Tag Archive for: Big Government Education

Bribing Future Generations for Marx?

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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.

Progressive Public High School Offers Race-Segregated Classes

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called “academic achievement gap” by making black and Latino students feel more comfortable in class.

As Evanston, Ill. School Board Vice President Monique Parsons described the problem this month, “Our black students are, for lack of a better word … at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently.” Evanston could have offered extra tutoring, parent engagement programs, or similar interventions. Instead, they offered special black-only classes taught by black teachers, on the theory that black students would learn better without white peers around.

Evanston is not the only community to offer race-segregated classrooms. Woke strongholds such as Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have been offering race-specific high school electives focusing on subjects like African-American history since at least 2015. Evanston’s innovation was to expand the concept of race-segregated classrooms to math and English classes, such as Algebra 2 and AP Calculus.

Of course, federal non-discrimination laws forbid school districts from separating students on the basis of race, but the Evanston school district attempts to sidestep these laws by making the classes voluntary. Is that acceptable? To answer that question, consider what would have happened if Arkansas high schools in the 1950s had offered voluntary, whites-only classes to make white students feel more comfortable.

“In this example, the school system is failing to educate a portion of students. Rather than blame themselves for failing to prepare students to advance academically, this school system asks students to segregate themselves based on race,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told The Washington Stand. “The students must do it themselves so the school doesn’t violate civil rights laws that protect them from racial segregation.”

Fortunately, Evanston’s racial segregation scheme has not encountered universal participation. Approximately 200 of the high school’s 3,600 students (a little more than 5%) are attending race-segregated classes. About 25% of the student population is black, and about 20% is Latino, which comes out to about one in nine black students and one in seven Latino students attending the segregated classes. While not universal, these numbers still represent a sizable percentage of the school’s minority populations.

Regardless, the problem lies in the principle, not the implementation.

“We would all agree that it would be wrong if white people were looking to create spaces where everyone was white, but somehow the calculation is supposed to be different if black or brown people want to create spaces where no one is white,” Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement Joseph Backholm told TWS.

In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) informed educators in a “Dear Colleague” letter, “OCR generally will open an investigation under Title VI [a civil rights non-discrimination law] where there are allegations that the use of a curriculum or program separates students or otherwise treats them differently based on their race” (emphasis added). That is precisely what Evanston’s program does, even if it is voluntary.

“This is a great example of how wokeness changes our moral evaluations,” Backholm explained. “In wokelandia, a person labeled an oppressor can do exactly the same thing as one of the oppressed, but it is wrong for one and right for the other. It’s very bad moral reasoning.”

Evanston has distinguished itself in recent years for its zeal to address past discrimination through present discrimination. The city became the first in America to approve reparations payments for black Americans in 2021. In 2019, the city council passed a resolution declaring Evanston “an anti-racist city” and “acknowledg[ing] that the trauma inflicted on people of color by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, and social outcomes; and conjures painful memories of our City’s past …”

Such self-abasement might be understandable if the city had been the site of some notorious lynching or a KKK hotbed. Instead, Evanston was founded by Methodists — the backbone of the abolition movement — and incorporated in 1863 — the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city’s zeal to apologize for racism seems to outpace its actual record of racial discrimination.

Countering racism infuses Evanston’s current policy of racially-segregated classes, too. “Equity guides many of the district’s decisions,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “embodied in a stated board goal: ‘Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.’”

Kilgannon said this “deeply troubling” goal “summarizes quite precisely the problem with ‘equity’ as a worldview-guiding policy.” She explained, “Student achievement has many factors. ‘Centering’ racism as the most devastating factor will not produce better academic outcomes and is likely to produce an even more toxic environment for children of every race.”

Indeed, students who choose to participate in the racially-segregated classes may have already bought into that woke indoctrination. By segregating themselves, they will miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them. They will encounter expectations that don’t prepare them for the real world. They will accept the false premise that their skin color arbitrarily limits their potential academic success. Meanwhile, the students — white, black, and Latino — who stay behind in the mixed classes also miss out on interactions with their peers.

“In athletics, all play together. They don’t have a white team, a black team, and a Latino team,” argued Jay Sabatino, a former high school teacher, principal, and superintendent in Illinois public schools, who retired after 30 years in education. “They have one Evanston team. All contribute, and all make mistakes. If a student in class or on the basketball court feels unsafe because he made a mistake, the teacher should address that. A safe environment (physically and emotionally) is the result of an excellent school.”

