Tag Archive for: education

Progressive Public High School Offers Race-Segregated Classes

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.

Seattle Middle School Teacher Made Students Write Hate Mail to Moms for Liberty

Moms for Liberty, a conservative parental rights group, received a surprise package from Jane Addams Middle School in Seattle. It consisted of letters that appeared to be written by the middle school students with phrases such as “Say Gay,” “Gay is slay, stop being a rat,” and a repeated use of “Stop bullying.”

The social studies teacher, Ann Christianson, included her own note, which read, “Dear Moms for Liberty, please read the enclosed cards from concerned middle school students in Seattle, WA.” Christianson is also the coordinator of the Gay-Straight Alliance at the school.

The mothers’ group posted pictures of the package on X, writing, “Seattle Public Schools are spending class time indoctrinating and weaponizing your children.” And the Jane Addams Middle School report card seems to affirm their claim that students’ time is not as prioritized on learning as it should be. According to The Post Millennial, “38.6 percent of students failed to meet the grade level in English. Almost half the students failed to meet the grade level in mathematics and 34.2 percent failed to meet the grade level standard in science.”

But this isn’t the first time this Seattle school district has promoted progressive ideas. Shortly after the 2020 George Floyd riots, Seattle Public Schools removed police from campuses and promoted the “defund the police” movement. Schools in the district have also offered free “gender-affirming care,” including hormone blockers and gender transition surgery referrals for middle and high school students.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “The most important lesson a school club can teach is the value of serving others. The best student clubs are the ones that serve others in love — by visiting the elderly in nursing homes, working at food banks or soup kitchens, or performing volunteer service at the school itself.”

She continued, “Are these children reading at a high enough proficiency to help kindergarteners with ABCs? Based on their test scores, one [would] think they might not be, and that a better use of their club time, rather than sending passive aggressive missives to Moms for Liberty, might be to improve their reading and writing scores.”

For Kilgannon, this controversy should prompt a lot of questions from local parents: “Who paid for the postage and supplies? How did they decide where to send the letters? Were the parents of the students who sent the letters allowed to know their child participates in such a club at school?” The Post Millennial’s Ari Hoffman attempted to reach the school to get some answers, but he received only an auto-reply message from the teacher responsible for the hate mail that stated she was on a leave of absence.

“As a mom and as someone who gets ‘love letters’ like these from time to time,” Kilgannon added, “I can assure you that the effect of these letters is to strengthen the resolve of Moms for Liberty, a group that loves ALL children and works in the tireless service of human rights. We should join with Moms for Liberty members in praying for these students and the teachers who directed this sad little project.”

Kilgannon concluded, “We live in the greatest country in the world; our school children and families deserve much more than this demeaning exploitation.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Christians Forced Out of Competition for Biblical Views on Gender

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.

Report: U.S. Colleges Received $13 Billion from Mostly Authoritarian Regimes

On Monday, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) released a report revealing that American colleges and universities have received approximately $13 billion in undisclosed funds from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian regimes such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. As the report and experts are noting, there appears to be a correlation between colleges that received money from Middle Eastern regimes and increased levels of anti-Semitic campus violence.

The report found that from “2015-2020, Institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors, had, on average, 300% more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.” Two of the top four countries who gave the most money to U.S. colleges were Qatar (number one on the list with over $2.7 billion) and Saudi Arabia (number four with other $1 billion), both of which are ruled by authoritarian regimes that use Islamic Sharia law as the basis for governance.

Notably, two of the top three universities that received the most undisclosed funds from foreign governments were Cornell University (number two on the list with over $1.2 billion) and Harvard University (number three with almost $900,000,000). At Cornell, the campus has been shaken by a series of anti-Semitic incidents, including the arrest of a student who threatened to “shoot up a dining hall that caters to Jewish students and execute other Jews with an ‘assault rifle.’” This followed the discovery of anti-Semitic graffiti on campus and a professor who stated that Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,400 mostly civilians was “exhilarating.”

Meanwhile, Harvard has seen numerous anti-Semitic incidents proliferate on its campus. Immediately following the October 7 attack, 34 student organizations signed a statement blaming the “Israeli regime” for “all unfolding violence.” In an open letter to Harvard’s president on November 4, alumnus Bill Ackman described what he discovered during a townhall he held with Jewish students on campus:

“Jewish students are being bullied, physically intimidated, spat on, and in several widely-disseminated videos of one such incident, physically assaulted. Student Slack message boards are replete with antisemitic statements, memes, and images. On-campus protesters on the Widener Library steps and elsewhere shout ‘Intifada! Intifada! Intifada! From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free!’”

On Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” FRC’s Senior Fellow for Education Meg Kilgannon expressed alarm at the number of universities that are illegally hiding the acquisition of funds from foreign governments.

“You’re dealing with a university system in the United States that has completely been absorbed by moral relativism,” she contended. “They’re certainly mostly anti-Israel, and definitely a lot of them are anti-American. So the fact that they’re taking this money and they’re not disclosing it, it’s evidence that they consider themselves above the law or they just don’t care to be held accountable for what they’re doing.”

Kilgannon further observed that the influence of Islamist regimes on college campuses has a long history. “[A]fter 9/11 … you had universities and colleges looking for Islamophobia everywhere they could find it. … And so a lot of this funding was happening through programs where they were trying to educate Americans about how Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all just get along … [T]hat was 20 years ago. Here we are now. And they’ve got a lot of money streaming through those channels and organizations that they set up on campus.”

The overall conclusion of the NCRI report stated that “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor 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.

Virginia School District Removes Sexually Explicit Books to Keep Focus on Literacy

A public school superintendent in Virginia is making it clear that his school district will be focusing on improving the literacy of its students while also protecting them from being exposed to sexually explicit material while in school.

As parents and observers began noticing a rise in gender ideology, critical race theory, and pornographic material present in curriculums and school library books in recent years, many worried that the focus on ideologies was eating up valuable class time that could be spent on developing basic competencies in reading, writing, and math. News came in 2022 and in June of this year that math and reading scores had plummeted to the lowest levels in decades.

Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) rode a wave of energy surrounding the burgeoning parental rights movement to a surprise gubernatorial victory in 2021, and his administration has made education policy a focal point. In 2022, Youngkin signed into law the Virginia Literacy Act, which focused on improving the reading skills of Virginia’s students by providing special training to teachers, sharing instruction results with parents, and partnering with parents to create individualized plans for students who are showing a deficiency in reading.

“There’s a lot of talk in public education right now about implementing Virginia’s Literacy Act, about wanting to improve standards of learning and standardized test scores,” said Mark Taylor, superintendent of Spotsylvania County Public Schools in Fredericksburg, Va., during Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “And we’re doing that in Spotsylvania County. But also among those priorities is a debate, really, about parental rights and parental involvement in public education. In Spotsylvania, we are following the directives of Governor Glenn Youngkin, and we are working hard to maximize parental engagement and parental involvement.”

Taylor also noted that he is continuing efforts his school district started in March to remove sexually explicit material from the shelves of school libraries.

