Tag Archive for: public schools

Can Millennials [And Academia] Take a Joke? by Clark Conner

/in , , /by

Millennials can be a hypersensitive bunch, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the academy. American institutions of higher learning have become veritable minefields of trigger warnings, safe zones, and speech codes.

It appears we can add another line item to the growing list of things too radical for college students: humor. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld recently joined an expanding group of high-profile figures in denouncing higher education’s culture of hyper-sensitivity.

In an interview with ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd, Seinfeld discussed why comics are reluctant to take their act on campus:

COWHERD: Does the climate worry you now? I’ve talked to Chris Rock and Larry the Cable Guy; they don’t even want to do college campuses anymore.

SEINFELD: I hear that all the time. I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, “Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.” I’ll give you an example: My daughter’s 14. My wife says to her, “Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys.” You know what my daughter says? She says, “That’s sexist.”

COWHERD: That’s amazing.

SEINFELD: They just want to use these words: “That’s racist”; “That’s sexist”; “That’s prejudice.” They don’t know what they’re talking about.

It took roughly 24 hours for Seinfeld’s point to prove itself. The day after the Huffington Post ran an article on Seinfeld’s comments, an open letter appeared on the site addressed to Mr. Seinfeld from a “College Student.”

The letter touches on a myriad of topics, including racism, sexism, offending the “right” people, and (for reasons unknown) “the underlying culture of violence and male domination that inhabits high school football,” but its overarching spirit is summed up in the author’s ironic introduction:

Recently, I’ve heard about your reluctance to perform on college campuses because of how “politically correct” college students are… As a college student that loves and appreciates offensive, provocative comedy, I’m disheartened by these comments.

So, a college student was “disheartened” by Jerry Seinfeld’s observation that college students are too sensitive. Let that sink in.

Seinfeld isn’t the only comedian to denounce the current sensitivity epidemic on campus. In a discussion with Frank Rich, Chris Rock espoused the same views as Seinfeld:

RICH: What do you make of the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims?

ROCK: Well, I love Bill, but I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.

RICH: In their political views?

ROCK: Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

Former Tonight Show host Jay Leno, too, shared his experience with a college intern who conflated his dislike of Mexican food with racism.

The experiences of Seinfeld, Rock, and Leno obviously can’t be projected on the whole of entertainment media, but their willingness to criticize the don’t-offend-me culture indicates a growing sense that American campuses are becoming hostile to humor. 

And their criticisms aren’t unfounded: the uptrend in campus outrage over even mildly provocative humor is inescapable. Ask Robert Klein Engler, formerly of Roosevelt University, who received his walking papers after telling his class a joke he overheard as a way of stimulating conversation about an Arizona immigration bill.

“There was a sociological study done in Arizona,” Engler said to the students, “and they discovered that 60 percent of the people in Arizona approved of the immigration law and 40 percent said, ‘no habla ingles.’”

That caused a student, Cristina Solis, to file a written complaint with the university, which in turn opened a harassment investigation against the professor.

According to reporting from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Engler was summoned by university officials to discuss the harassment charges, but they wouldn’t disclose the nature of accusation, nor the identity of the accuser. Engler agreed to cooperate with the university’s investigation, but only if the accusations were put in writing.

Roosevelt wouldn’t do so, and also refused Engler the right to be accompanied by his attorney at investigation meetings. Stripped of due process, Engler chose not to participate in the sham investigation, which resulted in Roosevelt University terminating his employment.

What’s worse, Ms. Solis voiced her approval with the university’s decision to terminate Engler. In a quote to the student newspaper preserved on Minding the Campus she proclaimed:

If that [Mr. Engler’s firing] is what it took to give him a reality check, and to make sure that no other student has to go through that, maybe it’s for the best. It’s just something you don’t say in a classroom, not coming from a professor, and especially not at a school like Roosevelt University, which is based on social justice.

What a dangerous precedent this is, that a lone student infatuated with the idea of social justice can spearhead a movement to fire a professor over a throw-away joke.

Teresa Buchanan, formerly an associate professor at Louisiana State University, also knows what it means to offend the wrong people.

Buchanan was known by her students as a “gunslinger” who sometimes incorporated profanity or sexually charged jokes in class. For example, Reason reports that one of her zingers came in the form of advice to female students that their boyfriends would stop helping them with coursework “after the sex gets stale.”

After the Fall 2013 semester, Buchanan was informed by the university that she was being placed under suspension pending an investigation for “sexual harassment” and promoting a “hostile learning environment.”

The investigation dragged on, and 15 months later a faculty committee upheld the university’s accusation of sexual harassment. The committee, however, decided that termination was not the solution, but rather that LSU should ask that Buchanan tone down her language.

This suggestion was ignored by university president F. King Alexander. Buchanan was fired on June 19, 2015.

Not only are American academics under fire for using semi-edgy humor, British academics, too, are learning the hard way to leave the one-liners at home.

The saga of Sir Tim Hunt illustrates how even the most prestigious careers can be derailed by pitchfork-wielding mobs feigning outrage over innocuous comments.

Hunt, a Nobel laureate, found himself to be the object of scorn, stemming from a joke he made while presenting to the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea:

It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists.

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?

Now, seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.

This comment was first reported by Connie St. Louis, a journalism professor at University College London (UCL) who was present for Hunt’s speech. She claimed his comments induced a “stony silence” on the crowd.

In reaction, an armada of social media warriors descended on Hunt, resulting in his resignation from multiple honorary positions, including at UCL. Although Hunt incessantly apologized for his “transgression,” his opponents continued to besmirch his character and career.

In making the comments public, however, St. Louis only mentioned some of Hunt’s remarks. She omitted the part where Hunt clearly stated he was joking and praised the role of women scientists.

A few weeks later, a report from a European Commission official recalled a different version of events. Unlike St. Louis, the report included Hunt’s entire statement and claimed that Hunt’s joke was received by laughter, not the agitation asserted by St. Louis.

Despite the EC report vindicating Hunt and dispelling the charges of sexism, the damage is done. Hunt’s top-shelf academic career is now in shambles after being sullied by a throng of raging speech oppressors.

A joke was all it took.

Anything Peaceful

Anything Peaceful is FEE’s new online ideas marketplace, hosting original and aggregate content from across the Web.

EDITORS NOTE: A version of this post first appeared at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

VIDEO: Liberals and Teaching Children Gun Safety

/in , , , /by

We have turned our children over to idiots! Time for some sanity and gun safety education.

The Hidden Costs of Tenure by Jonathon Anomaly

/in , , /by

Conversations I’ve had with non-academics about university employment practices usually evoke surprise and skepticism. Most people have a hard time understanding the point of a system that makes it so difficult to dismiss faculty members who are not especially good at their job.

The recent motion in Wisconsin to remove state laws that protect teacher tenure has re-ignited the debate over providing special protections to teachers—protections that don’t apply to journalists, gardeners, or bloggers who are occasionally fired for expressing unpopular views.

In some ways, regulations that determine how university professors are hired and fired in the United States are analogous to the restrictive labor laws in Spain and Greece. By raising the cost of firing bad workers, they increase the relative cost of hiring good ones.

The consequence is persistent unemployment and low productivity in Greece and Spain. The consequences of our tenure system are the proliferation of poor teaching and arcane research in university departments that are immunized from market forces.

Those who pursue a career as a university professor are mostly incentivized to produce specialized work aimed at impressing people who may end up on their promotion committee rather than a wider audience.

In the sciences, this may be a good thing, since one’s peers are likely doing narrow but important work that uncovers the basic structure of the universe. But in the humanities and social sciences, it often leads to the pursuit of bizarre research that is inscrutable to outsiders and of little value even to scholars in related fields.

Another hidden effect of the tenure system is that it often sifts out the very people it is supposed to protect: those with unusual or unpopular ideas. The original justification for tenure was to protect teachers and scholars who hold unpopular views by making it difficult to fire them. But when tenure is the main game in town, the stakes associated with hiring a new faculty member are high, making departments risk-averse. Thus, in order to be considered for tenure-track jobs, candidates have strong reasons to conceal unpopular political beliefs and to pursue relatively conservative lines of research.

By “conservative” I do not mean politically conservative. Quite the opposite.