“What I fear is happening is that these students are being given the impression that their skin color is the most important thing about them,” Backholm agreed, “and that they need protection from people who don’t look like them. If that’s the case, these segregated classrooms will end up giving them a much greater handicap in life than whatever math deficiencies they may have.”

“As long as the program is voluntary, I can accept it more than if it is ‘the way we do things,’” Sabatino told TWS. But he expressed concerns about the process, based upon the WSJ’s reporting that the school district was dodging media inquiries and had not published data on the program’s success over the past four years. “Transparency in these decisions (at a district or school level) should be paramount. That Evanston would not respond to questions should throw up a red flag to the community.” Additionally, “Any district that does not look at the data critically and report out on them is not operating optimally. This isn’t an administrator’s school; it’s the community’s.”

“This example is one of the many reasons we encourage Christians to run for school board, and why we support in prayer Christians serving in schools as teachers and staff,” said Kilgannon. “Only a system devoid of God can produce this kind of situation. Christians are needed now more than ever in education of every kind.”

America’s educational establishment — such as national teachers’ unions and education training programs — are pushing schools to embed godless, toxic ideologies based on Marxism into curriculums, instruction, and every aspect of school life. They instruct students to classify everyone as either oppressor or oppressed, based not upon their individual behavior but upon their belonging to groups. Many of these groups, which determine someone’s moral standing according to woke ideology, are based upon unchangeable physical characteristics, such as a person’s skin color or ethnicity.

Creating special classes for certain “oppressed” groups (blacks and Latinos) to escape from the supposed “oppressors” (whites), as Evanston school district has done, is just another method for subtly advancing this radical indoctrination agenda. But will it actually help students learn better in AP calculus class? The case to make for it is not very persuasive.

Instead of imbibing untested racial ideology, there are time-tested methods for academic improvement which Evanston could try. Based on his 30 years of experience, Sabatino said, “I’ll always endorse this: Hard work and perseverance lead to success.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 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.

Thousands of Schools Won’t Tell Parents About Kids’ Gender Transition: Report

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More than 5,000 schools across the nation allow teachers to hide a child’s decision to identify as a member of the opposite sex from the child’s parents. The parental exclusion policy — which is heavily advocated by LGBT lobbying groups and applies to more than 3.2 million children nationally — has already resulted in the sexual trafficking of at least one young girl.

A total of 5,904 schools in 168 school districts nationwide allow, or require, teachers to conceal children’s transgender “social transition” — in which children change their name or preferred pronouns, or begin using the locker rooms of the opposite sex — from their parents. School districts keeping legal guardians ignorant about their children’s life-altering decisions stretch from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and from Alaska to Arizona.

“This investigation shows that parental exclusion policies are a problem from coast-to-coast — and that living in a red state doesn’t mean that families are automatically shielded from this issue,” said Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education (PDE), which compiled the list. PDE discovered four districts in deep-red Kansas that have adopted the policy, crafted by LGBT activists. For example, Wichita Public Schools’ teacher training claims, “The lack of using [a child’s preferred] pronouns could lead to death.”

In all, PDE reports, such policies affect 3,268,752 students — and their parents — in 28 states and the District of Columbia.

“This list is not comprehensive,” the report notes.

A Virginia high school’s decision to conceal a teenage girl’s gender transition ended with the teen being drugged, gang-raped and, on two separate occasions, sexually trafficked. In August 2021, 14-year-old Sage began attending Appomattox County High School. Her biological grandmother, Michele, who legally adopted her, said Sage told her “all the girls there were bi, trans, lesbian, emo,” and Sage soon decided she “wanted to wear boys’ clothes.” But Michele added, Sage told school officials “she was now a boy named Draco with male pronouns. Sage asked the school not to tell me, and they did not tell me.”

After a group of boys accosted and threatened to rape her in the boys’ restroom, Michele took Sage home and found a pass made out to “Draco.” Michele said Sage was too afraid to return to school, so she ran away to meet an online “friend,” who sexually trafficked her through Washington, D.C. and Maryland. By the time the FBI found her locked inside a room in Baltimore nine days later, Michele recalled, Sage had been “locked in a room, drugged, gang-raped, and brutalized by countless men.”

“One of the expert witnesses in the hearing [on January 30] confirms that online predators do target social media accounts of children who list themselves as ‘ftm’ or ‘female to male,’” Delegate David LaRock (R-Berryville) told The Daily Signal.