“We provide an avenue for parents to opt in or opt out of the availability of sexually explicit materials for their children, and we’re actively reviewing challenges of instructional materials, including library books,” he explained. “I’ve recently removed 23 more books now, for a total of 37 books removed from our public school libraries. Now, we have 390,000 volumes, so there are plenty of books to be read.”

Taylor went on to point out the extreme nature of some of the sexually explicit material that he removed. “[It’s] essentially pornography and doesn’t need to be a part of [school libraries]. In fact, some of it is shocking scenes of violent rape or descriptions of forced bestiality, sex with animals.”

In response to accusations of “book banning” from legacy media and left-wing critics, Taylor emphasized that any books that have been removed from school library shelves are widely available elsewhere.

“The books that I’ve removed, to the best of my knowledge, are all still available in the public libraries, so this is in no way a ban. The books are available in the community, they’re available online, they’re available from a variety of sources. We’re simply trying to, number one, follow the governor’s directives in implementing policy for our school division. And number two, to create what I hope will be a safe space for children to learn the basics of English and literacy and mathematics and other subjects that are essential to their preparation for a positive and beautiful future that we want them to have.”

In April 2022, Youngkin signed into law a measure that requires Virginia schools to notify parents if their child is assigned books or other materials that contain sexually explicit content.

Taylor also shared his thoughts as to why some public school administrations have appeared to show hostility to the concerns of parents.

“I think that what has been enculturated over many years is the notion that the professional educators are specialists in the field with exemplary competencies, and they are best positioned to help the students forward,” he observed. “Professional educators are certainly highly trained and very talented people, but at the end of the day, I think it’s also true that no one knows the child like the parent knows the child. And for public education to be successful, there really needs to be an effective collaboration, a solid partnership, close connection between parents and public school educators working together to prepare students for their very best future. … Let’s work together instead of pulling in opposite directions.”

Taylor concluded by urging for prayer and a strong turnout in the upcoming election.

“Pray for the upcoming election,” he entreated. “Virginia is a purple state next week. Local seats are up, including seats on our Board of Supervisors that appropriates money to the school division and seats on our school board. And this purple state is going to become more blue, or it’s going to become more red. These issues will continue to be debated, and our success or failure depends in part on support from the community and from the voters.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior 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.

Anti-Semitic and Pro-Hamas Rallies Reveal the Need to Teach Truthful History

Since October 7, many of us have been deeply impacted and heartbroken seeing imageshearing news, and realizing what has happened to thousands of individuals and families in Israel. In addition to sympathizing with our brothers and sisters, it has been eye-opening and tragic to see how many college students sympathize with — not the Israeli victims — but the Hamas terrorists who delighted in brutally attacking and murdering them. This reality brings to light the importance of teaching children accurate history, natural law, and, for Christians, a biblical worldview.

The United States is a unique, blessed nation that was founded upon prayer and the wisdom of men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Jay, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. These men shared Judeo-Christian values which they referred to as “self-evident truths” in the Declaration of Independence. Political philosophers refer to America’s founding political philosophy as “classical liberalism”: limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law. The Founders’ understanding that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness” results from the Jewish and Christian understanding that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Tragically, in recent decades, America’s mainstream media and public education system have devalued our country’s relationship with Israel and our shared, Judeo-Christian values based on the Ten Commandments in favor of viewing history and current affairs in the Middle East from the perspective of Palestinians and even radical Islamist terrorists such as Hamas. While it is important to view the Palestinian people as human beings made in the image and likeness of God, we must also defend and declare the sacredness of the Jews’ lives and their right to defend their homeland of Israel.

In 2021, FRC’s Chris Gacek and Lela Gilbert detailed how anti-Semitism and Marxism have tragically spread throughout America, especially on college campuses. They described how there is an aggressive antisemitic outlet among foreign and U.S.-born students on American campuses via the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Movement (BDS).

BDS targets Israel for isolation and economic ostracism because Israel is “purported to be an ‘apartheid state’ akin to South Africa with Zionism being its supporting ‘racist’ ideology,” Gacek and Gilbert write. “Worse yet, the BDS Movement has extensive ties to Islamic radicalism in the Middle East including Hamas. To promote BDS on campus, the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was founded in 2010, but numerous individual campus chapters existed for at least a decade prior. The BDS/SJP movement accepts nothing about Zionism or the State of Israel. …Now, SJP has over 200 college and university chapters which are administration sanctioned. …Jewish students are intimidated from public displays of religious or Zionist belief …”

“This modern adaptation of antisemitism is a manifestation of [Marxist] critical race and ethnic theories that cast Jews ‘uniformly as powerful white oppressors.’ This ‘critical’ variation ‘doesn’t single Jews out, ethnically or otherwise, as distinct categories.’ Instead, by lumping Jews together with other ‘dominant majorities,’ it ‘effectively creates an erasure, diminishing the Jewish voice in defining Jewish identity,’” the duo warns.

On the October 19 episode of “Washington Watch,” Dean of the Regent University School of Government Michele Bachmann explained, “There’s a real change that’s happened in the United States Congress, and there’s a real change that’s happened throughout America, and that’s where Christians need to wake up, too, and take stock of what’s going on because our … Christian young people are being targeted with this propaganda … that really Israel and Hamas, they’re coequal partners. [Or that] Israel’s just as much at fault as Hamas. This is an absolute lie.”

Bachmann continued, “And so we’re swimming in a sea of lies, and it’s important that churches, that Christian schools and universities teach the truth about what the Bible says about Israel and also the historic truth, the political truth, the legal truth about Israel’s right to her land. And there is never any justification … for what Hamas has done and is doing even today to Israel.”

To help your kids learn the history of Israel and Palestine, PragerU has some very helpful videos at prageru.com.

WATCH: History Gaza Explained

AUTHOR

Kathy Athearn

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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.

America’s Universities Reap What They Have Sown

America’s elite institutions are shuddering from the impact of the outbursts of anti-Semitism on their campuses. Their spasms of panic are animated less by the Israel-hatred and hostility to Jews emanating from their students than by something even atheist materialist postmoderns find terrifying: loss of income.

From Harvard to Berkeley, universities long-reputed to be the nation’s — and often the world’s — finest have proven to be cauldrons of seething bigotry. But it’s bigotry of a specific kind, aimed at Jews and the State of Israel.

This is not new; it’s been simmering for years. As journalist Seth Mandel reports, many universities’ “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agenda is substantially anti-Semitic. Numerous incidents of anti-Semitism have been well-documented, and the U.S. Department of Education currently is reviewing reports of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish behavior — even by some professors — at the City University of New York and its law school, UCLA, U.C. Berkeley, George Washington University, the University of Vermont, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and the University of Illinois.

Since Hamas launched its atrocity-laden attack on Israel on October 7, there have been outbursts of unrestrained Israel hatred at some of our country’s most storied places of higher education. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania are among the schools at the center of the storm, but not just because so many of their students have signed odious petitions and blamed Israel for Hamas’s morally squalid assault.