If most people in a department where you’ve applied are progressives, it is not likely that your allegiance to any non-progressive views will help your cause. Tenured faculty members who make those decisions are often unwilling to take a chance on somebody with eccentric or politically unpopular views, since when a tenure-track position is filled, the candidate who fills it will probably be a colleague for life.

This is not only unfair; it is contrary to the mission of most universities. Research by Professor Jonathan Haidt suggests that political bias negatively impacts the quality of research by stifling open debate. But it’s one of the unintended results of tenure.

Tenure can, of course, protect people with unpopular views. Consider Edward Wilson and Arthur Jensen, eminent scholars at Harvard and Berkeley who have argued, among other things, that different groups of human beings exhibit average differences in genetically-mediated characteristics, including general intelligence and impulse control. Tenure protected their careers, although it didn’t protect them from death threats and intimidation.

On the other hand, it is likely that many more controversial scholars will never be hired in the first place because those on the hiring committee are hostile to their ideas.

Tenure also makes it much harder to terminate faculty members. It was never supposed to be a guarantee that one will never be fired. According to the American Association of University Professors, tenure can be revoked if members of a department can demonstrate that a colleague exhibits incompetence, or engages in academic fraud or seriously immoral behavior.

But even when these things can be shown, it is often easier for faculty and administration to ignore the problem than to mount a costly battle to fire a colleague.

This is one reason many tenure-track jobs are being replaced with adjunct positions, which is a temporary fix for a deeper problem. In the long run, it is likely that the quality of student education and faculty research would increase under a system that offered faculty a greater diversity of contracts, reflecting a faculty member’s ongoing accomplishments, experience, and contributions to the university.

In effect, tenure is a barrier to entry in the academic job market that makes it difficult to replace poorly performing faculty with better alternatives. We should applaud rather than protest the recent decision of the Wisconsin legislature to force the University of Wisconsin to experiment with new ways of conducting the business of hiring and firing faculty.

This post first appeared at the John William Pope Center. 

Jonathan Anomaly

Keep Sex out of Kindergarten by Hannah Phillips

/in , , /by

It’s the first day of kindergarten. Each child is excited to learn about the alphabet, numbers, and – sex? Under the guise of “family life” or “health” education, children are exposed to graphic sexual images and ideas that damage their young minds. A child’s undeveloped brain is not prepared to make decisions regarding sexuality.

Obscenity Exemptions

Outside of the classroom, it is illegal to expose children to sexually explicit material. For example, Virginia law prohibits any person to “print, copy, manufacture, produce, or reproduce any obscene item for purposes of sale or distribution.”[1] Schools, however, are the exception. Under Virginia law, the prohibition does not apply to the “purchase, distribution, exhibition, or loan of any book, magazine, or other printed or manuscript material by any library, school, or institution of higher learning.”[2] According to Dr. Judith Reisman and Mary McAlister, children “are exposed to otherwise illegal sexually explicit materials because of ‘obscenity exemptions’ granted to schools, libraries, and other organizations.”[3] The young minds that should be protected in their innocence are instead exploited in the name of education.

Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education

Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) are the frontrunners of comprehensive sexuality education taught from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Many advocates claim that comprehensive sexuality education in early grades is necessary for a child’s healthy development. In 2004, SIECUS published its third edition of Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade. A “national task force of experts” devised the Guidelines to “help educators create new sexuality education programs and evaluate already existing curricula.”[4] In addition to over 100,000 copies that have been dispersed across the United States, more than 1,000 people each month download the Guidelines from SIECUS’ website.[5] SIECUS praises the Guidelines as “popular and valuable.”[6] The National Guidelines Task Force that developed the Guidelines originally consisted of members from Planned Parenthood, Indiana University, and various public school systems. Although SIECUS claims that a “majority of parents want schools to provide comprehensive education about sexuality,” many parents do not know what schools are teaching their children.[7]

SIECUS’ Guidelines presents comprehensive sexuality education as a “lifelong process” that begins at birth and continues throughout adulthood.[8] As SIECUS’ ultimate goal, a “sexually healthy adult” will “affirm that human development includes sexual development which may . . . include . . . sexual experience,” “affirm one’s own sexual orientation,” and “affirm one’s own gender identities.”[9] The Guidelines recommend that schools teach children, ages 5 through 8, about masturbation, sexual intercourse, abortion, and sexual orientation. Little children are taught that “touching and rubbing one’s own genitals to feel good is called masturbation” and that “some boys and girls masturbate” in a “private place.”[10] Educators are supposed to instruct five-year-olds on “vaginal intercourse – when a penis is placed inside a vagina.”[11] The Guidelines describe abortion as the solution for circumstances in which “women become pregnant when they do not want to be or are unable to care for a child.”[12] Kindergarteners learn that “human beings can love people of the same gender and people of another gender,” according to a person’s sexual orientation.[13] Under SIECUS’ Guidelines, sexual perversions are deemed natural, favorable, and void of all consequences. Similarly, Planned Parenthood promotes initiating comprehensive sex education in kindergarten because “sexuality is an integral part of each person’s identity.”[14] Although Planned Parenthood does not lay out its own guidelines for comprehensive sexuality education, it directs interested educators to SIECUS’ Guidelines.[15]

Schools and libraries provide children with access to explicit sexual material and ideas in books. Recommended by SIECUS’ Guidelines as a resource for children, the book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris covers topics such as sexual reproduction, sexual desire, sexual intercourse, and homosexuality. Although the book is designed for children ages ten and up, it includes cartoon images of a naked man and woman engaging in sexual intercourse, two men and two women in homosexual relationships, and multiple naked men and women depicted at different stages in life.[16] Advocates of comprehensive sexuality education in kindergarten assure cautious parents that sex education teaches only scientific facts. According to SIECUS, however, comprehensive sexuality education includes “forming attitudes, beliefs, and values about . . . identity, relationships, and intimacy.”[17] Sex education does not only teach facts, but it also teaches values. As religious and traditional values become irrelevant, sexual promiscuity becomes rampant.

The Man behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education

The current traumatization of children with explicit sexual images and ideas finds its roots in the work of “scientist” Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. According to Stolen Honor Stolen Innocence, Kinsey claimed that “children are . . . unharmed by sexual activity even from birth.”[18] In his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey included several tables depicting the “erotic arousal” of between “1,746 to 2,035 boys and girls” based on “instrumental measurement” and “timed with a stopwatch.”[19] Kinsey recruited pedophiles, parents, and nursery personnel to molest and rape children under the guise of “scientific research.”[20] Kinsey used his infamous Table 34 to support his contention that children are capable of “orgasm.” Table 34 “reported around-the-clock experimental ‘data’ on infants and young boys,” with the youngest child being five months old.[21] The infants and children who were sexually stimulated responded with pain, fright, “extreme tension with violent convulsion,” or fainting – a reaction which Kinsey considered “orgasm.”[22] What Kinsey deemed an “orgasm” in infants, however, can only be interpreted as an absolute protest to the violation of their bodies. From his “data,” Kinsey concluded that children are sexual from birth and can benefit from “incest or sex with adults” and that all forms of sexual behavior are both permissible and beneficial.[23]

The recent shift toward teaching explicit sex education in early grades is entirely based on the fraudulent research of this child rapist. Before Kinsey’s reports were published, all sexuality education was the “responsibility of parents or legal guardians.”[24] However, after Kinsey, school teachers became the primary instructors of sexuality information and health. Kinsey’s corrupt ideas are currently taught under deceptive pseudonyms such as “sex education, AIDS prevention or awareness, family life, health, hygiene, home economics, physical education, even ‘abstinence’ education.”[25] Based on Kinsey’s false ideologies, Planned Parenthood endorses teaching children comprehensive sexuality education in kindergarten since “learning about sexuality . . . begin[s] at birth and continue[s] throughout our lives.”[26] The false contention that children are sexual from birth remains prevalent in our schools today. Just as Kinsey violated the fragile bodies of thousands of infants and children, schools are violating the fragile minds of children.