But Sage’s nightmare had only begun. A judge accused Michele and her husband of inflicting “emotional and physical abuse” by “misgendering” their granddaughter. The judge had Sage committed to the male section of a children’s home, where she was “repeatedly beaten” and “given street drugs,” Michele said. Sage ran away from the home, but the FBI found her in the grips of a sexual trafficking in Texas. Sage had again “been drugged, raped, beaten, and exploited.”

“Sage isn’t unique,” LaRock told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on February 9, although “the degree to which she’s been violated is, hopefully, rare.”

Reports of schools allowing or encouraging minors to “socially transition” to another gender have trickled out, as outraged parents have taken legal action against the districts on PDE’s list. A coalition of parents sued Iowa’s Linn-Mar Community School District last summer. Last month, Amber Lavigne filed a lawsuit against the Great Salt Bay Community School in the coastal Maine village of Damariscotta — population 2,300 — after she found a chest binder in her 13-year-old daughter’s belongings. A social worker facilitated the child’s decision to identify as another gender, and the school withheld all information from her mother, according to her legal counsel. “The school never stopped trying to keep me in the dark at every turn, repeatedly stonewalling me when I tried to find out what was going on,” said an exasperated Lavigne, who is represented by the Goldwater Institute. “My parental rights aren’t up for debate: I deserve to know what’s happening to my child in school.”

“Counselors and teachers didn’t tell Sage’s family about the fact that she was transgender. And she got caught up in some horrific human trafficking issues, and they almost lost her,” Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) told a CNN townhall last Wednesday. “There’s a basic rule here, which is that children belong to parents — not to the state, not to schools, not to bureaucrats, but to parents.”

Last September, Youngkin enacted model school guidelines that affirm, “School personnel shall keep parents fully informed about all matters that may be reasonably expected to be important to a parent.” Parents may “determine (a) what names, nicknames, and/or pronouns, if any, shall be used for their child by teachers and school staff while their child is at school, (b) whether their child engages in any counseling or social transition at school that encourages a gender that differs from their child’s sex, or (c) whether their child expresses a gender that differs with their child’s sex while at school,” the guidelines add.

Despite Youngkin’s actions, the report lists seven school districts in Virginia that continue to hide social transition from parents.

To remedy the situation, LaRock introduced “Sage’s Law” (H.B. 2432), which requires school officials to contact parents if a child begins using names or pronouns not consistent with his or her sex. The bill passed the House of Delegates on February 6 by a narrow 50-48, party-line vote. (Democratic Delegate Cliff Hayes also intended to vote no.) It is currently under Senate consideration.

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives is taking steps to assure no American parent is frozen out of his or her child’s life decisions. Last week, House Republicans advanced a measure barring any federally funded elementary or middle school from changing a “minor child’s gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name” on any school form, or allowing students to use the restrooms and changing facilities of the opposite sex. The House Education and the Workforce Committee adopted the measure — originally introduced as a separate bill, the Parental Rights Over the Education and Care of Their (PROTECT) Kids Act, by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) — as an amendment to the Parents Bill of Rights (H.R. 5). Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) introduced a companion bill in the Senate (S. 200).

Walberg, an ordained pastor who once worked for the Moody Bible Institute, found it “unconscionable that some believe that parents should be kept in the dark regarding gender transitions of their own children. He urged Congress to “ensure that schools do not hide important information about children from their own parents,” “increase transparency, and defend the God-given authority and rights of parents.”

President Joe Biden is all but certain to veto such a bill. The president’s now-inactive nonprofit, the Biden Foundation, partnered with Gender Spectrum, a group whose “Gender Support Plan” tells schools to have “contingencies in place” if parents find out their child is “being supported” against their will. Since taking office, Biden has said transgenderism reflects “the image of God.”

You may see PDE’s incomplete list of the school districts that have adopted anti-parental rights transgender policies here. The group asks citizens to report such policies to PDE.

“Frighteningly, this only begins to scratch the surface of what is taking place behind closed doors in America’s schools,” said Neily. “Without a doubt, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of others with similar policies on the books.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 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.

What’s the Most Important Issue for the Liberty Movement to Focus On?

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There are many great candidates, but there’s one that stands above the rest.

One of the problems with large social movements is that it can be difficult to figure out which issues to focus on, and the liberty movement is no exception. There are thousands of ways the government has inserted itself into our lives, and each of them represents an opportunity for change in a pro-liberty direction.

The good news is that we have thousands of libertarians, many of whom have picked their own niche topics of interest to focus on, which means we can fight this battle on multiple fronts simultaneously. But while the decentralized nature of this movement is certainly one of its strengths, it sometimes makes it hard to build momentum on the topics that are more important.