These expressions of anti-Semitism have led many previously generous donors to pull their pledged donations. For example, former U.S. Ambassador to China John Huntsman has written to the president of the University of Pennsylvania that the institution is “deeply adrift in ways that make it almost unrecognizable.” Huntsman, a Penn alum and billionaire whose family has long supported the school, wrote that “the University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low.”

Financier Kenneth Griffin, who “has donated more than half a billion dollars to Harvard University,” placed a call to the school’s president expressing dismay that Harvard had been so tepid in response to a public letter produced by 30 student groups blaming Israel for Hamas’s attacks. “Asked if his hedge fund Citadel would hire the head of a student group that signed the Harvard letter, his answer was an unequivocal no. ‘Unforgivable,’ he said.” Griffin then asked, “How do you end up in such a twisted place?”

So, with money on the line, university leaders are now almost falling over themselves condemning Hamas and its brutality. Better late than never. But there’s a larger issue at stake.

For decades, America’s top colleges and universities have become home to far-left academics who denigrate America’s founding, its history, and its basic principles. The United States is cast as a global villain and portrayed as little more than politically bankrupt and racially and economically oppressive. This is not about an honest accounting of the nation’s failures but an almost exclusive emphasis on her faults, omitting all that is noble in our past and worth upholding in the present.

So with Israel: According to some of America’s most talented young people, a little country founded after a mid-century genocide of six million Jews, occupying about 8% of the land mass of the Middle East, surrounded by Islamists for whom nothing short of Israel’s utter destruction will be enough, is at fault for the attacks and attempted conquest to which it so often has been subject. This mentality is, in part, the fruit of the propaganda to which they have been subject in the name of education. And fearful of offending those who scream the loudest, university leaders have cowered upon hearing such “woke” shibboleths as (so-called) justice, “triggering,” and so forth.

Even more, the unwillingness of college heads to articulate clear moral rights and wrongs stems from their own denial of objective, knowable, and unchanging truth, truth revealed by the Creator, Who our Declaration of Independence heralds as the author of our inherent rights. So, why is it unsurprising that impressionable students, many if not most raised in religiously vacuous homes and taught in faith-hostile schools, would gravitate to the grimy alleyways of anti-Semitism? That, Mr. Griffin, is why we are now in “such a twisted place.”

Donors to prestigious institutions are shocked by what they are seeing. Where have they been? And what do they expect? As C.S. Lewis wrote prophetically in “The Abolition of Man,” “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

AUTHOR

Rob Schwarzwalder

Rob Schwarzwalder is Senior Lecturer in Regent University’s Honors College.

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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.

UN Refugee Fund for Gaza Is Being Used to Finance Terrorism and Anti-Semitism, Experts Say

In the wake of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas terrorists that killed over 1,400 Israeli civilians on October 7, increased scrutiny is being centered on the ideology that fueled the barbarity that took place. Experts say that funds allocated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) have not only been funneled to terrorists in Gaza, but have also been used to fund educational materials for Palestinian youth that is rife with anti-Semitism.

UNRWA was established in 1949 by the U.N. General Assembly with the original purpose of aiding the refugees that resulted from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Since then, the fund has been renewed almost every year and has grown astronomically to a current annual budget of over $1 billion. The Biden administration contributed $153.7 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars to the fund in June, which the UNRWA commissioner claimed would “help us keep over 700 schools and 140 health centres open over the next months.” For decades, however, the fund has been embroiled in controversy, as reviews of the fund’s expenditures showed that a significant amount of money was going to terror-group affiliates.

In 2018, the Trump administration ended funding for UNRWA due to the corruption that was uncovered. A report found that less than 5% of the population that it funded actually met the original definition of a “refugee.” But as experts have observed, this was only the tip of the iceberg. It was found that a number of the UNRWA staff working in Gaza had personal ties to terrorism and that “UNRWA schools in Gaza have been used by Hamas to launch rockets against Israel.”

What has become particularly distressing to observers is how the money is being used to fund schools that indoctrinate Palestinian youth to hate Israel and the Jewish people. On Monday, Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss the situation.

“Our first report on Palestinian schoolbooks … was in 1998, and they were filled with poison,” he explained. “At that time … [an] American representative said, ‘I read this material and I wanted to vomit.’ It’s just unimaginable.’ Americans condemned it then, and the United States continued funding the Palestinian Authority year after year after year, knowing what was happening already then.

Marcus continued, “[W]e did a report in 2007, which I decided to release in the Senate, and I turned to Hillary Clinton. I wanted a Democrat … someone who would [not] be automatically pro-Israel. And she appeared at a press conference with me … [and] said, ‘The Palestinians are profoundly poisoning the minds of their children.’ And that was 2007. I call the Palestinians who are running through the streets today murdering Israelis, the Hamas, as well as the Palestinian Authority, Fatah people, the mainstream. They are the poisoned generation. They were brought up on hate, on demonization. And that’s what we have today.”

Marcus went on to describe the specific beliefs that have been espoused by religious authorities in Gaza.

“Mahmoud Abbas is the head of the Palestinian Authority — he’s seen as the moderate,” he noted. “He has a personal adviser on Islam … name[ed] Mahmoud al-Habash. He went on TV and he said that the Jews have been the enemies of Islam since the beginning of time, literally since the time of Adam. … [He also said] when you see a Jew, it actually might be Satan in the form of a human. … He literally said that the Jews are subhuman. [He also] said that the Jews are humanoids — creatures that Allah created in the form of humans but aren’t really humans. So you’ve got the top religious figure in the Palestinian Authority [saying] that Jews are actually subhuman, either Satan or animals, but they’re humanoids, so of course you can kill them.”

Marcus also pointed out that Palestinian textbooks for schoolchildren include quotes from a hadith (an Islamic tradition attributed to Muhammad) that commands Muslims to kill Jews, and that TV programs owned and controlled by the Palestinian Authority teach children similar lessons. “Children have said they’ve learned in school to hate the Jews and kill them,” he noted. “We’ve had many, many chants and children’s programs where they talk about the Jews being the descendants of apes and pigs. … And one of the worst things that they’ve taught these kids is that they should go out and die for Allah, that if they [fight] against Jews and they’re killed, that’s the best thing that can happen to them.”

Perkins further wondered if peace is possible when Palestinian youth are taught that Israel has no right to exist.

“They deny Israel the right to exist as a state, and they deny Jews the right to exist as individuals,” Marcus somberly emphasized. “Those two together make peace impossible.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor 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.

As Democrats Disparage School Choice, Experts Say Increased Competition Fuels Innovation

While states have successfully expanded their school choice programs, left-wing critics argue that the programs are an “existential threat” to public education. But experts are pointing out that not only do school choice programs relieve pressure off of the public education sector and provide parents with more schooling options, they are also proving to help students thrive academically and are fueling academic competition and innovation.

On Sunday, National Review reported that Florida has seen an additional 90,000 students enroll in private schools and other “innovative” educational programs in the last year due to the universal school choice bill that was enacted this year, marking a 43% increase in the number of students enrolled in the program, which now totals over 256,000 students. The program allows any Florida family to use state scholarships funded by corporate tax credits and other state funds to send their children to the private school of their choice.