The Harm Caused by Comprehensive Sexuality Education

A Child’s Brain

According to Dr. Judith Reisman and Mary McAlister, every “child or young person who views sexually explicit images suffers real harm.”[27] This harm is irreversible on a child’s brain. Brains are “far more impressionable in early life than in maturity.”[28] A child cannot process auditory and visual information like an adult. In contrast to an adult, “young children’s brains are more vulnerable to developmental problems should their environment prove especially impoverished or un-nurturing.”[29] In “Soft Porn” Plays Hardball, Dr. Reisman recognizes that “the human brain experiences conflicting and confusing images and information when viewing pornography.”[30] An impressionable child is confused when forced to absorb sexually explicit material. Describing pornography’s influence, Dr. Reisman continues, “When one reaches a state of emotional arousal faster than the body can rally its adaptive reactions, a form of stress follows.”[31] Children who are exposed to sexually explicit images experience stress and anxiety that carries into their adulthood.

The Rights of Parents

“Obscenity exemptions” provided for schools erodes the rights of parents. According to Pierce, the Supreme Court declared, “The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”[32] All parents have the right and responsibility to educate their children. President Obama, however, endorsed teaching “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex education” in kindergarten as “the right thing to do.”[33] Who determines what is age-appropriate for a kindergartener? Planned Parenthood? Local school boards? The federal government? Since schools have “obscenity exemptions,” schools can expose children to sexually explicit material and deem it “age-appropriate” by their own standards. SIECUS considers teaching about masturbation, sexual orientation, and sexual intercourse to be “age appropriate” for five-year-olds. Parents have a duty to protect their children from harm. Schools that indoctrinate young students with comprehensive sexuality education usurp the authority of parents.

Conclusion

SIECUS “believes that all people have the right to comprehensive sexuality education that addresses the socio-cultural, biological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sexuality by . . . exploring feelings, values and attitudes.”[34] Do five-year-olds have the right to digest sexually explicit material in school? Does SIECUS or the federal government have the right to impose their perverse and twisted values on your children? On that first day of kindergarten, each child anticipates learning about numbers and the alphabet. Let’s keep sex out of it.

RELATED ARTICLE: Planned Parenthood wins as Hawaii makes it harder to opt out of controversial sex ed lessons

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Liberty Center for Law and Policy website. It is reprinted with permission.

REFERENCES:

[1] VA Code Ann. § 18.2-374.

[2] VA Code Ann. § 18.2-383.

[3] Judith Reisman and Mary E. McAlister, “‘Obscenity Exemptions’ for Educators Violate Children’s Civil Rights by Creating a Hostile Learning Environment” (executive summary, Liberty University School of Law, 2015), 1.

[4] “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade,” Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (2004): 5, http://www.siecus.org/_data/global/images/guidelines.pdf (accessed June 29, 2015).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 13.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 16.

[10] Ibid., 51-52.

[11] Ibid., 26.

[12] Ibid., 61.

[13] Ibid., 29.

[14] Planned Parenthood, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/educators/implementing-sex-education (accessed June 29, 2015).

[15] Ibid.

[16] Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing, Sex, and Sexual Health (Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2009), 14-20.

[17] “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade,” 13.

[18] Judith Reisman, PhD, Stolen Honor Stolen Innocence: How America was Betrayed by the Lies and Sexual Crimes of a Mad “Scientist” (Orlando, FL: New Revolution Publishers, 2013), 133.

[19] Ibid., 135.

[20] The Kinsey Syndrome: How One Man Destroyed the Morality of America, DVD, Directed by Christian J. Pinto (American History Films, 2008).

[21] Reisman, Stolen Honor Stolen Innocence, 144.

[22] Ibid., 146-147.

[23] Ibid., 170.

[24] Ibid., 133.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Planned Parenthood, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/educators/implementing-sex-education (accessed June 29, 2015).

[27] Judith Reisman and Mary E. McAlister, “‘Obscenity Exemptions’ for Educators Violate Children’s Civil Rights by Creating a Hostile Learning Environment” (executive summary, Liberty University School of Law, 2015), 1.

[28] Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddler, and Families, http://main.zerotothree.org/site/PageServer? pagename=ter_key_brainFAQ (accessed July 2, 2015).

[29] Ibid.

[30] Judith Reisman, PhD, “Soft Porn” Plays Hardball: Its Tragic Effects on Women, Children, and the Family (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House Publishers, 1991), 17.

[31] Ibid., 18.

[32] Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925).

[33] Terence P. Jeffrey, “Obama: Sex Ed for Kindergarteners is the ‘Right Thing to Do,’” CNS News, http://cnsnews. com/news/article/obama-sex-ed-kindergartners-right-thing-do (accessed July 2, 2015).

[34] Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade, 13.

 

Real Heroes: Homeschool Parents — Home Education Inspires a Love of Learning by Lawrence W. Reed

/in , , , /by

The hero in this story is not any one person but rather nearly two million Americans — moms and dads who go the extra mile and who, often at great sacrifice to themselves, are rescuing children in a profoundly personal way. They are the homeschoolers, parents who give up time and income to directly supervise the education of their children. They teach, they arrange learning experiences within their home and elsewhere in cooperation with other parents, and they inspire an appetite for learning.

Of all the ingredients in the recipe for education, which one has the greatest potential to improve student performance?

No doubt the teachers unions would put higher salaries for their members at the top of the list, to which almost every school reformer might reply, “Been there, done that!” Teacher compensation has gone up in recent decades, while indicators of student performance have stagnated or fallen.

Other standard answers include smaller class size, a longer school year, more money for computers, or simply more money for fill-in-the-blank. The consensus of hundreds of studies over the past several years is that these factors exhibit either no positive correlation with better student performance or only a weak connection. On this important question, the verdict is in and it is definitive: The one ingredient that makes the most difference in how well and how much children learn is parental involvement. Homeschooling is the ultimate in parental involvement.

When parents take a personal interest in their children’s education, several things happen. The child gets a strong message that education is important to success in life; it isn’t something that parents dump in someone else’s lap. Caring, involved parents usually instill a love of learning in their children — a love that translates into a sense of pride and achievement as their students accumulate knowledge and put it to good use. As one might expect, time spent with books goes up and time wasted in the streets goes down, but there’s so much more to the homeschooling experience, as explained by Marianna Brashear, curriculum development manager at the Foundation for Economic Education:

Much time is spent not just in books, but seeing the world and participating in field trips with hands-on learning. There is so much knowledge that is gained through real-world exposure to a vast array of subjects far more lasting than reading out of a textbook. The word “schooling” in homeschooling is misleading because education takes place in and out of formal lessons. The biggest waste of time in schools comes not just from indoctrination, but also from “teaching to the test,” where kids memorize, regurgitate, and forget.

American parents were once almost universally regarded as the people most responsible for children’s education. Until the late 19th century, the home, the church, and a small nearby school were the primary centers of learning for the great majority of Americans.

In more recent times, many American parents have largely abdicated this responsibility, in favor of supposed “experts.” The context for this abdication is a compulsory system established to replace parental values with those preferred by the states and now, to an increasing degree, by the federal government. (It’s important to remember how much the current system was established as a reaction to immigrants, especially Catholics. See Robert Murphy’s “The Origins of the Public School” in the Freeman, July 1998.)

Twenty years ago, a report from Temple University in Pennsylvania revealed that nearly one in three parents was seriously disengaged from their children’s education. The Temple researchers found that about one-sixth of all students believed their parents didn’t care whether they earned good grades, and nearly one-third said their parents had no idea how they were doing in school. I can think of no reason to believe things have improved on this front in the two decades since.

Homeschooling is working — and working extraordinarily well — for the growing number of parents and children who choose it.

Teaching children at home isn’t for everyone. No one advocates that every parent try it. There are plenty of good schools — private and many public and charter schools, too — that are doing a better job than some parents could do for their own children. And I certainly praise those parents who may not homeschool but who see to it that their children get the most out of education, both in school and at home. Homeschooling almost always goes the extra mile, however, and it is working extraordinarily well for the growing number of parents and children who choose it.

This outcome is all the more remarkable when one considers that these dedicated parents must juggle teaching with all the other demands and chores of modern life. Also, they get little or nothing back from what they pay in taxes for a public system they don’t patronize. By not using the public system, they are in fact saving taxpayers at least $24 billion annually even as they pay taxes for it anyway.

In the early 1980s, fewer than 20,000 children were in homeschools. From 2003 through 2012, the number of American children 5 through 17 years old who were being homeschooled by their parents climbed by 61.8 percent to nearly 1.8 million, according to the US Department of Education. That’s likely a conservative estimate, but it equals 3.4 percent of the nation’s 52 million students in the 5–17 age group.

