $90,000 they paid to Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago since 2021, as reported by the DCNF.

The payment was reportedly for a series of training sessions from the hospital’s Sexuality Education Program, which includes “age-appropriate” lessons on anal sex and “gender-affirming” sexual communication, according to the hospital’s website. The denial was made on the grounds that Illinois law protects “course materials” from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, according to the DCNF.

AUTHOR

THOMAS MCGIFFIN

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Criminal’: Legal, Parental Advocates Sound Alarm On Blue State Bill Allowing Minors To Consent To Medical Procedures

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Why are Americans becoming more stupid?

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” ― Aristotle

Why are Americans becoming more stupid?

Our entire education system needs a revolution

By: Joel Kotkin, Unherd, February 26, 2024:

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill.

And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.

One might expect, then, that the creation of a raft of new universities and schools focused on doing something different would seem like a fundamental necessity. After all, young people are deserting college in droves, with enrolments down by 15% over the past decade; in the lower grades, it’s common to hear talk of “zombie schools”, the product of more than 20% of pupils being “chronically absent”.

And yet, the emergence of these still-small shoots have terrified the educratic establishment. Some claim the shift in emphasis towards classics and civics, now occurring in places such as Florida’s New College, is “sinister development” by nefarious Right-wingers. Similarly, the teachers’ unions have resisted a number of moves to create charter schools — which increase choice in the public system — because they are part of a “war on schools”.

In some cases, the defence of failure is breathtaking. Blue states such as Illinois have worked to all but eliminate charters, even as the Land of Lincoln boasts 53 schools where not one student can do grade-level math and 30 where none can do so in English. These schools are overwhelmingly in Chicago, where a significant increase in spending per student since 2019 seems to have made no impact.

Yet Chicago’s failures are wholly representative. The most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress found that only 27% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, 20% in math, 22% in geography, and a mere 13% in US History. The Covid lockdowns may have accelerated the deterioration, but scores have continued to decline since the pandemic ended. IQ scores, which had been rising for decades, are now falling even among college students.

More influential here is education’s gradual radicalisation, which has its origins at the top of the food chain. Already in 2018, one study of 51 top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. Five years later, nearly three in five US professors admitted to self-censoring to avoid offending administrators and students.

Continue reading.

A READER’S COMMENT:

“This is now [a] state of war, fifth generational war – from the inside, not kinetic, but lawfare against the society in order to destroy it. Destroy morals and ethics, the sense of fairness, destroy the understanding that rights only work when tied to responsibilities. Break the family – get young to not marry, be bisexual or gay if possible. Create mental illness (phones, entertainment industry, the ‘health departments, vaccine), increase Crime, increase anti-social behavior, import a vast number of unsuitable people, cause them to not absorb in the native culture to fragment society. Destroy religion. Destroy patriotism.

Remove enlightenment liberalism (the writers of the USA Constitution, for example) and replace the philosophy with Postmodernism, which is basically Satan’s creed. Grow debt past the ability to pay to service it, award entitlements to the public sure to bankrupt the nation as they have to be borrowed to pay them out – then have to borrow to ‘service’ that debt’s interest payments, which is called a ‘doom loop’, borrowing to pay interest on debt….. Make home ownership unaffordable to young so they do not have Families. Basically do everything the UNIParty’s of all Western Nations do – abetted and run by their ‘Deep States’ and Globalist masters. Keep ‘Forever Wars” burning to justify a secret Police state, the ‘Security Services’ are now watching you, their resources turned inward….

But enough listing – I am sure you know a hundred more insane things being done – and even enforced, to destroy us all. (Kneeling?) drugs, homelessness, just endless.

At the heart of it all is to destroy Enlightenment and Classical Education. One which has good and evil – not ‘correct and incorrect.’ The people are utterly powerless once you replace that with Postmodernism Liberalism. No morals, No ethics, nothing of ultimate importance.

AUTHOR

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.