Currently, 10 states have enacted school choice programs similar to Florida’s.

As the programs have expanded nationwide, Democratic lawmakers have almost universally denounced the programs, claiming that they present an “existential threat” to the public school system by redirecting public money away from it. But as observers have noted, the financial shortfall projections that left-leaning organizations have claimed would occur have proven to be wildly inaccurate. The Florida Policy Institute estimated that the state’s school choice program would cost the state $2 billion to fund scholarships in its first year, which was almost 10 times higher than the legislature’s estimate.

“They were grossly over-inflated in their estimates, and that they did so, in my mind, deliberately to stop kids from having the kind of customized, quality education that they deserve, and only for partisan purposes and in defense of their union allies that put the needs and interests of institutions and adults over the needs of children,” said Florida House Speaker Paul Renner (R).

Renner went on to tell National Review that “we’ve had Democrat members who have reached out to us, our staff, to find out how their families can benefit from the scholarship, even though they voted against our bill.”

In recent years, public education has seen a remarkable downturn in equipping students with proficiency in basic skills. Reading and math scores are currently at their lowest levels since 1971, and the Associated Press reported in May that “40% of eighth grade students are performing below basic proficiency in history, meaning they likely cannot identify simple historical concepts in primary or secondary sources,” with 31% “performing below basic proficiency in civics.”

At the same time, recent studies have shown that students who are enrolled in school choice programs show more political tolerance than public school students, with “13 studies showing a private-school advantage and only one showing a government-school advantage.” In addition, a study of Milwaukee’s school choice program found that it significantly reduced criminal activity of students, including a 53% reduction in drug convictions, an 86% reduction in property damage convictions, and a 38% reduction in paternity suits.

As Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, contended, school choice programs will lead to “a lot more growth with very innovative 21st-century learning environments.” He went on to observe that “we’re in a weird place where the people who like to think of themselves as progressives are very, very conservative and traditional. They do not want the innovation and change. When people say, ‘You’re trying to destroy public education,’ what I hear is, ‘You’re trying to destroy my 1950s concept about what public education should be.’ And that’s true, we are trying to move away from a one-size-fits-all industrial model that’s been around really since the 1800s.”

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, concurred, while also arguing that the rise of controversial ideologies on gender, race, and sexuality that have arisen in public schools are a direct threat to Christian families — further highlighting the value of school choice programs and the need for Christian engagement in the educational sector.

“These kinds of dire predictions of ultimate demise are typical fearmongering from the Left,” she told The Washington Stand. “They are afraid of their own demise if they are prevented from indoctrinating a new generation of leftist activists via highly politicized public education. As birth rates decline in the U.S., the fight for the minds and hearts of children will intensify. Christians need to engage in our educational system in every way: churches starting their own schools and Christians running for office or serving as teachers, administrators, or staff. Our witness is desperately needed.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior 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.

‘We’re Not a Soft Target’: Ohio School Superintendent Arms Teachers

As violence continues to surge amongst America’s youth and both politicians and civilians hotly debate gun control, an Ohio school superintendent has decided to start arming his teachers.

John Scheu, superintendent of the Benjamin Logan Local School District, has trained and armed nearly 20 faculty and staff members in his district in order to respond to active shooter incidents and protect students. Scheu had implemented a similar program in the nearby Sidney City Schools district 10 years ago. In a recent interview, he explained why he decided to arm teachers, even though he says he’s “not a gun person.”

According to Scheu, the idea originated in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Scheu worked closely with his county sheriff to bolster campus security across the district, upgrading security cameras and reinforcing doors and locks. “But the Sandy Hook situation showed us that we can have the most secure buildings in the country,” he said, “and if an active shooter wants to come in and do that kind of carnage to students, they can, so that’s when we sat down and came up with the plan that had an armed presence trained by the sheriff’s department.” Scheu explained that school board members were told by the sheriff that it could take up to 15 minutes before a deputy was able to arrive on the scene in the event of a shooting, and agreed that “time is of paramount importance” and greenlit the formation of armed response teams.

“The policy we came up with is one to train volunteers — secretaries, custodians, teachers’ aides, principals — to either conceal carry or have an assigned firearm that’s securely stored and available to them in the event of an active shooter,” Scheu explained. “They go through intense training and are the first line of defense if there’s a shooter. They don’t help the police once they arrive — they’re instructed to put the threat out as soon as possible and retreat as soon as law enforcement identifies themselves.”

Scheu also noted that, while teachers have had mixed reactions to the programs, parents have almost unanimously supported it. He said that “the parents overwhelmingly have supported the armed response team, so we feel pretty confident that the community in general is supportive of having a trained and qualified armed response team to back up our school resource officers and the police.”

Many teachers, according to Scheu, expressed concern over the program, insisting they’re trained to educate children, not to serve as law enforcement. The superintendent responded, “I understand that, but what I go back to is no one is being forced to do this, and every one of these people are very, very committed to protecting their fellow teachers and students in the unlikely event of an active shooter.”

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council commented to The Washington Stand, “School children should enjoy the same level of protection we require for our most precious assets. As a country we have watched the disappointing responses to active shooter situations in Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas in contrast to the heroic response of the police in the Nashville, Tennessee, massacre. Allowing willing and trained teachers and staff to serve on an armed response team is a reasonable and praiseworthy endeavor.”

Although Scheu admitted that the chances of a school shooting occurring are relatively low, he added that having trained, armed adults on campuses acts as a deterrent. Schools in his district now have signs warning that active shooters will be met by an armed response team. He explained, “By putting up signs telling people, it’s not that we’re bragging. It’s just a matter of telling people we’re not a soft target. Do not pick us to do your carnage.”

Kilgannon agreed. “The ‘school shooter’ is a result of the breakdown of the family and the rejection of God,” she told TWS. “The disturbed coward who would attack school children is looking for a ‘soft target,’ making ‘gun free zones’ in schools very attractive. Armed response teams will be a deterrent, and if worst comes to worst, they can respond immediately to an attack. Parents want their children to learn safely in excellent schools.”

Armed response teams on school campuses are growing in popularity across the U.S. For example, the Mad River school district, also in Ohio, is reinstating a once-active armed response team, and several school districts in Indiana are in the process of training teachers to participate in armed response teams in the near future.

State legislators are also funding the effort, at least in part. As of June, there are 33 states that legally permit teachers to carry firearms on campus and in the classroom. The armed response team program in Ohio’s Benjamin Logan Local School District went into effect at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news 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.

For Just $83,140, Princeton Will Train Your Son to Be a Drag Queen

It costs a staggering $83,140 to send a student to Princeton University, and that’s just for one year. Four years of this august Ivy League school will set you back a cool $332,560, and just think: for that kind of money, you could have bought a brand-new Corvette convertible every year and had some spare change left over.

But Princeton has its benefits: you may not be able to tool around in the glorious sunshine with the wind blowing your hair back, but for all that dough, Princeton will take your thoughtful, intelligent son and turn him into a prancing, preening, children’s-innocence-stealing drag queen. And they will do that in just one year, in case you can’t afford all four. Hey, it’s worth $83,140 to get in step with the times, isn’t it?