Parents who homeschool do so for a variety of reasons. Some want a strong moral or religious emphasis in their children’s education. Others are fleeing unsafe public schools or schools where discipline and academics have taken a backseat to fuzzy, feel-good, or politically correct dogma. Many homeschool parents complain about the pervasiveness in public schools of trendy instructional methods that border on pedagogical malpractice. Others value the flexibility to travel, often with their children for hands-on, educational purposes; the ability to customize curricula to each child’s needs and interests; and the potential to strengthen relationships within the family.

“When my wife and I first decided to homeschool our three children,” says Bradley Thompson, a political science professor who heads the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University, “we did it for one reason: we wanted to give them a classical education — the kind that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson might have received when they were young boys.” He adds,

Within a couple of years, we added a second reason: we didn’t want our children exposed to the kind of socialization that goes on in both government and some private schools. Over time, however, we added a third reason: homeschooling became a way of life for our family, a way of life that was irreplaceable and beautiful. By the time our third child goes to college, we will have been homeschooling for 18 years. Those years have been, without question, the most important of my life.

Homeschool parents are fiercely protective of their constitutional right to educate their children. In early 1994, the House of Representatives voted to mandate that all teachers — including parents in the home — acquire state certification in the subjects they teach. A massive campaign of letters, phone calls, and faxes from homeschool parents produced one of the most stunning turnabouts in legislative history: by a vote of 424 to 1, the House reversed itself and then approved an amendment that affirmed the rights and independence of homeschool parents.

The certification issue deserves a comment: we have a national crisis in public education, where virtually every teacher is duly certified. There is no national crisis in home education.

Critics have long harbored a jaundiced view of parents who educate children at home. They argue that children need the guidance of professionals and the social interaction that comes from being with a class of others. Homeschooled children, these critics say, will be socially and academically stunted by the confines of the home. But the facts suggest otherwise.

Reports from state after state show homeschoolers scoring significantly better than the norm on college entrance examinations. Prestigious universities, including Harvard and Yale, accept homeschooled children eagerly and often. And there’s simply no evidence that homeschooled children (with a rare exception) make anything but fine, solid citizens who respect others and work hard as adults. Marianna Brashear informs me thus:

More and more early college and dual enrollment programs are available for rising 9th through 12th graders, and these programs, too, are quite eager to admit homeschoolers for their ability to take responsibility and to self-motivate, for their maturity, and for their determination to learn and succeed. For example, my 14-year-old daughter will be starting with a nearby technical institute in August and will receive high school and college credit simultaneously. She will be in a class with other high school students, and they are on track to receive AA degrees before graduating high school.

Homeschool parents approach their task in a variety of ways. While some discover texts and methods as they go, others plan their work well before they start, often assisted by other homeschoolers or associations that have sprung up to aid those who choose this option. Writing in the Freeman in May 2001, homeschool parent Chris Cardiff observed that because parents aren’t experts in every possible subject,

families band together in local homeschooling support groups. From within these voluntary associations springs a spontaneous educational order. An overabundance of services, knowledge, activities, collaboration, and social opportunities flourishes within these homeschooling communities.

My FEE colleague, B.K. Marcus, also a homeschool parent, identifies this natural “socialization” as a critically important point:

Homeschooling produces communities and participates in a division of labor. Homeschooling is social and cooperative, contrary to the stereotype of the overprotected child under the stern watch of narrow-minded parents. Traditionally schooled kids show far fewer social skills outside their segregated age groups.

A quick Internet search reveals thousands of cooperative ventures for and between homeschoolers. In Yahoo Groups alone, as of June 2015, about 6,300 results pop up when you search for the keyword “homeschool.” More than 800 show up in Google Groups. Facebook is another option for locating a plethora of local, regional, and national homeschool groups, support groups, events, co-ops, and communities.

In every other walk of life, Americans traditionally regard as heroes the men and women who meet challenges head-on, who go against the grain and persevere to bring a dream to fruition. At a time when more troubles and shortcomings plague education and educational heroes are too few in number, recognizing the homeschool champions in our midst may be both long overdue and highly instructive.

Common to every homeschool parent is the belief that the education of their children is too important to hand over to someone else. Hallelujah for that!

For further information, see:

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.

Texas Will Stop Putting Kids in Prison for Skipping School by Jason Bedrick

/in , , /by

The AP reports some good news out of Texas over the weekend:

A long-standing Texas law that has sent about 100,000 students a year to criminal court – and some to jail – for missing school is off the books, though a Justice Department investigation into one county’s truancy courts continues.

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a measure to decriminalize unexcused absences and require school districts to implement preventive measures. It will take effect Sept. 1.

Reform advocates say the threat of a heavy fine – up to $500 plus court costs – and a criminal record wasn’t keeping children in school and was sending those who couldn’t pay into a criminal justice system spiral.

Under the old law, students as young as 12 could be ordered to court for three unexcused absences in four weeks. Schools were required to file a misdemeanor failure to attend school charge against students with more than 10 unexcused absences in six months. And unpaid fines landed some students behind bars when they turned 17.

Unsurprisingly, the truancy law had negatively impacted low-income and minority students the most.

In the wake of the arrest of a Georgia mother whose honor role student accumulated three unexcused absences more than the law allowed, Walter Olson noted that several states still have compulsory school attendance laws that carry criminal penalties:

Texas not only criminalized truancy but has provided for young offenders to be tried in adult courts, leading to extraordinarily harsh results especially for poorer families.

But truancy-law horror stories now come in regularly from all over the country, from Virginia to California. In Pennsylvania a woman died in jail after failing to pay truancy fines; “More than 1,600 people have been jailed in Berks County alone — where Reading is the county seat — over truancy fines since 2000.”)

The criminal penalties, combined with the serious consequences that can follow non-payment of civil penalties, are now an important component of what has been called carceral liberalism: we’re finding ever more ways to menace you with imprisonment, but don’t worry, it’s for your own good.

Yet jailing parents hardly seems a promising way to stabilize the lives of wavering students.

And as Colorado state Sen. Chris Holbert, sponsor of a decriminalization bill, has said, “Sending kids to jail — juvenile detention — for nothing more than truancy just didn’t make sense. When a student is referred to juvenile detention, he or she is co-mingling with criminals — juveniles who’ve committed theft or assault or drug dealing.”

It’s encouraging to see movement away from criminalized truancy, but it’s not enough. As Neal McCluskey has noted, compulsory government schooling is as American as Bavarian cream pie.

We shouldn’t be surprised when the one-size-fits-some district schools don’t work out for some of the students assigned to them. Instead, states should empower parents to choose the education that meets their child’s individual needs.


Jason Bedrick

Jason Bedrick is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

EDITORS NOTE: This post first appeared at Cato.org.

PARENTAL WARNING: Gaming is Coming to America’s Public Schools

/in , /by

The U.S. Department of Education is partnering with the gaming industry to bring their products to the classroom. This effort, like textbooks, can become a billion dollar industry.

If every public school in America integrates gaming into the public school curriculum what will be the positives and negatives?

In her column “Transforming Education Beyond Common Core: Crony Capitalists Promote Gaming in the Classroom“, Dr. Mary Grabar writes:

It is true: the technology can offer promising results in many applications, for example in medicine or flight simulation. But the overall thrust [of the U.S. DOE Games for Learning Summit] was that games provide advantages in “cultivating dispositions” – games for “social change,” as the name of the group and festival indicates. As for such subjects as history, one wonders: can we really go back in history, or just the history that the game designer decides to create for us?

[ … ]

One of the reasons for the widespread opposition to Common Core has been the cost of buying new Common Core-aligned textbooks.  But the speakers enthused about replacing textbooks with games, and not only to teach such subjects as science, but also history and civics.  Games would “transform” education, taking the idea of “flipped classrooms,” where students watch videos at home and do homework in class, to a whole new level.  Virtual reality and augmented reality would produce amazing results.

The U.S. DOE Office of Educational Technology website states:

Video games are important learning tools that provide immersive, interactive, and creative spaces for students to learn and explore in the 21st century classroom. The U.S. Department of Education recognizes the proven power of digital games for learning and is committed to fostering the broader adoption of high quality games in schools and informal learning settings.

What are the pros and cons of this growing edu-entertainment complex?