The question then arises, if we wanted to pick a specific topic to emphasize, which topic should that be? Stated differently, what issue is the most important when it comes to scaling back government intrusion in our lives?

To help us decide, let’s take a look at some of the top contenders, in no particular order.

One of the biggest issues with the US government is undoubtedly its Military Industrial Complex. The $782 billion defense budget is a massive waste of resources, and the civil liberties violations associated with the surveillance state are nothing to scoff at either. Add in war and all other kinds of foreign intervention, and it becomes pretty clear just how big this problem has become.

Barriers to immigration may not be something we think about every day, but they have life-changing consequences for millions of people. Lifting these barriers would not only be a win for human rights, it would also provide tremendous economic benefits as people take advantage of the opportunities that become available.

I still remember the day I first found out America had the highest incarceration rate in the world. I was stunned then and I remain stunned to this day. The War on Drugs in particular has put thousands of people behind bars for non-violent offenses, and harmful practices like civil asset forfeiture and no-knock raids are commonplace. Countless lives have been needlessly destroyed because of this inhumane system.

While social issues often get the spotlight, economic issues are arguably just as important, especially when it comes to the Federal Reserve. As Ron Paul has regularly pointed out, central banking has been responsible for so much of the corruption, war, and poverty that we have seen in recent decades, and anyone who’s been keeping an eye on rising prices can tell you just how much damage it can cause.

Free expression is one of the pillars of a free society. Without the freedom to say and publish what we see fit, we have no means of calling attention to injustice or arguing for our ideas. Fortunately, free speech has many protections in the US, but we’d be naive to think this means we’re in the clear. Government pressure has already prompted Big Tech platforms to censor many important discussions, and surveys show Americans increasingly support the government stepping in to restrict “false information” online. If public dialogue breaks down even more, the consequences could be serious.

Many argue the Second Amendment is the key to defending every other liberty, and they have a point. As history has shown time and again, it’s hard to tyrannize an armed population. At the end of the day, those who have a means of defending themselves will have a far better chance of preserving their liberties than those who don’t.

Though all of the issues mentioned above are important, the issue that takes the top spot in my books is one I haven’t mentioned yet.

Education.

The main reason education is so important is that it is the key to all the rest. The first step for achieving change on any issue is teaching people about it. And we will struggle to do that effectively as long as the government has a virtual monopoly on teaching the next generation.

Think about it. Kids spend 12 years of their life in government schools, learning government-approved history, geography, literature, economics, and civics, being taught to obey authority, standing for the national anthem and reciting the pledge of allegiance. We’re talking 50 million kids in any given year. This isn’t some minor intrusion in our lives. There’s a public school in just about every neighborhood in America.

In addition to public schools being generally pro-government by their very nature, there is also evidence they tend to have a distinct “big-government” bent. For instance, among high school teachers in the US there are 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans. For English teachers, the ratio is 97 Democrats for every three Republicans.

In his book The Corrupt Classroom, education researcher Lance Izumi summarizes the state of public education in this regard. “Far from being mere anecdotal incidents—and there are a lot of these—,” he writes, “political bias is becoming systemic in public school systems and has turned many public schools into indoctrination centers for progressive ideologies and causes.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee private schooling will be a panacea for these biases, but there is evidence it might be able to help.

Aside from the clear indoctrination potential, there are also profound social and economic problems with public schooling. On the social side, compulsory schooling laws represent a fairly significant civil liberties violation. We don’t often think of it this way, but statutes regulating education are ultimately coercive and thus interfere with the freedom of parents, educators, and students to teach and learn as they see fit.

Economically, public education is of course one of the biggest government expenditures, but it’s also a tremendous waste of kids’ time and potential. So many opportunities for growth and learning (and in the long run, economic productivity) are crushed because of this regimented system that tries to force every kid into the same box.

So what can we do about it?

Clearly, we need to go after the government schooling system with well-crafted arguments and sound reasoning. But just as importantly, we need to be creating alternatives: private schools, homeschool networks, YouTube channels, blogs, podcasts, TV shows, conferences, seminars, webinars, articles, books…all of it. As John Taylor Gatto once said, “there isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints.”

In short, we need to take education back into our own hands. Free speech and gun rights and all the other issues are great, but the way we make progress on them is by committing to learn and to teach, not just as kids, but as adults too. Because it’s only by teaching and learning that we will win each of these individual battles, and ultimately, the war for freedom.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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