The College Fix reported Thursday that Princeton has launched a “new ‘Drag University’ program” that purports to “train students in the ‘artform.’” Do parents send their children to Princeton for this? If there are any parents out there (and I’m sure there are, complete with peeling Bernie stickers on their Volvos) who would be pleased and proud, nay, thrilled, if their sons became drag queens), there are cheaper ways to accomplish this than plunking down $83,140 to get him or her or xer or whatever a degree from Princeton.

The Princeton drag queen training program is “open to all undergraduate and graduate students interested in the world of drag,” so students need not be concerned that they might be too young for it. And there are no prerequisites or preliminary courses that enrollees have to take; they can go from zero to drag queen with just one course. No wonder Princeton charges so much.

The course goes for the entire “academic” year and covers a sweeping array of pressing issues that every young man who will be graduating from college and facing the future in the next few years needs to know, and know thoroughly. These include “the history of drag, ‘Sewing 101,’ choreography, face painting, photoshoots, and other topics,” as if all that wasn’t quite enough, thank you very much.

On the cutting edge as always, Princeton was actually offering scholarships for this course. An Instagram post stated: “Drag University is a new program housed under the mentorship pillar of the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center,” as anyone would expect. The Gender + Sexuality Resource Center describes itself as fostering “a supportive and inclusive campus community for women, femme, trans and queer Princetonians.”

In line with that mission, Princeton’s Drag University is a full-year program that will “teach about the history of drag, as well as the art form of drag. Sessions will be taught by local drag performers, on-campus partners who know their way around machines, and other students. This program is open to undergraduate and graduate students. The first 8 applicants who commit to the entire curriculum and attend orientation will get a scholarship to cover costs of supplies.”

Generous. This course, however, is so very much in line with the spirit of the age that all the scholarships were snapped up in the twinkling of an eye. The College Fix noted that “the form was updated this week to note: ‘At this time we have reached our capacity for our scholarships, but you are more than welcome to attend our workshops.’” That kind invitation appears to be extended only to Princeton students, so you’re still in for the $83,140.

Considering that “pride” is the emblematic slogan and second-favorite deadly sin of the entire LGBTQETC movement, it would have been only natural for Princeton to be effusive and enthusiastic about its new Drag University and happy to respond to inquiries. However, when The College Fix reached out to university administrators, Princeton’s media affairs division, and the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center seeking information about “the number of students enrolled and what pool of money is being used to fund the scholarships,” all of them ignored the inquiries.

Surely they couldn’t have something to hide, could they? Surely they are just bursting with pride about their Drag University, and want all Princeton parents and alumni to know about it, don’t they? Don’t they? If not, why not? Could it be that somewhere underneath their dresses, exaggerated makeup, and wigs, Princeton administrators still have some understanding that this sort of “academic course” is deeply offensive on numerous levels and has no place in any decent university? Inconceivable!

AUTHOR

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

Classical Christian Schools See Enrollment Explode

Since the beginning of 2020, when the COVID pandemic caused widespread and lengthy public school shutdowns and vaccine requirements that proved to be immensely controversial, a growing number of parents are removing their students from public schools and enrolling them in private ones. Among the private schools that have seen substantial growth are classical Christian schools, which focus on instilling students with a biblical worldview through the wisdom and traditions of Western civilization that have been established for centuries.

With 1.2 million students leaving public schools since 2020, many are enrolling in private schools, which have seen enrollment increase by 140,000 students since 2019. As a result, classical Christian schools have seen enrollment mushroom over the last three years. As David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, told guest host Jody Hice during Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” classical education is about getting back to the basic building blocks of education that have already been established for centuries within the church.

“For over a thousand years it was the churches that did the educating,” he underscored. “… It’s only been the last hundred or 150 years that that’s moved away from the churches and into the public school system. So what we’re calling for is a form of Christian education called classical Christian education, which seeks to restore that form that was existent before the American public school system developed.”

Goodwin further observed that classical education is rooted in the founding of Western civilization and of America.

“It was a form of education developed in the church after the fall of the Roman empire,” he explained. “It sustained the church as the primary form of education up until about 1830. It developed most of our Founding Fathers.”

Goodwin continued, “It studies what are sometimes called the ‘Great Books,’ it looks to the wisdom of the past, it studies a lot of theology. The students in our schools often learn Latin and Greek as avenues to the past to be able to read original manuscripts. But it’s really for everybody. We’ve got people from every walk of life. We have inner city schools, schools across the suburbs and in metro areas. They all have in common a love for the lordship of Jesus Christ and an establishment of the Christian worldview, which is really when you think about it what school does. In the Bible it’s called ‘paideia,’ it’s the Greek word. We now call it worldview. … That’s the primary function of classical Christian schools.”

Goodwin went on to illustrate how classical schools are expanding, and encouraged churches to join the growing movement.

“Before 2020, we were [seeing] 20-30 new schools a year,” he noted. At present in the last two years, we have brought in about 200 new schools. … [W]e would love to have churches across the country join with us in building those schools. We have about 500 right now in our membership. We’ve been operating for the last 30 years, and the demand is … going so high at this point that we’re dependent on church buildings and church resources to get these schools started.”

Goodwin further emphasized that churches should not be intimidated at the prospect of starting a classical school.

“This may seem daunting, but really education has been made a little bit overcomplicated by all the bureaucracy and all the systems that have to be there for things like public schools,” he commented. “Really all it takes is a room, a teacher, and some kids. Of course, the teacher has to be gifted at teaching — it’s a spiritual gift. But don’t think too small is too small. Most of our schools start with between three and 12 students the first year. And you can blend classrooms, you can use what are called ‘pod schools’ where you get a single teacher that teaches across multiple ages. There’s a whole lot of ways you can do this.”

“My hope and prayer is that parents will — in this cultural moment where things are so challenging, so many evil things are going on in the public sphere — it’s time for us as Christians to come back to the kingdom, to come back to Christ, to dedicate all of the universe, all of the world to his service and his glory,” Goodwin concluded.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor 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.

Chloe Cole: Anyone Trying to Hide Kids’ Gender Identity Is ‘Plain Perverted’

There aren’t a lot of 19-year-olds who give up their birthdays to go to Congress and plead for kids’ lives. But Chloe Cole isn’t your average teenager. The face of the detransitioner movement has come into her own by walking a painful path she prays no one else follows. Now, after years of suffering, self-doubt, and irreversible surgery, Chloe is a living warning to parents that the scars of trying to be someone else never fully heal.

“I look in the mirror sometimes, and I feel like a monster,” she told the roomful of elected leaders last month. Chloe talked emotionally about the double mastectomy that doctors encouraged at just 15. “After my breasts were taken away from me, the tissue was incinerated — before I was able to legally drive.” It was the loss of that piece of herself that drove the nightmare home. “Every single night after every bath, after every shower, I would have to look down at these huge wounds that were on my chest,” she remembered. Even the skin grafts that they “took of my nipples” haunted her. The masculine replacements that doctors made “are weeping fluid today,” she admitted to the hushed room of leaders.