Perhaps it is important to note the Department of Defense experiences since introducing gaming in 2002. In the column “Playing War: How the Military Uses Video Games: A new book unfolds how the “military-entertainment complex” entices soldiers to war and treats them when they return” Hamza Shaban writes:

According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry out all-too-real rampages. Much like discussions surrounding the Internet, debates on video games carry the vague, scattershot chatter that says too much about the medium (e.g. do video games cause violence?) without saying much at all about the particulars of games or gaming conventions (e.g. how can death be given more weight in first person shooters?).

I recently had an extended conversation with John Jorgensen, founder and CEO of the Sylint Group, and USAF Brigadier General (Ret.) Charly Shugg, Sylint’s Chief Operations Officer, on where we are on cyber security and where we are headed. Both John and Charly understand that technology is ubiquitous. It is present, appearing and found everywhere. As technology expands so does the possibility of those with the necessary skills to use it for both good and evil.

The more we tune in, turn on and hook in to technology the greater the threat to individual privacy and freedom.

Gaming is becoming mainstream in education. But are we creating an environment where public school children will become addicted to gaming, if they aren’t already? One example of game-addiction is that of Clifford Davis. Davis, who lived with his mother,  in 2005 killed her, had sex with her dead body, then lured his grandfather to his mother’s home and killed him. John Jorgensen was called into the case to determine the sanity of Davis. He did a forensic study of Davis’s computer and found that Davis gamed 16+ hours a day. Jorgensen said that Davis became one of the characters in one a the games, a woman. Davis took on this female character’s personality. Gaming may have played a role is Davis’s bizarre and deadly actions in 2005.

The greatest threat is when a gamer takes on the values of the game, which are not necessarily societies values. What happens if your child or grandchild is required to become part of the edu-entertainment complex? Will your child become a character in the game or not?

That is the question. Time will tell.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

White House OSTP: The White House Education Game Jam

USA Today: White House “game jam” lures top video game developers

Wolf Sharks, energy drinks and learning standards: Reflections from White House Education Game Jam

Toward a better culture of games

Stupefying Generations of Americans

/in , , , , /by

I used the verb “stupefying” to describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported “Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.”

“U.S. middle-school students’ performance on social studies didn’t improve much between 2010 and 2014, federal test scores released Wednesday (April 29) show, underscoring concerns about the uniformed citizenry and workforce.” When it comes to U.S. history, the share of students scoring at or above proficiency last year was 18%, up one percentage point from 2010. In other words, over 80% failed to have a grasp on the subject, critical to every citizen’s understanding of U.S. history, its Constitution, and governance.

Cover - Crimes of the EducatorsAn extraordinary new book by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children” should be the center of conversation for a nation’s media, but I suspect this may be among the few places you would learn about it. Blumenfeld has written ten books on education and Newman is an international journalist, educator and consultant.

What history does teach us is that progressives, also known as communists, have slaughtered millions in their quest to create the perfect society where everybody earns the same amount, thus abandoning them to equal poverty. To achieve this, it was necessary to exercise complete control over what the children learned and what the media shared as news.

Blumenfeld notes that “In the United States the socialist utopians adopted a new and unique method of conquering a nation; by dumbing down its people, by destroying the brainpower of millions of its citizens.”

This was launched in 1898 by John Dewey, a socialist, and outlined in his essay titled ‘The Primary-Education Fetich.’ “In it he showed his fellow progressives how to transform America into a collectivist utopia by taking over the public schools and destroying the literacy of millions of Americans.”

“The plan has been so successfully implemented that it is now a fact that half of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate. They can’t read their nation’s Constitution or its Declaration of Independence. They can’t even read their high school diploma.”

This was achieved by changing how children are taught to read in our government schools. Previously the method was phonetics in which children learned the alphabet, the sounds the letters represented, and how in combination they composed words. The present method is called “whole word” in which the child must recognize the whole word without identifying its alphabetical elements. “That forces children to read English as if it were Chinese,” says Blumenfeld.

He notes that most teachers are unaware of what they are doing and most parents trust the public schools that are supposed to represent the cherished values of our democratic republic. “But the unhappy truth is that today’s public schools have rejected the values of the Founding Fathers and adopted values from nineteenth-century European social Utopian plans that completely contradict our own concepts of individual freedom.”

pillsBlumenfeld also identifies a fact that is hidden in the growing numbers of people who having passed through our schools or attending experience dyslexia and learning disabilities. Brain scans have demonstrated this. Our schools are places where the answer to the normal child’s energy and curiosity is deemed being “over-active” and our schools “push various psychiatric drugs on millions of children by requiring them to take such powerful, mid-altering stimulants as Ritalin or Adderal to alleviate such school-induced disorders as attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These drugs are as potent as cocaine and have even caused sudden death among teen athletes.”

“The long-term utopian plan required destroying America’s political, social, and moral culture of religious freedom, individual rights, unobtrusive government, and high literacy for all.”

That is a virtual definition of what has occurred in America today. We see it in the attack on religion, particularly Christianity, in America. We see it in the attack on traditional marriage in the name of the homosexual objective of “same-sex marriage.” We see individual businesses attacked for not wanting to give up their spiritual values and beliefs when challenged by homosexuals. We see it in the vast growth in the numbers of single mothers, often never married. And, of late, we see it in the obscene hatred being directed against our nation’s police forces.

The statistics cited in “Crimes of the Educators” have been published by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and they include:

Eighty-one percent of American 18 year olds are unprepared for college coursework.

More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.

Seventy percent of those in prison and 70 percent of those on welfare read at the lowest literacy levels according to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey.

According to tests in 2012 given to 15-year-olds by the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, U.S. students were at 17th place in the world on reading, 29th in math, and 20th in science.

“These failures,” says Blumenfeld, “ are not the result of an accident. They are the result of programs created by the best-organized and best-paid educators on the planet. All of these programs that create failure were conceived to produce precisely the results we are getting.”

This explains, too, why many concerned parents have decided to teach their children at home while others spend their money to have their children tutored to overcome the damage of our public schools.

If you have looked around and thought to yourself that too many of the people who see, hear, work with, and who vote are dumb, you now know why.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Surveys given to children in schools across America on sexuality, suicide, drug use, criminal activity…

/in , , , /by

Wait until you see the questions (below)!

Across Massachusetts – and across America – thousands of schoolchildren are given sexually graphic, psychologically intrusive surveys by the public schools without parents’ knowledge. These surveys also ask youth to reveal their criminal activity, personal family matters, and other intimate issues.

This is done in the public middle schools and high schools during school hours. At best, parents are told about the surveys in vague terms, but are rarely allowed read them beforehand.  The surveys are “officially” anonymous and voluntary.  But they are administered by the teacher in a classroom and (according to teachers we’ve talked to) there is often pressure for all kids to participate.

NOTE: Public hearing this WEDNESDAY, May 6, at the 10 am in the Massachusetts State House, Room A2. MassResistance has filed bill H382 in the Legislature to make all these surveys “opt-in” (not “opt out”) and force schools to let parents see them beforehand! Please join us and testify if you can!

The major survey given to kids across America is the “Youth Risk Behavior Survey” put together every two years by the national Centers for Disease Control and handed off to state and local education departments (which they can modify). And there are many similar surveys administered in various districts.

Here are questions from the actual “Youth Risk Behavior Survey” surveysgiven to children in Massachusetts schools, grades 7-12.

How old are you?

A.  12 years old or younger
B.  13 years old
C.  14 years old
D.  15 years old
E.  16 years old
F.  17 years old
G.  18 years old or older

Sexual Behavior

Which of the following best describes you?
A.  Heterosexual (straight)
B.  Gay or lesbian
C.  Bisexual
D.  Not sure

A transgender person is someone whose biological sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about themselves. Are you transgender?

A.  No, I am not transgender
B.  Yes, I am transgender and I think of myself as really a boy or man
C.  Yes, I am transgender and I think of myself as really a girl or woman
D.  Yes, I am transgender and I think of myself in some other way
E.  I do not know if I am transgender
F.  I do not know what this question is asking

Have you ever had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal)?