These are the horrors that Chloe travels the world to share. Now, with the shock that the number of U.S. gender reassignment surgeries has tripled, her cause is even more urgent. She wants people to know that she was never suicidal before her transition. That changed almost instantly. “After my surgery, I did become suicidal,” Cole admits. “I’m doing better now, but my parents almost got the dead daughter promised to them by my doctors.”

She was referring to the intimidation tactics used by a shocking number of clinics on moms and dads who are concerned about letting their children move forward with cross-sex hormones and mutilation. “I mean, really, they were just giving me what I, as the child, wanted rather than stopping [me] and letting me be a kid and thinking about what it might have been that I actually needed — which was psychotherapy and just being given a chance to just grow up,” Chloe told former Congressman Jody Hice on Friday’s “Washington Watch.”

And the doctors “expected my parents to go along with all of this. They told them that it was going to be life or death for me, that I would become suicidal if I were not on these interventions. And really, what it came down to was they said that to manipulate my parents.”

But as Chloe explains it, she was just a small-town girl in rural California who was on the verge of puberty and uncomfortable with what was happening to her body. “And when I told my parents that I felt like a boy, in retrospect, all I meant was that I hated puberty, that I wanted this newfound sexual tension to go away.” She started reading things online that if she didn’t feel like a girl, she probably wasn’t. In a letter that she left on the dining room table, she told her parents that she wanted to be a boy. “They had no idea what to do,” she recalls in a lengthy profile piece for The Telegraph.

At therapy, the “experts” — like so many of her teachers — ignored years of evidence that Chloe was most likely autistic. She says she never felt “super close” to her parents, and “I must have had some sort of attachment issue. I started at five or six to reject physical affection.” Despite those underlying issues, doctors urged Chloe’s mom and dad to consent to puberty blockers at just 13.

“They told them that blood was going to be on their hands … and that they only had those two choices. No other choices were presented to us. They never told them about the possibility that I would resist or detransition or of me regretting these procedures. They said that it was more likely that I that I would regret going through puberty than I ever would being on these interventions,” Cole explained to Hice.

Two years later, at the tender age of 15, Chloe made the decision that she has regretted ever since: “I had a double mastectomy, meaning that my breasts had been removed permanently.” After months of physical pain and trauma, she realized she “regretted all of these interventions, that I was too young to be making decisions like this, and that by doing all of this, I was losing parts of my adulthood before I could even call myself a woman, and that one day I wanted to be able to have kids of my own.”

Sitting in a psychology class about parenting and family barely a year later, Cole had what she now considers “a huge wake-up call.” “As I listened, I reali[zed] that I had a maternal instinct, that one day I’d like to have kids of my own, but that the effects of being prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone during my transition might mean I couldn’t.”

But these weren’t things she was thinking of at 15 when she had her body irreversibly altered. “But sitting in that class, it hurt me really deeply to reali[ze] how a part of me had been taken away. … It shattered my heart into a million pieces.” She talks about spending a lot of time in bed, “unable to get up, crying silently. I didn’t know what life would look like from there and who I would be, but I just knew I couldn’t take any more testosterone shots.”

What came next was a long and difficult chapter marked by indifferent doctors and the open betrayal of the same LGBT movement that had pushed her toward this mess. “I actually got a really aggressive response from the transgender community and the people who had celebrated me the most through my transition,” Chloe told Hice, “[They] … were now turning their back on me, and they were saying the cruelest things to me. And even my doctors — I wasn’t getting any support from them. I wasn’t getting any help as to how to go off of the hormones or any of the complications that I was having from these procedures. It was an incredibly lonely experience, so much more difficult than transitioning in the first place.”

Trying to figure it “all out on my own,” Chloe started stumbling on other people with similar horror stories — people who felt damaged and regretted it. “And while on one hand, it was kind of comforting knowing that I wasn’t the only one going through this,” it was also, she explained, “incredibly painful and terrifying that I’m not the only one who has been hurt by this, that there are many people out there — the amount of which we’ll never know. … And I wanted to be able to advocate for other people, especially the other kids who have been in this situation — and to prevent it from happening ever again.”

When Hice characterizes what happened to Chloe as abuse, she embraces the term. “That’s absolutely what it is at every single level. I was failed by these adults — these people who call themselves doctors, who are supposed to help my parents in raising me and getting me care.”

That’s why she’s adamant that parents do more digging about what’s really going on. “… [A] good percentage of these people — if not all of them — have had some sort of co-morbidity issue, whether it be like a learning disorder, such as ADHD or autism, or like a cluster B personality disorder, depression, social anxiety. Or, overwhelmingly, many of them have a history of trauma, whether it be of sexual abuse or assault or rape or a parental or family trauma. And it’s hard to know how that might play into the way that a person sees themselves in relation to their sex.”

The idea that schools want to hide these issues or keep a child’s gender identity a secret is, in her opinion, “plain perverted.” “ …[I]t’s incredibly concerning that these schools think that they can control what the child is exposed to more than the parent. I mean, back when I was in school, when I was in middle and high school, we had like waivers for parents to sign off for sex ed. But they don’t get a choice on this?”

So where should parents start? What would have helped Chloe when she was struggling?

“The best thing to do is to … not go the path of having these children go on permanent interventions that will affect them for the rest of their lives,” she insisted. “It’s important to speak to them directly and openly about where these feelings are coming from. What is it that makes them feel like they’re not enough as their own sex? What is influencing them to think that they can just opt out of either being a boy or a girl and go the other path? And to remember to be compassionate to them, to let them know that they are loved. That they are perfect as they are. That the issue is not their body or the way that they look or were born, but the way that they see it.”

As frightening as the idea may be to parents, moms and dads are the ones best equipped to guide their children through this. That means taking control over the negative voices that are corrupting their view of themselves. As Chloe concluded:

“[T]ry to remove the influence that is making them think otherwise—whether it be from school, whether they’re learning it in class from their peers, or from the internet, and to respond accordingly. Like … in the case of it being from social media or the internet, you might have to take away their devices and to replace it with something else like a sport or encouraging them to go out and develop a hobby. Or if it’s coming from school, then you’ll have to be more involved in your child’s education to see what is going on in the classroom, to look at the curriculum. And you may have to move schools, you may have to end up homeschooling them, which is not an option for every parent.

“It is incredibly difficult. But I think in the very end it’s worth it, because that gives you full control over what your child is being exposed to and what they’re taught.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer 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.

Over 1,000 School Districts Hiding Students’ Gender Identities from Parents

A new report is sounding the alarm on the growing number of schools embracing transgender ideology and keeping parents in the dark. According to Parents Defending Education, at least 1,040 U.S. school districts have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents. Those districts include over 18,000 schools responsible for nearly 11 million students. The vast majority of those school districts (593) are in California.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand, “I am grateful to Parents Defending Education for their attempt to quantify this problem. It is important to support with evidence what many parents know by instinct or experience: our educational system that is supposed to work with parents will often work around parents instead.” She added, “At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school.”