A.  Yes
B.  No

How old were you when you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal) for the first time?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  11 years old or younger
C.  12 years old
D.  13 years old
E.  14 years old
F.  15 years old
G.  16 years old
H.  17 years old or older

During your life, with how many people have you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal)?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  1 person
C.  2 people
D.  3 people
E.  4 people
F.  5 people
G.  6 or more people

During the past 3 months, with how many people did you have sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal)?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  I have had sexual intercourse, but not during the past 3 months
C.  1 person
D.  2 people
E.  3 people
F.  4 people
G.  5 people
H.  6 or more people

Did you drink alcohol or use drugs before you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal) the last time?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  Yes
C.  No

The last time you had sexual intercourse (oral, anal, vaginal), did you or your partner use a condom?

A.  I have never had sexual intercourse
B.  Yes
C.  No

During your life, with whom have you had sexual contact?

A.  I have never had sexual contact
B.  Females
C.  Males
D.  Females and males

How many times have you been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant?

A.  0 times
B.  1 time
C.  2 or more times
D.  Not sure

Have you ever been tested for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS? (Do not count tests done if you donated blood.)

A.  Yes
B.  No
C.  Not sure

Have you ever been tested for other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as genital herpes, chlamydia, syphilis, or genital warts?

A.  Yes
B.  No
C.  Not sure

Family and personal life

How often does your parent/guardian(s) wear a seat belt when driving or riding in a car?

A.  Never
B.  Rarely
C.  Sometimes
D.  Most of the time
E.  Always

Do your parents text, e-mail or use any other form of social media while driving a car or other vehicle?

A.  Yes
B.  No

Can you talk with at least one of your parents or other adult family members about things that are
important to you?

A.  Yes
B.  No

My parent/guardian(s) talk to me about the dangers of alcohol and drugs?

A.  Yes
B.  No

Is there at least one teacher or other adult in this school that you can talk to if you have a problem?

A.  Yes
B.  No

During the past 12 months, how  often did you talk with your parents  or other adults in your family about  sexuality or ways to prevent HIV  infection, other sexually transmitted  diseases (STDs), or pregnancy?

A.  Not at all during the past 12  months
B.  About once during the past  12 months
C.  About once every few  months
D.  About once a month
E.  More than once a month

How long have you lived in the United States?

A.  Less than 1 year
B.  1 to 3 years
C.  4 to 6 years
D.  More than 6 years but not my whole life
E.  I have always lived in the United States

Where do you typically sleep at night?

A.  At home with my parents or guardians
B.  At a friend’s or relative’s home with my parents or  guardians
C.  At a friend’s or relative’s home without my parents or  guardians
D.  In a supervised shelter with  my parents or guardians
E.  In a supervised shelter  without my parents or  guardians
F.  In a hotel or motel, car, park, campground, or other public  place with my parents or  guardians
G.  In a hotel or motel, car, park, campground, or other public  place without my parents or guardians
H.  Somewhere else

Weapons

During the past 30 days, on how many days did you carry a weapon such as a gun, knife, or club?

A.  0 days
B.  1 day
C.  2 or 3 days
D.  4 or 5 days
E.  6 or more days

During the past 30 days, on how many days did you carry a gun?

A.  0 days
B.  1 day
C.  2 or 3 days
D.  4 or 5 days
E.  6 or more days

Suicide

During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?

A.  Yes
B.  No

During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?

A.  Yes
B.  No

During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?

A.  0 times
B.  1 time
C.  2 or 3 times
D.  4 or 5 times
E.  6 or more times

Tobacco, alcohol, drugs

How old were you when you smoked a whole cigarette or other tobacco/nicotine product for the first
time?

A.  I have never smoked a whole cigarette
B.  8 years old or younger
C.  9 years old
D.  10 years old
E.  11 years old
F.  12 years old
G.  13 years old or older

During the past 30 days, how did you usually get your own cigarettes, or other tobacco/nicotine product?

(Select all that apply)
A.  I did not smoke cigarettes during the past 30 days
B.  I bought them in a store such as a convenience store, supermarket, discount store, or gas station
C.  I got them on the Internet
D.  I bought them at a public event such as a concert or sporting event
E.  I gave someone else money to buy them for me
F.  A person 18 years old or older gave them to me
G.  I took them from a store
H.  I took them from a family member
I.  I took them from someone else’s home
J.  I got them some other way

During the past 30 days, what is the largest number of alcoholic drinks you had in a 4 hour period?

A.  I did not drink alcohol during the past 30 days
B.  1 or 2 drinks
C.  3 drinks
D.  4 drinks
E.  5 drinks
F.  6 or 7 drinks
G.  8 or 9 drinks
H.  10 or more drinks

During the past 30 days, how many  times did you drive a car or other vehicle when you had been  drinking alcohol?

A.  I did not drive a car or other vehicle during the past 30 days
B.  0 times
C.  1 time
D.  2 or 3 times
E.  4 or 5 times
F.  6 or more times

During the past 30 days, how many times did you use marijuana?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

During your life, how many times have you used any form of cocaine, including powder, crack, or freebase?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

During your life, how many times have you used heroin (also called smack, junk, or China White)?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

During your life, how many times have you taken a prescription drug (such as OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin, codeine, Adderall, Ritalin, or Xanax) without a doctor’s prescription?

A.  0 times
B.  1 or 2 times
C.  3 to 9 times
D.  10 to 19 times
E.  20 to 39 times
F.  40 or more times

The above questions are from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey given to students in Canton, Mass, (which parents there were able to get for us) and from the statewide Massachusetts 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Survey posted on the Mass Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education (DOE) website.

Unscientific, destructive and deceitful

Parents and others who see these surveys are overwhelmingly shocked, upset, and angry. Here are just a few of the problems:

1. Psychological distortion of reality. Going through a battery of questions asking “how many times” a child has engaged in certain sex acts, drug use, illegal or unhealthy activity (or attempting suicide) will likely cause the child to believe he is abnormal if he is not doing it at all – especially since the survey comes from an authority figure.

2. Personal information. Having children to reveal personal issues about themselves and their family can have emotional consequences and from the parents’ point of view is extremely invasive.

3. Grossly unscientific.  Experts in surveys we’ve shown these to say they’re unscientific on several levels. The respondents are (officially) self-selected. The surveys include “leading questions” similar to push-polls. The questions are so outrageous that (we’ve been told by students) they provoke exaggeration and untruthful answers.

4. Results used for funding of radical groups. This is the main reason for the existence of these surveys: The surveys create misleading “statistics” that are used by radical groups from Planned Parenthood to LGBT groups to persuade politicians to give more taxpayer money these groups – and to let them into schools – to “help solve” these “huge” problems that these surveys reveal. It is a very emotional appeal, and millions of dollars are budgeted on the basis of these very questionable surveys.

How the Youth Risk surveys are done in Massachusetts

Every two years the Mass. DOE creates a new statewide version of the CDC national Youth Risk Behavior Survey and makes it available to each school district. The school districts can further modify the surveys if they wish and are given wide discretion as to how they notify parents, whether they allow the parents to see the surveys, how the surveys are administered to the students, etc.

In many districts, it’s a nightmare for parents, who rarely even know that their children were given the survey. That’s not an accident. School officials are well aware that if parents were to read these surveys beforehand, almost none of them would want their children to participate.

We telephoned the Mass. DOE to ask them questions about how schools administer the test and whether we can get a copy of the 2015 statewide survey.They were not eager to discuss it with us. We were told they were “too busy” to answer our questions over the phone and we must submit them via email. We did so, and are still waiting for a reply.

Many teachers uncomfortable with the surveys

We have spoken with teachers in Massachusetts who have told us that they are pressured by schools to present the surveys to kids as if it were a normal procedure, and to not to discourage them from taking it. But some teachers do rebel against that. A parent in Canton, Mass., told us that a two years ago a teacher in that town was disciplined for telling his students they had a constitutional right to decline the survey. In 2010 a teacher in Illinois was also reprimanded for that (which was reported in the Chicago Tribune).

Parents and others need to stop this!

It’s been our experience that the people who do this have no interest whatsoever in how this affects children or their families. From the politicians and the activists down to the school officials, it’s mostly about money, ideology, politics, and control. Even when the obvious and harmful flaws are pointed out, there is no effort to change. It will take angry parents and citizens to stop this. That’s why MassResistance filed Bill H382 in the Massachusetts Legislature which will completely empower parents. The fight begins!

#Take Back Our Kids

/in , , , /by

Our nineteen fifty something station-wagon was loaded with Mom, Dad, big fat Aunt Nee (300 lbs ), myself and four younger siblings. Aunt Nee raised my Dad; his surrogate Mom. Our family was excited about spending a hot summer day at Carr’s Beach, Maryland. I had no idea at that time that it was the only Maryland beach open to blacks.

Before hitting the road to the beach, the ritual included riding from our black suburban community into Baltimore city to pick up Aunt Nee and stopping down “Jew Town” to purchase corned-beef and a bread that the adults loved. I did not get a sense that my parents calling it Jew Town was meant in a derogatory way. It was simply an area of Baltimore filled with Jewish businesses that sold great food.

As a matter of fact, most of the corner stores in black neighborhoods were owned by Jews. Blacks purchased items without cash, put on their account. Store owners would log items in their book; no bulletproof wall and turn-style between the Jewish store owners and their black customers.

We always had a wonderful time at the beach and rode home exhausted. Dad’s car was not air conditioned. Looking back, I wonder how on earth did we endure; three adults, five kids, food and beach supplies stuffed in a hot station-wagon. And yet, all my memories of family days at the beach bring a warm smile to my face.

Mom was a great cook. Two of mom’s weekday dinner menus stick out as favorites. One was mom’s hot homemade biscuits with butter and King Syrup. The other was collard greens with cornbread dumplings. We kids were clueless about the economic component surrounding these meals. We simply enjoyed them, never feeling deprived.

Wednesday nights were prayer service at the storefront church in Baltimore city where dad was assistant pastor. On the way home, there was a corner bakery right before we crossed over the Hanover Street bridge. Whenever dad unexpectedly pulled over to purchase a dozen donuts, it was an exciting family treat.

As the eldest, I remember my parent’s lean years more than my siblings. One Christmas, I was extremely excited receiving a secondhand bicycle. Years later, Santa delivered new bikes for my younger brothers and sister.

Dad was among Baltimore City’s first black firefighters and mom worked part-time as a custodian at a high school and a domestic for white folks.

My point is we did not have what kids have today. And yet, we enjoyed the little things. We did not feel deprived. Mom and dad always found a way to get us whatever we needed. I remember wearing my new suit for 6th grade graduation looking at my friend Martin wearing a suit a few sizes too small. My three brothers, sister and I were happy.

The Bible says “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). While my siblings and I had our individual periods of rebellion, like the prodigal son, we defaulted back to our home training; our parent’s principles and values.

Today, the Left is aggressively usurping authority over your kids, ripping parenting out of your hands.

Decades of allowing liberal indoctrination to go unchallenged has produced a generation of youths who believe in the name of “fairness” that no one should have more than anyone else (income inequality). Needs and desires are now declared to be rights (government entitlements). In our quest to prove our tolerance as conservatives, we allowed the Left to steal our kid’s minds.

Youths are idealistic. Once liberalized guilt-ridden youths are led down the road of trying to make life fair, the consequences are far reaching. For example: Pressure from students is forcing colleges to make all campus restrooms “all gender”. An Oregon High School created gender-neutral restrooms for transgender students.

In case you have not noticed, the Left has zero tolerance for anyone daring to disagree with their far left radical liberal agenda. They punish and even seek to criminalize opposing points of view. How long will it be before our kids are reporting their parents to authorities after overhearing them express an opinion out-of-step with that of the Left, government and the mainstream media?

Folks, it is time that we take back our kids from Leftist’s indoctrination.

Though “#Bring Back Our Girls” won rave reviews from liberals, sadly, it did nothing to free the 200 girls kidnapped and made sex slaves by Islamic extremists. A year later, the girls have not been returned.

I wish to implement, #Take Back Our Kids. I am calling all parents to closely monitor their local school administrators and school boards, confronting them when necessary. Home schooling is a great option. We can no longer sit back and passively allow the Left to totally control the thinking and beliefs of our kids. We must #Take Back Our Kids.

Major corporations funding “gay” indoctrination in elementary schools across America [+ Video]

/in , , , , , /by

It’s every parent’s nightmare, but true: Major U.S. corporations are funding a campaign of sophisticated, psychologically intrusive “gay” indoctrination programs targeting very young children in elementary schools across America. It’s part of a very well-planned and well-funded effort to reach children as young as possible without their parents’ intervention.

From the “Welcoming Schools” website.

The national program, called “Welcoming Schools”, skillfully works on the minds of young children in three ways:

(1) Introducing the concept of homosexuality to children.

(2) Telling them that homosexuality is normal and natural.

(3) Telling them that their parents or friends who portray homosexuality in a less than positive way are bad people – intolerant, bigoted, etc.

The “Welcoming schools” website has even posted a video that describes their program and shows how effective these psychological techniques are in molding young children’s minds:

As MassResistance has reported, major US corporations are enabling this through large donations to the radical national LGBT group Human Rights Campaign (HRC). HRC created and runs the Welcoming Schools program and has representatives in regions around the country pushing it in elementary schools.

Of particular concern and outrage was the recent arrest of HRC’s founder and current Board member, Terry Bean, for “third degree sodomy” of a 15-year-old boy. HRC has had no comment on that incident, but it continues a vicious campaign of harassment against pro-family leaders with whom it disagrees. But this has not deterred corporate donations to HRC in any way that we can determine.

Bringing it into the schools

Among the vehicles they use to bring this into the schools are the “anti-bullying” laws which the national LGBT movement lobbied heavily for in states across the country over the last several years. As MassResistance warned at the time these laws, which were largely written and/or influenced by LGBT groups, invariably have little to do with legitimate anti-bullying behavioral science. Instead they require schools to provide LGBT “diversity training” and mete out punishment for “anti-gay” opinions or discussion.

Not surprisingly, nothing is said told to kids about the extensive medical and psychological dangers of homosexual behavior, including a range of diseases, addictions, domestic violence, and other social pathologies.

Confronting the corporations that fund this

The companies pouring money into HRC read like a who’s who of corporate America. You can see some of the names HERE.

But MassResistance is fighting back. As we’ve reported, we have been helping people to contact these companies – by phone, email, and letter – and tell their corporate staffs in no uncertain terms what we think of their actions – and demand that they stop it.

It’s quite shocking. Companies that many of you patronize at one time or another are using your money to subvert your own young children’s minds to accept and support a dangerous perversion.

When people manage to actually speak with corporate representatives, the companies don’t deny what they’re doing. They talk about how proud they are to be fighting for “tolerance” and “diversity.” They seem to have no misgivings at all when outraged parents contact them.




We contacted these four companies — to start with.

What that tells us is that we need to step up this fight. Most of these companies have never heard from pro-family people before. They only hear from radical homosexual activists. With your help, that will change!

$10,000 matching challenge for MassResistance!

Help us meet $10,000 matching challenge by midnight Dec. 31!

A generous donor has offered to donate $10,000 if we can raise an equal amount by midnight Wednesday, Dec. 31. You can really make your money work for you — and get a year-end tax donation also. (See our 77-second video on what MassResistance is doing.)

But it needs to be done by midnight Wednesday, Dec. 31.

Here are two ways you can do it:

1. Non-tax-deductible gift. To MassResistance:  You donate by credit card online HERE or mail a check to MassResistance, PO Box 1612, Waltham, MA 02454.

2. Tax-deductible gift. To Parents’ Education Foundation, which funds our research and education work.  You can mail a check to: Parents’ Education Foundation, PO Box 1612, Waltham, MA  02454. Or to give by credit card, call our office at 781-890-6001.

All donations sent by Dec. 31 will receive TWO of our “not equal” stickers, suitable for your car … or, be creative!

Let’s ring in the New Year with a big push!

Tired of seeing the obnoxious homosexual Human Rights Campaign’s “equal” stickers everywhere?

Fight back with the truth — our MassResistance “not equal” stickers!

(Get two free with each donation.)

Help us keep fighting!
Please DONATE to Mass Resisance

RELATED VIDEO: Taco Bell Makes Commercial with Two Men Falling in Love and Getting Married

The Catalyst Message: Are God’s children returning Him to public schools? [+Video]

/in , , , , /by

There is a student lead high-school campus coalition that is bringing God back to public school campuses across the United States. It is a living, breathing adventure. A real life adventure as explained by Jean Carlos Diaz in the below video.