Commonly called “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies,” such dictums have been the subject of controversy and even protest across the nation, with parental rights organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Mama Grizzly forming to combat the policies and others like them. Speaking on the role of parental rights organizations, Kilgannon commented, “[I]f we have the ability to do so, we must engage with people and systems that view this parental deception as good for children. Obviously, something is very wrong if some people can believe the answer is government first, parents second or never.”

A recent example of the ongoing controversy may be found in New Jersey, where a state judge last week blocked a trio of school districts from enforcing a policy requiring faculty and staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities at school, effectively forcing the school districts to keep parents in the dark. The judge wrote that the policies, “if implemented, will have a disparate impact on transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary youth.” Those policies would require teachers, coaches, and other staff to inform a student’s parents if that student used a bathroom that didn’t correspond to their biological sex, requested different pronouns be used in addressing them, or asking to play on a sports team that didn’t correspond to their biological sex.

The controversy over “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies” comes as debate continues on why an increasing number of children are identifying as transgender or non-binary. One study from earlier this year, for example, classified the increase as part of “a socially contagious syndrome,” stating that it’s likely that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria. That is, youth[s] … falsely believe that they are transgender…”

While some theorize that standard peer pressure, coupled with the social popularity of transgenderism, is largely responsible for the increase in children identifying as transgender, others — like Mama Grizzly founder Stacy Langton — allege it’s largely rooted in the sexual grooming of children by teachers.

Kilgannon commented, “[T]his is where our own action as parents are so important. We must be present to our children, engaged with them, being the most important person in their lives. … [L]ike everything in life, it starts with ourselves and our relationships to the people God has put in our lives, especially the children we are blessed with and responsible for.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©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.

New College Makeover in Florida: A Case Study in Higher Ed Reform

New College in Florida has been making news lately, for all the right reasons. The Board of Trustees, with six new members appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), charts a new course for New College.

For context, a little history: New College was founded in 1960 as a private university. It was later absorbed into the University of Florida system, making it publicly funded. It’s a small college with fewer than 650 students in Sarasota. To be fair, New College is a highly rated public university in Florida and in the U.S. overall. It is an “honors college” with a contract model for course work. New College lets students design their own course of study. Course work is not “graded” per se, but professors provide narrative feedback to students through a timeline they determine together. New College had the highest number of Fulbright Scholars in 2020.

But that was then. New College is getting an overhaul. As described by Chris Rufo, among the changes underway at New College: “[President Richard] Corcoran has recruited a new team that is busy rebuilding the institutional capacity of the college, which had atrophied significantly under previous administrations, and is designing a new core curriculum, which will begin with an immersive first-year study of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and continue to provide a foundation based in logos (the cultivation of human reason) and techne (the cultivation of the applied arts).”

Student and faculty reaction to these changes is shockingly conservative for such a progressive bunch. It seems the new Board of Trustees’ pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful is a regressive and oppressive insult to many current students and faculty members. They are not on board with Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz’s goal: “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

Breathless news coverage of this development ranges from the unhinged to the comical. How dare any governor (no less a Republican governor) deign to make an impact on the taxpayer-funded colleges and universities? Who is the governor to attempt to oversee publicly funded universities, regardless of the overwhelming mandate to lead he is given by the voters?

The new trustees have begun the process of remaking New College into a classical college. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion dean and a “queer librarian” were among the first to go. Tenure for five professors approved by an interim president has been denied. The College is recruiting more students and placing more emphasis on athletics as an integral part of the new New College experience.

Bringing in a larger freshman class, one that is eagerly anticipating the new emphasis on classics over social justice warfare, is one of the best ways to ensure the success of the transition. These bright new students will be great ambassadors for the cause and will quickly outnumber the disgruntled — another smart move by a very capable group and New College President Richard Corcoran. Surely this effort to diversify both the curriculum of the college itself and the student body will prove more efficient than the DEI commissariat the Board of Trustees recently removed, as displayed by the 2022 tally of the student body composition.

The cancelation of Gender Studies seems to be the final straw for the old guard. NCF Freedom filed a lawsuit challenging the defunding of ideologically biased course offerings, among other perceived indignities. We look forward to updating you on this as events unfold. Pray for New College, for the leadership team, the faculty, staff, and students. Pray that God will be known there and everywhere.

AUTHOR

Meg Kilgannon

Meg Kilgannon is Senior Fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council.

RELATED ARTICLE: Half of Gen Z Says Their Life Was ‘Transformed’ by the Bible’s Message

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.

The 5 Worst Lies of the Biden Administration

For the Biden administration, pushing abortion and transgender ideology is a top priority at all levels of government. Sometimes, this priority even overshadows their commitment to the truth. And the Biden administration has told some real whoppers. But don’t take my word for it; consider the facts for yourself. Here are the top five lies of the Biden administration regarding abortion and transgender ideology.

1) Weakened safety standards for the abortion pill regimen does not pose a threat to women.

On January 3, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permanently removed a “requirement that mifepristone be dispensed only in certain health care settings, specifically clinics, medical offices, and hospitals (referred to as the ‘in-person dispensing requirement’).” At the same time, it created a new program under which pharmacies such as Walgreens and CVS can become licensed to distribute mifepristone.

Mifepristone is the first of two drugs taken to induce a chemical abortion. FDA in 2011 placed mifepristone under the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation System (REMS) due to reports of adverse events up to and including death. REMS is reserved “for certain medications with serious safety concerns.” By removing the in-person dispensing requirement from the REMS governing the use of mifepristone, FDA enabled abortion pill dispensaries to ship the pills to women without any oversight from a health care practitioner.

On December 16, 2021, the FDA had “determined that the data support modification of the REMS to reduce burden on patient access and the health care delivery system and to ensure the benefits of the product outweigh the risks.”

On January 22, 2023, President Biden issued a memorandum endorsing FDA’s action, saying that it was “evidence-based” and taken “after an independent and comprehensive review of the risks and benefits.” He directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to work together to further advance distribution of the abortion pill regimen. In compliance with this directive, Attorney General Merrick Garland and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra both denounced an April court decision blocking the distribution of mifepristone (the decision is currently on hold).

In reality, the best available evidence shows that “chemical abortion has led to a surge in emergency room visits and higher rates of complications,” according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI). According to a peer-reviewed, 17-year longitudinal study of Medicaid claims data, in the 30 days following a chemical abortion, women have a 22% greater risk of visiting the emergency room for any reason, and a 53% greater risk of visiting the emergency room for an abortion-related reason, when compared with a surgical abortion.

Peer-reviewed studies of comprehensive datasets in Finland, Sweden, and California also show higher complication rates from chemical abortion. In Finland, a study of 42,619 abortions found that one fifth of all chemical abortions resulted in complications, a rate four times greater than for surgical abortions. In California, a study found the major complication rate for chemical abortions was four times greater than for surgical abortions. In Sweden, a study found complications of chemical abortions “increased significantly during 2008-2015 without any evident cause.”

Although President Biden called the FDA review “comprehensive” and “evidence-based,” the data they reviewed was far less robust than these peer-reviewed studies. “Starting in 2016, the FDA chose to only require reports of death associated with the abortion pill, making their dataset woefully incomplete,” said Dr. James Studnicki, CLI’s vice president of Data Analytics. The FDA review ignored this substantial evidence of high complication rates when it freed the distribution of chemical abortion pills from professional oversight.

2) Military readiness requires taxpayers to cover abortion-related expenses for servicemembers.

On October 20, 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum titled, “Ensuring Access to Reproductive Health Care,” which directed the Department of Defense (DOD) “to ensure that our Service members and their families can access reproductive health care.” On February 16, 2023, the DOD finalized the policy, granting up to 21 days of “administrative absence to non-covered reproductive health care,” subsidizing “travel for non-covered reproductive health care services,” and loosening “command notification of pregnancy” to benefit abortion.

DOD has claimed the policy will “increase readiness.” After Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) announced he would block senior-level military promotions until DOD ended the policy, President Biden accused Tuberville of “jeopardizing our national security over domestic social issues. Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby was asked last month, “Why is the new DOD policy on abortion critical to military readiness?” He responded that paying for abortion-related travel was a “foundational, sacred obligation of military leaders.”

In reality, federal law prohibits the DOD from using taxpayer funds to promote abortion. Under 10 U.S. Code § 1093, DOD funds and facilities “may not be used to perform abortions except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term or in a case in which the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.” On December 15, 2022, 66 members of Congress wrote to Secretary Austin notifying him that “funding travel and transportation to obtain non-covered, elective abortions through the DOD would, in and of itself violate federal law. It also contradicts DOD’s past recognition, interpretation, and implementation of this law.”

3) Self-perceived gender identity always overrides biological distinctions between the sexes.

On January 20, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order directing federal agencies to interpret all “laws that prohibit sex discrimination” to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation,” extending the Supreme Court’s Title VII-specific reasoning in Bostock v. Clayton County to every federal law. A separate executive order on this date ordered the president’s Domestic Policy Council to “coordinate efforts to embed equity principles [including with ‘respect to … gender identity’], policies, and approaches across the Federal Government.”

In the months that followed, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Education, the DOJHHS, and other agencies have faithfully implemented this directive to expand the presence of biological males in women’s shelters, women’s locker rooms, and women’s sports, reinterpreting the Fair Housing Act, Title IX, and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. FRC Action has compiled a full accounting of the dozens of actions taken by Biden administration in pursuit of this goal.

In reality, physical differences between men and women are too important to ignore. Biological males are, on average, taller, heavier, and stronger than females, which gives them an upper hand in many types of sports — not to mention a predatory advantage when they win admission into women’s-only spaces. Males have won over 30 championships in women’s-only sporting events dating back to 2003. These distinctions are so obvious that even pro-LGBT Democrats cannot entirely ignore them. Last month, a Democratic congressman suggested erecting “barriers” in women’s locker rooms to protect women who felt uncomfortable changing next to a biological male with fully intact anatomy. And a Democratic senator tweeted, “We cannot avoid the biological/evolutionary differences between men and women.”

4) Civically engaged American citizens are violent domestic terrorists.

On October 4, 2021, Garland directed the FBI to investigate a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” That directive came five days after the National School Boards Association asked President Biden to investigate parents who spoke out at school board meetings for “domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” in a letter prompted by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Earlier this year, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government determined that the FBI had, in fact, used counterterrorism resources to investigate parents. Needless to say, the “spike” in violence was entirely fabricated.

On September 23, 2022, 25 heavily armed federal agents conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of pro-life activist Mark Houck to arrest him in front of his wife and seven children. The DOJ indicted Houck under the FACE Act, alleging that two years ago he violently pushed an abortion facility escort to the ground, when he was only defending his 12-year-old son from an aggressive, profanity-laced tirade. Houck had offered to voluntarily surrender months earlier, but apparently the DOJ’s resources were better spent on a SWAT-style raid. This January, a jury acquitted Houck of the charges brought against him.

In February 2023, a leaked memo from the FBI field office in Richmond, Va. revealed the bureau was spying on “radical traditionalist” Catholic communities. After months of FBI stonewalling, the Weaponization Subcommittee finally obtained documents proving that the Richmond field office coordinated with at least two other field offices, and that the investigation had gone as far as seeking to embed undercover sources.

In reality, each of these episodes simply involved ordinary citizens peacefully living their lives, practicing their faith, and properly engaging in the democratic process. In contrast with the previous lies, once caught, the Biden administration could muster no defense against the obvious impropriety of their behavior except pretending it never happened, Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Biden administration has weaponized federal law enforcement resources to investigate private citizens for nothing more than being civically engaged.

5) Protecting minors from harmful, irreversible gender reassignment procedures is illegal discrimination and potentially fatal.

On July 25, 2022, HHS announced a proposed rule under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which would force health insurers to cover gender reassignment procedures for minors and could financially coerce doctors to perform them.

Far from an isolated affair, promoting gender reassignment procedures is official Biden administration policy — although the federal role is less direct than states. The DOJ has intervened in lawsuits to block laws protecting minors from gender reassignment procedures in Alabama and Tennessee. The DOJ also tried to force two Catholic hospital associations to provide and insure gender reassignment procedures, in violation of their religious beliefs.

State actions to protect minors from gender reassignment procedures “callously threaten to harm children and their families just to score political points,” alleged President Biden in a March 2022 statement. He appealed to the political conclusions of “respected medical organizations” to argue that “access to gender-affirming care for transgender children can benefit mental health, lower suicide rates, and improve other health outcomes.”

HHS Secretary Becerra agreed in a June 2022 press release, “This year, we have unfortunately seen an alarming rise in state laws and other actions that discriminate against our LGBTQI+ children and youth. … We as a Department recommit to ensuring every American can access health care — including gender-affirming care.” This remained the official White House position as of April 2023, when Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said gender reassignment procedures for minors is “something for a child and their parents to decide” and certainly “not something we believe should be decided by legislators.”

In reality, confused children are often “given no choice” about pursuing gender reassignment procedures, according to detransitioner Prisha Mosley. “They said it was transition or suicide. … I was told, ‘You will kill yourself if you don’t go through with these treatments.’” A whistleblower account from one transgender center said the providers even disregarded the refusal of the custodial parent and proceeded with gender reassignment procedures anyways.

The physical reality of gender transitioning is even more brutal. One young detransitioner said the reassignment procedures performed on him did not make him a woman, but they did make him a “patient for life.” Young people who begin puberty blockers almost universally proceed to cross-sex hormones and often mutilating surgery. Cross-sex hormones can cause “irreversible infertility, while surgeries cause irreversible loss of healthy, functioning organs. Yet Biden said those opposing these gruesome procedures are the ones harming children.

On each of these five points, the Biden administration is driven more by ideology than by the truth. Abortion-by-mail is not safe for women. Taxpayer-funded abortion travel is not necessary for military readiness. Biological sex does matter more than gender identity in many contexts. Citizens aren’t domestic extremists just because they advocate policies the Biden administration doesn’t like. And gender reassignment procedures are good for nobody, especially not minors. With the constant drumbeat of fiction to the contrary, we must keep telling the truth — and saying it loud.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer 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.