Watch Jean Carlos Diaz explain this movement, a grand adventure:

clip_image003

Jean Carlos Diaz

Alice Patterson, President of Justice at the Gate, reports:

A coalition of youth pastor networks and students forged a movement that is touching high school campuses across the nation. It started with a freshman at Blaine High School in Minnesota in January 2011. Jean Carlos Diaz, born in Puerto Rico and raised in Iowa then Minnesota is the catalyst that Jean Carlos used to start the movement. Jean Carlos attended See You at the Pole at his high school. That led him to a Bible study of 25 students that dwindled to 6 by year end. When the leaders graduated, he was asked to lead what was left of the group. Shortly after that the group went on a missions trip to Kansas City. They were fired up, sad to leave and came home with a heart to impact their school. So they had a sleepover with three guys where they worshipped, prayed and dreamt all night. They wanted to pray something big, so they prayed, “Jesus, would You finish the Great Commission in our generation?”

At the same time they were praying for the Lord to use them on their campus, a network of youth ministers called Allies Ministries, led by Dan Buschow in Minneapolis, were praying for the youth of Minnesota. They sensed that the Lord wanted them to keep praying and not initiate anything.

God was doing the initiating through Jean Carlos. From the very beginning, everything was student-led and student-driven. It was a movement for students by students. We had learned from our mistakes and were able to teach and train other students. Since we were only teenagers in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of the church, God was the only one who could get the credit. We didn’t want to be a class about God; we wanted to be an agent of change in our school. We changed our focus, our name and started the first Catalyst.

As youth pastors prayed and waited, students stepped up and led. Shortly after that, a coalition between Catalyst and Allies Ministries, other shepherds and caring adults was formed. The first year Catalyst grew from 1 school to over 15 and from 30 students to over 500. Catalyst has now grown to over 50 groups and is spreading past Minnesota to 20 in Iowa and to Illinois, New York, Maryland, Arizona, California and Texas.

Read more.

Educators Set Student Goals By Race?

/in , , /by

The Florida Board of Education has a history of lowering educational standards and has now come under-fire for doing so based upon a student’s race. CBS Tampa reports, “The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.”

“On Tuesday [October 9, 2012], the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post,” states CBS Tampa.

This decision has raised eyebrows, some calling it racist. But is it racism or reality? Is lowering goals the right way to deal with student achievement in reading and math?

This issue is not new, rather it has been swept under the rug since 1994. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their seminal book on cognitive ability The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life state, “The question is how to redistribute in ways that increase the chances for people at the bottom of society to take control of their lives, to be engaged meaningfully in their communities, and to find valued places for themselves.”

Herrnstein and Murray found, “Ethnic differences in higher education, occupations, and wages are strikingly diminished after controlling for IQ. Often they vanish. In this sense, America has equalized these central indicators of social success.”

Herrnstein and Murray asked, “What are the odds that a black or Latino with an IQ of 103 – the average IQ of all high school graduates – completed high school? The answer is that a youngster from either minority group had a higher probability of graduating from high school than a white, if all of them had IQs of 103: The odds were 93 percent and 91 percent for blacks and Latinos respectively, compared to 89 percent for whites.”

The key factor in setting goals is IQ. Is it time for Florida to lead the way and reintroduce IQ testing for all students?

Herrnstein and Murray concluded:

  • We have tried to point out that a small segment of the population accounts for such a large proportion of those [social] problems. To the extent that the [social] problems of this small segment are susceptible to social-engineering solutions at all, should be highly targeted.
  • The vast majority of Americans can run their own lives just fine, and [public] policy should above all be constructed so that it permits them to do so.
  • Much of the policy toward the disadvantaged starts from the premise that interventions can make up for genetic or environmental disadvantages, and that premise is overly optimistic.
  • Cognitive ability, so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled – can only be handled – by a return to individualism.
  • Cognitive partitioning will continue. It cannot be stopped, because the forces driving it cannot be stopped.
  • Americans can choose to preserve a society in which every citizen has access to the central satisfactions of life. Its people can, through an interweaving of choice and responsibility, create valued places for themselves in their worlds.

Herrnstein and Murray found, “Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality.”

“Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities to admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and in-competencies,  assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that of all the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen,” found Herrnstein and Murray.

Finally, Herrnstein and Murray wrote, “Of all the uncomfortable topics we have explored, a pair of the most uncomfortable ones are that a society with a higher mean IQ is also likely to be a society with fewer social ills and brighter economic prospects, and that the most effective way to raise the IQ of a society is for smarter women to have higher birth rates than duller women.” Shocking words in 1994 and indeed even more so today. Is it time to have a national public debate on cognitive abilities?

RELATED COLUMNS:

Does Florida Really Want a Strong Commissioner of Education?

Watchdog Wire Education Archives

Do We Really Want a Strong Commissioner of Education?

/in , , /by

Jeffrey S. Solochek, staff writer for the Tampa Bay Times, reports, “Florida’s next education commissioner needs to have room to do the job without political interference, state Board of Education members said Friday as they set requirements for the vacancy.”

But do the Commissioners really want to stop political interference?

The Florida Board of Education (BOE) is itself political. Outgoing Chairwoman Kathleen M. Shanahan has held federal and state public policy positions of chief of staff for Florida Governor Jeb Bush, chief of staff to Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, deputy secretary of the California Trade and Commerce Agency, special assistant to then Vice President George Bush, and staff assistant on President Reagan’s National Security Council.

Vice Chairman Roberto Martinez, a lawyer, served as Chairman of the Florida Federal Judicial Nominating Commission; Special Counsel to Attorney General Charlie Crist; and as Chairman of the District Board of Trustees of Miami Dade College; Chair of Attorney-Elect Charlie Crist’s transition; General Counsel to Governor Jeb Bush during the gubernatorial transition.

Solochek quotes Martinez as saying, “The person has to be able to deal with the political process. But I think all of us … need to understand we need to give that person a lot of autonomy so they can function professionally with minimal interference from the political folks.”

On September 7, 2012 the State Board of Education moved forward with the search for the next Commissioner of Education approving the candidate profile developed by Ray and Associates. The search firm is conducting a nationwide search for Florida’s chief education officer who will be responsible for all aspects of the state’s Pre-K-20 education system. The deadline for applications is Sept. 27, 2012.

The Florida Legislature and Board of Education have come under fire from citizens with two actions that have disenfranchised students, parents and citizens.

The first action was removing citizen participation in the selection of text books used in Florida’s public schools. More recently the BOE unanimously voted to lower school passing scores after 2011 FCAT scores plummeted. This lowering of school passing scores occurred after political pressure from teachers unions, the superintendents association and school boards across Florida.

The Florida based Textbook Action Team (TAT) in May, 2011 became outraged with a provision in SB 2120 lines 118-120, which was passed by the Republican led legislature. The provision cuts out lay people from the State Instructional Materials Committee.

“Today all of Florida’s public school textbooks will be selected by bureaucrats, not citizens and parents” notes Sheri Krass, State Chairperson for TAT. Krass stated in a letter to Governor Scott, “Now, in a boldfaced attempt to avoid having to seat some of these individuals on the Committee, your State Legislature has passed SB 2120 which employs ‘three state or national experts in the content areas submitted for adoption’ to review the instructional materials and evaluate the content for alignment with the applicable Next Generation Sunshine State Standards. This move allows them to continue to deprive our students of the quality education they deserve.”

The second action was lowing the passing scores of public schools statewide.Cara Fitzpatrick, Shelly Rossetter and Jefferry S. Solochek of the Tampa Bay Times in their article “After FCAT scores plunge, state quickly lowers the passing grade” reported, “After conceding that poor communication with teachers could have contributed to the unprecedented plunge in Florida students’ writing scores this year, the state Board of Education voted Tuesday to lower the passing mark for the test.”

Teachers and administrators have known about the new testing standards for over a year. Teachers and school administrations actually write the Sunshine State Standards, the test questions and administer the tests. Many parents and citizens do not accept the premise that there was a communication gap. The new standards require that a student use proper sentence structure, punctuation and spelling. Each of these are fundamental to learning how to write.

All members of the Florida Board of Education are political appointees. How can politics be taken out of the classroom and replaced by empowered parents, students and citizens?

How do you take politics out of education? Perhaps this video from the Reason Foundation titled “The Machine” will help explain: