Have you recently heard the scornful claims of “progressives” who assert that critical race theory (CRT) is absolutely, unequivocally not taught in public schools? Never, no way, no how. Have you heard the suspiciously uniform proclamations that CRT is an academic theory originating and taught exclusively in law schools? Well, take a gander at this upcoming course offered at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy—a public high school:

SESSION # 34 TITLE: Introduction to Critical Race Theory in Education Research

LENGTH: 60 minutes / Three Days DESCRIPTION The three-day session will cover an introduction to Critical Race Theory concepts, the utilization of CRT in the field of education, and research applications of CRT in K12 classrooms and districts. The first 60- minute session is mainly lecture with a brief discussion focused on the tenets of CRT and the field of education. The second 60-minute session has a brief lecture on CRT in education and research, followed by small and large group discussions connecting students’ experiences with the CRT concepts and how they apply to the CRT framework. The final session will be students working in groups to design research questions and choose research methods using CRT as a theoretical framework. Students will create power points and share their ‘research designs’ with the group in the final 60-minute session. Students will be required to read journal articles and book chapters before the start of the session and during the 3-days of the course. Students will also have a small assignment outside the designated class time of the session to prepare for the group presentations.

SESSION GOALS

• To familiarize students with Critical Race Theory concepts.
• To familiarize students with CRT research applications in education.

STUDENT OUTCOMES

1. Students will be able to identify specific tenets of Critical Race Theory.
2. Students will be able to articulate different ways education researchers have used CRT to address education inequity in K12 classrooms and districts.

SESSION CATEGORIES

Academic – Session provides additional insight and inquiry into academic disciplines, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – Session promotes DEI values and perspectives.

PREREQUISITES

N/A

FACILITATOR(S)

Thandeka K. Chapman, Alumni IMSA Student

Remember, IMSA is a public school—that is, a school funded by you, the public. IMSA is using public funds to promote a highly controversial, arguable leftist theory on race and justice, which also includes controversial and arguable ideas about homosexuality and gender confusion.

By the end of the indoctrination seminar, IMSA expects students to be able to “identify specific tenets of” CRT and “articulate different ways education researchers have used CRT to address education inequity in K12 classrooms and districts.” IMSA does not, however, expect students to be able to identify dissenting views of CRT or how assumptions embedded in or derived from CRT may be wrong. In other words, IMSA is not teaching the controversy, and the seminar is not ideologically diverse or inclusive. It is biased in favor of CRT.

Thandeka K. Chapman

The woman teaching this course—and who is presumably being paid handsomely by Illinois taxpayers—is Thandeka K. Chapman, an alumna of IMSA, professor at the University of San Diego, and a “social justice” activist.

She calls herself a “Black Power Baby” whose “parents are educators and activists who utilized their resources to challenge injustices in education. Conversations about race and racism were regular dinner topics while I was growing up.”

All decent people oppose injustice. Many people, however, see serious problems in the way CRT defines injustice and with its proposed solutions to alleged injustice.

When asked, “If you could make any policy recommendation based on your own research (without regard to political possibility!), what would it be,” Chapman replied,

[M]y policy recommendation is to raise teacher salaries to be equivalent to–or above–salaries in other professions. Teachers have the most influence in students’ lives. … Teachers disseminate knowledge in particular ways, justify or demonize certain morals, values and behaviors. … Raising teacher salaries would elevate the profession. (emphasis added)

Paying more to recruit activists who are demonizing conservative morals, values, and behaviors is no solution, and paying activists more money will not elevate the teaching profession.

Depoliticizing teaching would be a good start, but leftist bias is systemic in schools and all ancillary institutions connected to schools, including the colleges and universities that train teachers, professional journals and organizations, teachers’ unions, and organizations that profit from advancing leftist ideas on injustice, systemic bias, oppression, race (and disordered sexuality). The entire system from the inside out and top to bottom is corrupt.

Regular IFI readers may be interested in who the “Chief Equity Officer” at IMSA is. It’s none other than Traci Ellis, former school board activist in District U-46 who infamously said about the American flag,

that flag means nothing more than toilet paper to me.

Ellis also referred to the Republican National Convention as the “Klanvention.” Can someone like that represent a diverse community or promote “equity” and justice?

On her school website, Ellis links to IMSA’s “Equity and Excellence” document adopted in 2018 when she was the Executive Director of the Office of Human Resources, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. What is most notable about this document filled with “social justice” education-ese is the absence of the word “equality.” There are lots of references to equity, inclusion, marginalization, cultural competence, and global citizenship (as opposed to American citizenship) but not one reference to equality.

One thing most “educators” today are not is independent thinkers. They are ideological lemmings whose rhetoric parrots whatever they read in their professional journals and hear at their conferences.

The “Equity and Excellence” document jampacked with jargon concludes with this:

The President, in collaboration with Academy departments, shall develop action plans with clear accountabilities and metrics, where appropriate, to execute this policy. (emphasis added)

This is the escape route for social justice change agents. This is the way they escape accountability for the inefficacy of their doctrinaire plans to change the world using other people’s children. They simply assert that “metrics” are inappropriate tools for measuring the outcomes they desire.

For more on the unprofessional, arrogant, and nasty Ellis who has no business involved in the education of other people’s children, Click HERE.

Some intrepid IMSA parents ought to find out how much Thaneka Chapman is being paid. And they ought to find out what teachers have been learning during professional development over the past five years since Traci Ellis was hired, because taxpayers fund professional development as well.

Anyone who teaches in public schools or has taught in public schools in the last two decades knows that ideas from CRT inform professional development and curricula. Anyone who denies that is either ignorant or deceitful.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Black-Power-Baby.mp3

Chicago Sun-Times education reporter Nader Issa offers a classic example of biased opinion writing masquerading as objective reporting in his “news” narratives about a recent controversy in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove over an obscene “graphic memoir.” The memoir, titled Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, may sound familiar to IFI readers. I wrote this about her memoir in early August 2021:

Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir, which is carried in high school libraries, tells the peculiar tale of her journey to her “identity” as a genderqueer, asexual woman with a lesbian aunt and a sister who dates a woman who pretends to be a man.

The far-left American Library Association awarded Kobabe an Alex Award for her “graphic” memoir. Her memoir is graphic in both senses of the word. It’s a sexually explicit, 240-page comic book about her journey into sexual confusion and perversion. Kobabe, who uses the “Spivak” pronouns ey/eir/em, also teaches art workshops to middle school children, mostly, she says, “AFAB” girls, which means “assigned female at birth.” Kobabe evidently doesn’t know that children aren’t assigned either a sex or “gender identity” at birth. That’s not a thing obstetricians do. Obstetricians identify the objective sex of babies at birth, a characteristic that never changes.

Public school kerfuffles over Kobabe’s obscene memoir have been justifiably emerging as parents learn that their children’s schools carry it, and one of those kerfuffles took place at a Downers Grove School Board meeting on November 15.

Issa mischaracterizes community criticism of the book as an “attack on literature” about “gender.” What in Issa’s view distinguishes an attack from criticism? And does he think that books about “gender” that don’t include obscene language and images would be under similar “attack”?

Issa continues his sly editorializing. He says the “attack” was perpetrated by “conservative protesters” and “some parents.” Notice the adjective “some,” which suggests that the attack was perpetrated mainly by conservative protestors with just a few parents. Issa, however, doesn’t provide any details. How many of the “conservative protesters” were district taxpayers? How many of the attendees approve of Gender Queer? How many of the attendees who approve of Gender Queer were parents? How many of the attendees who approve of Gender Queer were district taxpayers as opposed to outside leftist agitators? And why does Issa identify opponents of Gender Queer as “conservative” five times in the two articles he has written but doesn’t refer to supporters of the obscene book as “progressive” even once?

Issa then said that “Some critics have claimed children were being exposed to ‘homoerotic’ or ‘pornographic’ language and images.” Issa could have written “some critics oppose children being exposed to homoerotic and pornographic language and images,” but instead he wrote “some critics have claimed children were being exposed to” such language and images. Some have “claimed”? Seriously? Can any honest person deny that Kobabe’s comic book includes homoerotic and pornographic language and images? If images of two women engaged in sex using a dildo is not homoerotic and pornographic, what is?

The paranoid Issa implies critics are part of a vast right-wing conspiracy of “conservative politicians, activists, commentators and small networks of parents” to “denounce and ban progressive teachings in school.” He’s unfortunately right on two things; “progressives” are the peddlers of deviant and graphic sexuality, and they are using public schools to disseminate their sexuality ideology.

If Issa is bothered by the shared goals of conservative politicians, activists, commentators, and small networks of parents who are working toward cleansing schools of controversial leftist materials, he must really be troubled by the shared goals of leftist politicians, activists, academicians, commentators, and large networks of parents to systemically entrench leftist ideas about sexuality (and race) in curricula, resources, professional development, and activities.

Just as Issa referred to “some” parents and said some critics have “claimed” in order to discount the views of critics of Gender Queer, he also referred to “small” networks of parents. Perhaps Issa isn’t aware of the intimidation, bullying, mockery, name-calling, and shaming conservative taxpayers experience when they criticize pro-“LGBTQ” resources used in schools to advance leftist assumptions.

And perhaps Issa didn’t realize that “small networks” of conservative parents are now the minority, and minority voices are all the rage. Maybe Issa is an ideological neanderthal who believes might and numbers make right.

Issa dismisses the offensiveness of Gender Queer by saying it’s only “A few pages that include illustrations of sexual acts” that “have drawn the bulk of the ire.” First, it’s not just obscene drawings about which critics are angry. It’s also obscene language.

Second, how many pages of obscene images would it take to render a novel, memoir, or comic book inappropriate for purchase with taxpayer dollars for minors?

Issa calls attention to the “other students, parents and community members” who see the book as a “vital tool for youth discovering their identity and any efforts to ban it as censorship.”

Please note that Issa did not say a “few other students, parents, and community members” or “some other students, parents and community members” think Gender Queer is a “vital tool.” The diminishing qualifiers “some” and “few” are reserved for conservatives.

Vital? Really? Gender Queer is necessary to the continuation of life? However did kids survive before Kobabe wrote her obscene comic book?

The accusations of censorship and book-banning are curious. When leftist teachers decide that a book’s content is offensive or age-inappropriate and choose not to teach it, it’s called “text-selection.” When conservatives decide that a book is content- or age-inappropriate, leftists call it censorship or book-banning.

I wonder how many books the Downers Grove high schools have that critique leftist gender theory? How many resources do they have about detransitioners? If the answer is none, why would that be?

Issa didn’t mention whether there are any leftist politicians, activists, commentators, and networks of parents who share the goal of keeping Gender Queer and other obscene novels and plays in school libraries.

Issa mentioned that three students spoke in favor of keeping Gender Queer in the library. One student defended it by saying, that “it’s not being forced upon” students. Well, I guess Downers Grove parents should be thankful that teachers aren’t forcing their children to read it, but that comment fails to address the issue. The issue is, should taxpayer subsidized schools purchase and make available to minor students obscene material. Any parents who want their child to read Gender Queer can buy it for them, or kids can buy it themselves.

An 18-year-old student shared that Gender Queer “has scenes in it that are mature and sexual … [but] it’s not like we haven’t been given books with sex in them before.” Ain’t that the truth. School libraries and curricula are chock full of Young Adult (YA) books with graphic sex. Gender Queer is not an isolated library purchase. I would, however, dispute the claim that the obscene scenes in Gender Queer are “mature.” In this context, “mature” is a euphemism for vulgar and obscene.

The 18-year-old, Josiah Poynter, continued: “Inclusion matters to young people. … This is why we must have this book in our school’s library. Inclusion brings an opportunity to grow in a safe environment.”

Poynter is right. Teens and virtually every other human want to feel included, but inclusion must not trump truth. Inclusion must not entail affirming all feelings, beliefs, and acts. Neither inclusion nor the provision of a safe environment should entail the eradication of all moral boundaries.

According to Issa, Superintendent Hank Thiele said Gender Queer “met the district’s requirements for inclusion in its library.” Yikes. Someone better take a close critical look at those requirements.

In Issa’s second article on the Downers Grove dust-up, Democrat U.S. Representative Sean Casten made this asinine comment:

Let’s be really blunt about this. If you are a grown adult and you are walking through a library in an elementary school or high school and having sexual thoughts, you are the problem. It ain’t the book.

Let’s be really blunt about Casten. If he thinks adults who oppose taxpayer-funded schools spending taxpayer funds to make obscene garbage like Gender Queer available to minors are “having sexual thoughts,” then he’s ignorant, creepy, and unfit for office. But this is what we should expect from a man who admires Dan Savage.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Downers-Grove-HS-Obscene-Books-Biased-Journalism.mp3

Exeter High School in New Hampshire is being sued by a Catholic student (identified in the lawsuit as M.P.) who was suspended from playing in a football game because in a private conversation, off school grounds, initiated by a “progressive” student, M.P. expressed his view that there are only two genders: male and female. To be clear, by “genders,” he meant sexes. Until recently when the “trans”-cult redefined “gender,” the term was synonymous with “biological sex.”

The conversation was precipitated by an incident in Spanish class when a student declared that he or she is “nonbinary” and wished to be addressed by the third-person plural pronoun “they.” On the bus ride home after school, M.P. and his friends were discussing the “difficulty of addressing a non-binary person in Spanish,” which has two gendered words for “they”: “ellas” and “ellos.”

A girl identified as A.G. interrupted their conversation to assert the silly idea that there are more than two “genders.” After M.P. got off the bus, A.G. texted him to resume the debate during which she demanded M.P. “Give me one valid reason why there’s only two genders.”

That’s like demanding someone give her a valid reason why there are tigers. Tigers—like boys and girls—just are.

A.G. then sent the text conversation to Vice Principal Marcy Dovholuk, also known as Big Brother Sister Genderless Sibling. She decided from on her high horse that no student is permitted to express his or her true, scientifically verifiable belief that humans, like all other mammals, are either male or female. One wonders what orders Dovholuk has issued to Exeter’s biology teachers.

The next day, M.P. was pulled out of a morning class by Dovholuk and varsity football coach Bill Ball and suspended from the next football game for,

failing to respect another student’s gender pronouns and for ‘inappropriate language’ used in his texts, such as “bozo” and “stfu.”

As someone who worked in a public high school for a decade, I can say with confidence that no student is suspended for calling someone a “bozo” or saying “stfu” in class, let alone in a text message after school.

When M.P.’s mother objected to the suspension, saying that her son had done nothing wrong, Ball replied, “‘I know, but times are changing.’” Truer words were never spoken. Right is now wrong, and wrong is right. Imagine if Ball had had the spine to object instead of capitulating.

Even in the phantasmagorical Transtopia that leftists are socially constructing, A.G. misused the term “gender.” In Transtopia, “gender” is the aggregate of behaviors, roles, and conventions arbitrarily associated with one of the two biological sexes. A. G. likely meant “gender identities,” which in Transtopia, are the subjective, internal feelings one has about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither. “Gender identity” has no objective, material reality. A. G. interrupted M.P.’s discussion about the two sexes with an entirely irrelevant comment about “gender identity.”

Exeter’s outrageous policy on “Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students” states,

[T]he the goal [of this policy] is to ensure the safety, comfort, and healthy development of the transgender or gender nonconforming student while maximizing the student’s social integration and minimizing stigmatization of the student. … A student has the right to be addressed by a name and pronoun that corresponds to the student’s gender identity. … The intentional or persistent refusal to respect a student’s gender identity (for example, intentionally referring to the student by a name or pronoun that does not correspond to the student’s gender identity) is a violation of this policy.

Here are several questions for the Exeter administration and school board:

• What criteria did the school use to determine what constitutes the “healthy development” of gender-dysphoric students? Who socially constructed those criteria?

• Is the school arguing there exists no behavior that should be stigmatized? What if a student identifies as a polyamorist or zoophile? Are other students free to express disapproval of polyamory and zoophilia?

• What are the administration’s pronoun diktats with regard to “gender fluid” students who change their preferred pronouns day-to-day?

• Is the administration aware that when they suggest that saying there are only two genders is worthy of discipline, they are stigmatizing all theologically orthodox Christians, whose beliefs about God’s created order are central to their Christian identity? Could that stigmatization make Christian students feel “unsafe”?

• Does a student have a right not to be forced to lie? When the administration demands that students use pronouns that embody false, science-denying beliefs about humans, they are forcing students to lie, which in turn means the administration is forcing Christian students to violate their religion.

• Does the administration realize that disciplining students for acting on their religious beliefs constitutes discrimination based on religion?

The verb “respect” means to hold something in esteem or to feel deferential regard for something. No public school has a right to demand that students “respect” any aspect of the “trans” ideology or of any behavior related to it. And no public school has the right to demand that only conservative students refrain from expressing their ontological, theological, moral, or political views of “trans”-cultism, while permitting “progressive” students to express theirs.

No student has an obligation to “respect” the superstition that some boys menstruate and some girls have penises. No student has an obligation to respect cross-sex hormone-doping, cross-dressing, or the sexual integration of bathrooms, locker rooms, or sports.

There is nothing progressive about “Progressives.” Their sexuality ideology is an odd mixture of paganism and Gnosticism, and their political tactics are those of all oppressive regimes. The Exeter tattle tale A. G. is like one of the two kinds of “whisperer” (sheptun) in the former Soviet Union who “informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities.” Normal Americans are becoming the other kind of “whisperers” (shepchushchii) in the former Soviet Union, the ones who “whisper[ed] out of fear of being overheard.”

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Anti-Science-Public-High-School-Discriminates-Based-on-Religion.mp3

At the most recent School District 200 Board Meeting in Wheaton, Illinois, new school board member and cunning rhetorician, Mary Yeboah, Director of Graduate Student Life at Wheaton College, posed six questions to the board,  beginning with a prefatory statement that let the woke cat out of the bag:

I would like to ask six rhetorical questions regarding the proposed October 10th, 2022 and October 9th, 2023 no-school all-grades Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day in relation to district purposes outlined in the mission of School District 200, Vision 2022, and the portrait of a graduate work. To be very clear, these are not questions that I expect you to answer right now. I am asking them for the benefit of reflective thinking for the district, especially in the month leading up to the approval of these calendars.

One, does the District 200 administration recognize the impact of holidays, statues, and other memorials on shaping school culture, which in turn shapes student experiences and outcomes?

Two, does the District 200 administration consider celebrating extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization to be in line with the study of social science to help students develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the benefit of the global society in which they live?

Three, does the District 200 administration affirm the accurate telling of history and recognize the impossibility of “discovering” land already inhabited?

Four, does the District 200 administration take into consideration the perspectives of Indigenous people regarding this particular calendar event?

Five, could maintaining this District 200 calendar event unintentionally support a myth of U.S. exceptionalism that could undermine district efforts to create diverse, inclusive schools for all children?

Lastly, does this calendar event advance the vision and mission of District 200 goals? And if it does not, must it remain despite state-level support?

It was so considerate of Yeboah to make very clear that she didn’t expect her six loaded questions to be answered immediately. It was also odd in that she had declared these were rhetorical questions, which are questions intended to make a point—not to be answered.

After some reflective thinking, I have some reflective thoughts and questions on Yeboah’s questions.

1.) Does Yeboah recognize the impact of using a leftist lens through which to view, socially construct, revise, and impose a particular interpretation of the meaning of holidays, statues, and other memorials, which in turn shapes student experiences, beliefs, and outcomes—including outcomes like the 2020 riots?

2.) Yeboah’s second question presumes an astonishing premise that she doesn’t even attempt to prove: She presumes that Columbus Day is a celebration of “extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization.” That is akin to saying Martin Luther King Day is a celebration of plagiarism, marital infidelity, and the exploitation of women.

What school has ever used Columbus Day to celebrate extreme violence, theft, genocide, or dehumanization?

Historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a relevant critique of the impulse that animates Yeboah:

Campuses and Western critics in the last half-century have turned a once risk-taking and heroic Christopher Columbus into an evil emissary of disease and destruction. History is now seen as one-dimensional melodrama in which our contemporary duty is to pick sinners and saints of the past based on our own modern (quite imperfect) perceptions of morality and then judge them worthy of either hagiography or banishment from memory.

And Hanson shares a fact inconvenient to the narrative of those who love to hate America:

[K]nocking down images of Columbus will not change the fact that millions of indigenous people in Central America and Mexico are currently abandoning their ancestral homelands and emigrating northward to quite different landscapes that reflect European and American traditions and political, economic, and cultural values.

3.) Does Yeboah affirm the accurate telling of history? Does Yeboah believe children at every age should be alerted to every serious foible, sin, or moral failing of every human involved in significant historical events or achievements? Should children of every age be taught about MLK Jr.’s significant moral failings? Should children of every age be taught the sordid stories of the abuse of women by John F. Kennedy and his lady-killer brother Ted Kennedy? Should kindergartners be taught that Harvey Milk was a homosexual ephebophile who acted on his sexual interest in teenage boys?

Regarding Yeboah’s concern about the impossibility of “discovering” an already inhabited land: Good teachers should and do explain that “discover” means “to obtain knowledge of something through observation, search, or study.” Benjamin Franklin “discovered” electricity in this sense. James Wilson Marshall “discovered” gold at Sutter’s Mill in this sense. The gold was always there in the ground. Erasmus Jacobs, son of a poor Boer farmer in South Africa “discovered” diamonds along the banks of the Orange River—diamonds that had always been there.

4.) Does Yeboah consider the perspectives of indigenous people about celebrating their histories of extreme violence, theft, genocide, and dehumanization on Indigenous People’s Day?

5.) In her fifth point, Yeboah again presumes a premise she doesn’t attempt to prove: In her fifth rhetorical question, she presumes that American exceptionalism is a myth. But is it? What objective standards or criteria has Yeboah applied to conclude that America is not exceptional?

6.) Yeboah implies that honoring Christopher Columbus’ exploratory achievement and how it transformed the world violates the vision and mission of District 200, which are here set forth:

Our vision is to be an exemplary, student-focused school district that is highly regarded for the competence and character of our students and people, programs, and learning environment.

Our mission is to inspire, encourage, and challenge, and to support all students to reach their highest level of learning and personal development.

Yeboah has yet to make her case that honoring a history-making explorer undermines the development of competence and character, or how it undermines the mission to inspire, encourage, and challenge students to reach their highest level of learning and personal development. Do District 200 taxpayers even know how District 200 distinguishes between good character and bad?

Yeboah’s reference to the vision and mission of District 200 raises other questions:

• How does the sexual integration of restrooms and locker rooms support all students to reach their highest level of personal development and character?

• How does the wildly obscene  (*WARNING*) graphic novel/memoir Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, which is available in both District 200 high school libraries, foster character and personal development?

• How was the invitation to lesbian activist Robin Stevenson, who promotes cultural approval of both the “LGBT” ideology and the legalized slaughter of the unborn, to speak to 8-11-year-olds at Longfellow Elementary School in Wheaton supposed to foster character and personal development?

• How did the offensive student drawings defacing the walls of Monroe Middle School through positive portrayals of homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation, some accompanied by ignorant and troubling captions, contribute to character development?

In a Facebook post, Yeboah announced she’s all in for “anti-racism,” which everyone should know by now is a euphemism for anti-white racism.

In an upcoming “Table Talk” at Wheaton College, “Topics for White students” include “Invisible Racism” with guest speaker Mary Yeboah.

Yeboah is also a promoter of the  controversial “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that garnered nationwide condemnation, including by National Review.

In a Feb. 7, 2021 Facebook post, Yeboah admits that one of her “favorite scholars” is Tyrone Howard who wrote the book All Students Must Thrive. Howard’s publisher writes that Howard’s book “brings together three frameworks relevant for equity in schools–wellness, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory.”

If there’s any doubt about Yeboah’s “progressive” bona fides, this should dispel it: In 2020, as BLM was destroying cities across the country, Yeboah was part of a “white moms” group in Wheaton that created signs to encourage support–including financial support–for the Black Lives Matter organization, which is hell-bent on destroying the nuclear family and normalizing homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation.

And Yeboah worries that Columbus Day will undermine character development in children? Sheesh

Public schools are no longer places that foster character development or provide the highest level of learning. Get your kids out now.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Wheaton-Illinois-School-Districts-Wokest-Board-Member.mp3

After rejoining a number of controversial United Nations agencies and agreements over the last year, the Biden administration and its allies in Congress are quietly trying to figure out how to bypass federal laws to rejoin a UN agency that has been clouded in scandal and allegations of extremism for decades.

Four years ago, the Trump administration and the Israeli government both announced they would be exiting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Accusations of anti-Semitism and widespread corruption were among the many concerns cited.

But now, despite what critics describe as continued extremism and ongoing corruption issues, as well as significant communist Chinese influence over the UN’s education agency, there are growing signs that the Biden administration and Israeli authorities are getting ready to overlook all that.

At the Biden administration’s request, lawmakers have even quietly introduced legislation that would allow Washington to sidestep U.S. laws prohibiting funds for the controversial UN agency.

The price tag in terms of tax dollars would be enormous. But critics, analysts, and former senior officials warned that even more significant than the financial cost would be legitimizing the agency and even Beijing’s influence within it.

“I don’t think UNESCO is fixable,” explained Kevin Moley, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs during the previous administration.

Moley, who also worked as U.S. Ambassador to UN organizations in Geneva during the Bush administration, pointed to overwhelming communist Chinese influence in UNESCO and its long track record of undermining American principles as key reasons for concern.

“In the Trump administration, it was Make America Great Again,” Moley told The Epoch Times in a phone interview. “In the Biden administration, it’s HAA—Humiliate America Again.”

“Re-joining UN institutions that habitually take Israel and America to task for unfounded allegations of human rights abuses while condoning the human rights abuses of UN Human Rights Council members such as Russia, Venezuela, China, and Cuba, is the ultimate manifestation of what the late great Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called the ‘blame America first’ crowd,” the former assistant secretary of state explained. “This crowd has now taken over the U.S. State Department lock, stock, and barrel.”

At least one UNESCO insider argued that a thorough investigation of the UN agency and its leaders by U.S. authorities would be a more sensible plan than sending more than half a billion tax dollars to pay “arrears” to an organization that he said was dominated by ideologues and plagued by never-ending scandals.

Even powerful voices within the foreign-policy establishment have warned against a return to the agency without at least securing some major concessions and reforms. So far, though, it does not appear that any significant concessions are even being sought.

The Backstory

In October of 2017, following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, the Trump administration gave UNESCO its one-year notification that the U.S. government would be leaving the organization.

Among other concerns, the State Department pointed to the growing amount of taxpayer money supposedly owed to the agency by the United States since the U.S. government stopped paying dues in 2011, as required by statutes passed by Congress and signed by former presidents Bush and Clinton.

The funding was stopped during the Obama administration as a result of federal laws banning U.S. funding for international organizations that accept the “State of Palestine” as a member state prior to a negotiated settlement with Israel.

Current federal law still prohibits U.S. funding for UNESCO. But the Senate Appropriations Committee just introduced legislation that would allow the Biden administration to waive that prohibition if it believes re-joining would promote U.S. interests.

Also behind the U.S. government’s decision to withdraw was what authorities said was the UN agency’s systemic bias against Israel, as well as what the State Department described as the “need for fundamental reform.”

Pointing to murderous dictatorships on the agency’s “human rights” committee and other policies, then-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley at the time said the “extreme politicization” of UNESCO had “become a chronic embarrassment.”

“Just as we said in 1984 when President Reagan withdrew from UNESCO, U.S. taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to pay for policies that are hostile to our values and make a mockery of justice and common sense,” Haley said.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg, insiders and analysts say.

At the time, the UN agency was being led by longtime Communist Party apparatchik Irina Bokova of Bulgaria. Her deep ties to the former Communist regime in Bulgaria, combined with serious allegations of corruption and intrigue during and after her tenure, led to major questions among Western governments about the UN agency’s leadership.

Responding to the U.S. withdrawal, Bokova expressed “profound regret,” calling it a “loss for multilateralism.”

Leading the UN agency alongside Bokova was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official Qian Tang, who served as assistant director-general of the agency.

Separately, China’s then-Ambassador to Belgium, Qu Xing, was appointed deputy director-general by Bokova’s successor, French Socialist Party figure Audrey Azoulay.

Their influence over the UN organization—particularly in the field of education—has been immense.

On the heels of the U.S. notice to UNESCO, Israeli authorities followed suit. Blasting UNESCO as “the theater of the absurd,” then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the Trump administration for its “brave and moral decision.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry announced that government’s withdrawal shortly after Washington, and both governments officially exited at the end of 2018.

With the U.S. and Israeli governments gone, UNESCO continued in its ways under the leadership of French Director General Azoulay, a former culture minister whose tenure at the UN has also been marked by allegations of impropriety.

Diplomats have noticed problems.

Last summer, for example, U.K. Ambassador to UNESCO Matthew Lodge sent a scathing letter to top UNESCO officials expressing concern over “confirmed financial fraud.” Lodge also highlighted efforts by the agency’s leaders to cover up the fraud and avoid informing member states.

Efforts to Rejoin

A number of sources told The Epoch Times that after the Biden administration re-joined several other UN organizations and instruments such as the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the Paris Agreement on climate, it had its eyes on rejoining UNESCO.

A spokesman for the State Department responded to phone calls and e-mails from The Epoch Times with a brief note: “We don’t have anything to announce on UNESCO at this time.”

However, it appears that there are serious efforts behind the scenes to rejoin and pay arrears, complicated by the federal laws banning U.S. funding for organizations that admit the “State of Palestine.”

A statement released by UNESCO said the agency saw “real hope” for a U.S. return, but “the timing and modalities … have yet to be defined.”

UNESCO chief Azoulay was also reportedly in Washington lobbying Biden’s wife and U.S. lawmakers, according to media reports based on an anonymous diplomatic source.

And officials such as former USAID chief and Clinton-era Undersecretary of State J. Brian Atwood are publicly lobbying for the U.S. government re-join.

“Much has changed under UNESCO’s Director General Audrey Azoulay,” Atwood argued in an opinion piece for The Hill last month. “It is long past time for Congress to recognize that the national interests of the United States are best served by participation in international organizations like UNESCO.”

In Israel, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid asked officials to review the issue. In fact, according to media reports citing Israeli officials, Lapid believes leaving UNESCO and other international organizations made Israeli foreign policy less effective.

But critics have expressed grave concerns over ongoing efforts to rejoin the UN agency.

Speaking to The Epoch Times, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Moley blasted the Biden administration’s State Department and its efforts to re-engage in what he described as out-of-control UN organs such as UNESCO. In fact, he argued that this behavior undermined U.S. interests.

UNESCO is too far gone and cannot be fixed anyway, he added, pointing to large swaths of its policy-making that “have largely been taken over by the CCP and its allies.” These concerns have existed for decades.

In addition to being bad for America, Ambassador Moley also argued that re-joining the UN agency would be “another slap in the face to our only democratic ally in the Middle East.”

One key problem, he argued, is that the State Department is under the “complete control” of officials whose “first response to virtually anything is to apologize for America instead of standing up for our values, our Constitution, and our people.”

The Biden administration is a representation of this, and is “full of the most anti-American, socialist” forces, he added.

Another one of Moley’s major concerns is the attitude from Obama and Biden on down regarding the threat from the CCP.

Biden has even joked about it recently. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” he said in May 2019 on the campaign trail, ridiculing the idea that the CCP poses a serious threat to the United States.

Moley’s Obama-era predecessor as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, Bathsheba Crocker, was even quoted in the state-run newspaper China Daily saying she was “particularly pleased” to see China taking more responsibility in the UN.

China’s Influence

As The Epoch Times reported in May of 2020, the CCP now dominates large segments of the UN and its specialized agencies, with the CCP-dominated G77 (Group of 77) Plus China alliance holding a super-majority in the General Assembly.

UNESCO is no exception, and in fact, may be worse, critics say.

CCP agent and Deputy Director General Qu, who was appointed with no public “recruitment process” to speak of as required under the agency’s rules, is now leading the “Strategic Transformation” of UNESCO, according to the agency.

An insider at UNESCO who cannot be named due to the threat of repercussions for speaking frankly told The Epoch Times that Qu is working on the “most sensitive part” of Azoulay’s mandate. This allows the CCP to craft the UN agency in its own mold in a way that will endure for many years to come, the insider said.

“Today UNESCO is a lawless organization, a toxic political arena, with reduced to the minimum activities that should normally be at the heart of its action,” the source told The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity. “Incompetent leaders sold out to China.”

This is not a new phenomenon. During the previous administration of Bokova, who was trained in Moscow during the Soviet era and served as a senior official in the former Communist regime in Bulgaria, the UN agency was also closely connected to Beijing and other communist power centers—even while the U.S. government was a member.

The CCP now has the second-highest number of world heritage sites, and it is seeking to move key UNESCO education offices to China.

In 2017, long before the U.S. left, the CCP also signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” with UNESCO agreeing to increase cooperation on Beijing’s controversial “Belt and Road” project. Bokova praised the CCP for its initiatives that have “set good examples for the international community,” CCP media reported.

Under Bokova’s administration, CCP member Qian Ting—a former official with the CCP’s “Education Ministry”—served as assistant director-general for UNESCO.

Qian was even made “officer-in-charge” of the Bureau of Strategic Planning, giving the CCP wide influence in the path charted by the UN agency.

Perhaps even more significantly, Qian also led the UN’s “Education 2030” agenda, a critical component of the UN “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) also known as Agenda 2030.

Top UN officials have described the global agenda as the “master plan for humanity” and even the global “Declaration of Interdependence.”

As she was seeking to become Secretary General of the broader UN, Bokova rewarded Xi Jinping’s wife with the title “Special Envoy” for female education.

“You are an immense role model for millions of young girls in China and beyond,” Bokova declared when giving the CCP dictator’s wife the prestigious title.

On her way out from UNESCO, it was common knowledge among senior officials there that Bokova was hoping Qian would take her place. The CCP member was formally nominated for the top UNESCO post by the CCP, which is hoping to secure the agency’s director-general position when Azoulay’s term ends.

Unlike diplomats from other countries, who promise to work on behalf of international organizations rather than national interests while in UN agencies, CCP leaders have publicly declared that Chinese nationals in the UN must obey party orders. Former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei was even arrested by the CCP for, among other crimes, disobeying party orders while at the helm of the global policing agency.

Countering CCP, or Legitimizing and Funding its Agenda?

A number of influential voices from the foreign-policy establishment have proposed that the U.S. government rejoin UNESCO if only to counter CCP influence, which was well-established in the agency long before the Trump administration’s exit.

Kristen Cordell of the Council on Foreign Relations, an internationalist powerhouse, for example, cited the CCP’s influence in UNESCO as a key reason for Biden to rejoin in exchange for some concessions.

Critics ridiculed the idea, however.

Ambassador Moley, for instance, lambasted the notion that U.S. membership would rein in the CCP there as “wishful thinking.”

“As we have experienced in engaging with UN organizations—people think we have a veto—we are simply one of 193 members,” Moley said. “China has its useful idiots, including among the more than 130 governments in the G77 Plus China who make up most of the UN’s members.”

“As long as bribery, coercion, and blackmail are predominant tools of Chinese foreign policy, it is very unlikely that we can prevail in a UN forum such as UNESCO with our one vote,” he added.

Emphasizing the seriousness of the matter, Moley called the CCP “our enemy” and “the greatest existential threat to our republic since 1860.”

The insider from UNESCO similarly balked at the idea that re-joining the UN agency would give the U.S. government the ability to counter the CCP.

“If President Biden decides to return to UNESCO, it will be a good gesture towards China, which will please Beijing a lot, since it would legitimize its hold on the agency,” the source said. “It will also please all the leftist globalists and will bring nothing but costly nuisance to the U.S. and Israel.”

“In fact, Joe Biden would have more leverage to exert reform pressure at UNESCO by keeping the U.S. out,” the Paris-based diplomatic source added.

The conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation’s International Regulatory Affairs Fellow Brett Schaefer echoed concerns about CCP influence within the UN and its specialized agencies, saying it would be a “mistake” for the U.S. government to rejoin.

“Obviously, everybody should be concerned about Chinese influence in international organizations,” he told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.

“The question I have on this, though, is whether UNESCO is even central to U.S. interests,” Schaefer continued. “The U.S. did not participate and U.S. interests were minimally affected.”

In addition, even when Washington was a member, “UNESCO was pursuing policies that the U.S. did not support and frankly were embarrassments to the organization and its mission and mandate,” added Schaefer.

While countering the CCP is a worthy objective, he also expressed concerns about the large sum American taxpayers would have to hand over to rejoin UNESCO—more than $500 million just in arrears that would then be spent however the agency and its other member states wanted.

Pointing to the United States re-joining under Bush, the Heritage expert said there was already an established precedent for paying arrears in full.

“It’s a windfall that they can use however they want to,” Schaefer said.

That is almost certainly what would happen. “The new administration has made a practice of rejoining organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Human Rights Council without any conditions, so that would be the expectation of other member states, knowing that this administration would like to rejoin,” he added.

UNESCO: Corrupt to the Core?

Aside from the allegations of anti-Semitism and extremism, UNESCO has long been plagued by corruption and politicization scandals at the highest levels.

Leaked minutes from the UNESCO Executive Board revealed that then-U.K. Ambassador to UNESCO Matthew Sudders slammed Bokova for alleged corruption in appointing cronies to aid her ambitions to rise further in the UN.

“As a U.K. civil servant, I have a duty to report all cases of possible or suspected fraud to our investigations department,” Sudders declared. The comments were reportedly made with the full support of his government, which concluded that a “comprehensive external review” was needed.

More recently, under the current UNESCO administration, U.K. Ambassador to UNESCO Matthew Lodge demanded to know why member states were being kept in the dark about “confirmed financial fraud,” unsanctioned misappropriation of funds, and more by top UNESCO leadership.

Even more bizarre were news reports suggesting there may be a link between Azoulay’s troubles and an almost unprecedented late-night intrusion into UNESCO headquarters and IT systems by French government agents.

Reports also suggested that international civil servants in UNESCO chief Azoulay’s office were improperly lobbying for the elimination of a second candidate for director-general of the agency.

UNESCO’s Secretariat, which is overseen by Azoulay, did not acknowledge multiple requests for comment.

But in an e-mail to The Epoch Times, UNESCO General Conference President Altay Cengizer said the allegations of financial fraud raised by Western diplomats should be addressed but were beyond his competence.

Cengizer said he had “no idea” whether French authorities “played a part or not, in securing Member States’ silence about the alleged disregard of the Secretariat of financial and accountability regulations since 2017.”

“When allegations persist for such a long time, I think a clarification by the Secretariat, to set things straight, is the best way to deal with questions of financial irregularity,” Cengizer said.

So far there has been no clarification.

Because UNESCO is hosted in France, he said the “somewhat entangled relationship” between Azoulay and French authorities was to be expected.

“In such cases, one hopes that it would not exceed a certain limit and not endanger several other balances that are innate to an international and intergovernmental organization,” he said, noting that there were “strong reactions” to the “Spying Scandal” involving French officials being allowed into UNESCO headquarters at odd hours.

In the e-mail, Cengizer expressed concern—and has publicly in the past—about the “active lobbying by international civil servants for securing support for the re-election of the incumbent Director General.”

The UNESCO General Conference chief said he did not have details surrounding the mysterious elimination of Azoulay’s rival for leadership at the UN agency, a process that critics said was clouded by corruption.

“However, I think that the Member States should have been informed of such a development,” he added.

While supporters of rejoining UNESCO argue that the corruption and extremism have been cleaned up since the U.S. departure, critics and even people closely associated with the agency say that is not the case.

A Difficult Road Ahead

On both sides of the debate about whether the U.S. government should rejoin UNESCO, there is agreement on one point: If it happens, it will be a complex process.

Writing in the New York Daily News this summer, former National Security Advisor and UN Ambassador John Bolton said it was “incomprehensible” why Biden would seek to resurrect the UNESCO issue—especially since Congress will “certainly reject” funding it.

“Biden would face a massive political struggle without the prospect of any substantive accomplishment,” added Bolton.

In any case, any attempt to rejoin UNESCO would be a “significant mistake,” he said.

“UNESCO has long been among the most politicized UN organizations,” continued Bolton, saying it was an “error” to believe the agency was capable of reform.

Throwing fuel on the fire, UNESCO adopted two resolutions in October blasting Israel and calling on the international community to pressure Jerusalem to stop its “illegal” actions.

Pervasive corruption allegations and CCP influence surrounding UNESCO come amid an escalating scandal over Beijing’s subversion at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which further complicates Biden administration efforts to expand multilateralism.

An independent investigation recently found that IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, also a Bulgarian with links to Bokova, improperly applied “undue pressure” on World Bank officials to manipulate data. The goal was to put the CCP in a good light in its official report on business climate, the probe concluded.

Top Biden officials including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen publicly expressed concern and vowed to “monitor” the organization. But Georgieva, with ties to Communist forces in Bulgaria and beyond like Bokova, remains at the helm of the IMF.

UNESCO did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.

The international agency is best known for its world heritage site designations, but also plays a major role in the UN’s global education, culture, and science policy.

At the IFI Faith, Family, & Freedom banquet two weeks ago, we introduced our attendees to Pastor Courtney Lewis of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Pastor Lewis received the Voice of Truth Award because he models the courage to teach, promote, and speak of God’s moral law in today’s culture. (Watch our short video HERE.)

Pastor Lewis and his members decided they would no longer stand by idly and watch the government schools indoctrinate the children that God entrusted to them.

“The Lord confirmed upon my heart and the hearts of our members the need for a strong Christian school in the city of Chicago (Hyde Park/Woodlawn area). It is no secret that our government school system has failed and continues to fail our youth educationally and morally. Government education has undone the very biblical foundation that we, parents, and the church community at large, have worked so diligently to invest in our children. This has produced ill-prepared youth that are the supposed to be the future leaders of this country.

We have given our children to secularists. Our children need to be taught the multiplication tables AND the fear of the Lord. We need to teach them geography AND how to get to heaven. The more secular knowledge our children acquire, the more they need to be taught the fear of the Lord.”

As a result, Cornerstone Baptist Academy was established this past summer in three short months!

Their goal is to raise $65,000 and IFI is committed to helping them, and know that good Christians throughout the state and nation will step up to bless Pastor Lewis’ efforts. We are confident that Cornerstone Baptist Academy will be a leading Christian-based academy in the Chicago area.

The funds will be used in the following ways:

1.) A new HVAC system in the gym

2.) Space repurposing to add more classrooms

3.) Painting the facility

4.) Repurposing basement space for classrooms/lunchroom

Two ways to donate:

Mail a check made out to:

Cornerstone Baptist Church
1210 East 62nd Street
Chicago, IL 60637

A Go Fund Me page has also been set up. Donate by credit card by clicking HERE.

We are confident that God will provide exceedingly and abundantly beyond what we are asking.

Watch this video to know more about this worthwhile endeavor to help Cornerstone Baptist Academy Rescue the Children.

Twenty years ago, Christian leaders warned the church in America of the “slippery slope” that we were descending. Homosexuality was becoming more accepted and the gay community was demanding tolerance. Leaders like Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham warned us then that the outright acceptance of sin would lead to tolerance for other types of abominations. Academics, politicians, and advocates of homosexuality all insisted that tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community would not lead to other non-traditional lifestyles. These advocates decried the “slippery slope” theory as a fallacy. Fast forward to 2021, and the truth of the descent of morality is becoming clear. The church has dealt with not only homosexuality but now is facing problems with the expanding sexual, gender, and species dysphoria of transexuals, “furries,” “therians,” and “otherkins.”  

Many likely have never heard of furries, therians, and otherkins. Furries are individuals that identify as an animal, frequently a cat, dog, or wolf. People identifying as a furry will dress up in animal ears and tails and act like that animal in their everyday life. Therians claim to have the spirit of an animal trapped in their human bodies. Otherkins typically claim to identify as something more mystical like elves, dragons, or vampires. As bizarre as all this may sound, it is spreading and becoming a commonplace occurrence in our schools.

At the beginning of this school year, the Meade County School District in Kentucky had a large group of students dressing and acting like animals. Their behavior included hissing, barking, growling, and pretending to scratch others. It became such a disruption that a petition was created and signed by over 1,000 people to force the school to prohibit the practice.

Kentucky, however, is not the only place where this is occurring. In Twins Falls, Idaho, parents complained of teens acting like animals and disrupting class. The school district denied any knowledge of the behavior. Parents in several other states have had similar reports of this behavior, and the schools are doing nothing to address the problem. Parents of children in one Iowa school have even claimed that a girl requested a litter box in the girl’s restroom. The school district has denied the claim.

Public school districts have already proven they lack transparency and are willing to tolerate any abhorrent behavior. In 2018 a blog for school counselors published a post entitled “Making a Safe Place for Students Who Identify as Furries, Therians, and Otherkins.” The author states that these students are five times more likely to be homosexual and seven times more likely to be transexual. They also recognize that students claiming to be furries, therians, or otherkins may suffer from isolation, depression, and anxiety, but never state that the identity the students are creating may directly correlate to the psychological problems they are exhibiting. Instead, the author claims the lack of tolerance and acceptance causes emotional difficulties.

The blog encourages school counselors to be supportive and to prevent others from bullying the students. Although I agree we should not promote bullying, the school counselors that accept this type of behavior are doing a great disservice to these children. They are creating a false reality in which a person can do anything without repercussions. As a result of this accepted behavior, our society is yet again slipping further down the slope of moral decline.

It is time for parents, churches, and Christians to rise up and declare that not everything is acceptable, and disruptive and repugnant behavior will not be tolerated. Believers are called to show love and mercy; however, the secular world has defined that mercy as tolerance. Christians must put into practice what the Word tells us in Proverbs 28:13:

“He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”

Our job as Christians is not to idly sit by as these misled children suffer in their confusion. It is our job to love them to Christ and reveal their sin so they may confess and renounce evil, and therefore find mercy.

Christian parents first and foremost must protect their children, and this means renouncing the government-run schools that not only allow sin to run rampant but encourage sinful behaviors. As good stewards of our tax dollars, including the funding of our local public schools, we all should be demanding that the school board address these problems with dress and behavior codes that all students must follow. It is long past time for churches to become more directly involved in these students’ lives. Today’s children are desperate for guidance and love, often lacking two-parent homes and seeking attention from any avenue. Our churches should be the first place they think of for that love. It is time to draw a line in the sand and stand against the slippery slope of immorality in our public schools.

In America today, when it comes to the question of Critical Race Theory (CRT), we are like ships – really, like battleships – passing each other in the night. One side shouts, “We’ve got to get CRT out of our schools! It is hurting our children!” The other side responds, “CRT is not being taught in our children’s schools! This is just a racist dog whistle!” Is there any way to bridge the divide?

To illustrate the depth of our divisions, an August 2021 article posted on the Brookings.edu website stated, “Fox News has mentioned ‘critical race theory’ 1,300 times in less than four months. Why? Because critical race theory (CRT) has become a new boogie man for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.”

That is quite a serious charge.

Is Fox really engaging in white supremacist fearmongering? Or are fair-minded parents across America genuinely concerned about a destructive educational agenda in their kids’ schools?

That’s why I said that, when it comes to CRT, we are like battleships passing each other in the night – and shooting at each other as we pass by.

Yet I do believe that some of these divisions are more artificial than real, with the first problem being one of definitions. When we speak of CRT, are we speaking about the same thing? Can we even define it in our own words?

If you say, “CRT is good” and I say, “CRT is bad,” do we mean the same thing by CRT?

If we want to move beyond the current impasse, our first question should be, “What, exactly, do you mean by CRT? Can you define it?”

A colleague of mine asked me these same questions, writing to me from the perspective of a God-fearing, Bible-believing, highly respected black educator.

This led to a fruitful and insightful discussion, one through which we understood one another better and could better define where we agreed and disagreed.

But we can’t debate CRT if we can’t define it. So, let this be our starting point: What, exactly, do you mean by CRT?

This leads to the next: “Do you believe that CRT is being taught in our children’s schools (meaning, K-12)?”

My colleague assured me that, in his state (Virginia), CRT was not being taught in the schools. Instead, he explained, CRT was an academic theory taught at college or grad school levels.

But when I asked him if classes were being taught through the lens of CRT or if teachers were being informed by CRT, he said that was a very different question. Yet that was the very thing I meant when I referred to CRT being taught in our schools. Our interaction brought this difference to the surface.

It is the viewpoint of the black civil rights leader Bob Woodson that CRT is “explicitly and implicitly a racist approach to education,” and that approach is increasingly infiltrating our schools. That is what many parents are reacting to, and that’s why children’s education was such a hot topic in Virginia and beyond in the recent elections.

It was not a chimera or a racist dog whistle. It was (and is) an issue of real concern.

Britt Hume put it like this: “There’s ample evidence that critical race theory very much influences and is injected into what is being taught in those schools and these parents knew that.” That was the point I was making to my colleague, and that would be true even if many parents could not define CRT with precision.

Hume continued, “Now, you could say technically it is not being taught in the sense of volumes have been written on critical race theory and it’s not been handed out as a textbook” – which was the point my colleague was making to me – “but its influence and its tenants are in those schools.”

That, again, is the crux of the matter, and that’s what brings me to an approach that, hopefully, can help us work together for the betterment of our children, exposing bigoted and racists attitudes on all sides.

We continue to dig deeper with two sets of questions for parents.

• Do you want your children to gain a truthful and accurate of perspective of American history which includes the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad? That would exclude things like the 1619 Project, given its deep flaws and biases. It would also exclude an airbrushed telling of our national story. Do we want balance and honesty here? If so, can we agree on which textbooks and curricula to use? And can we help educate one another and fill in each other’s blind spots?

• Do you agree that it is wrong to make a child feel guilty or inferior or evil because of the color of their skin? Do you also agree that is wrong to separate children into different groups, based on skin color and ethnicity? And do you agree that it is wrong to identify some children as part of the oppressed class and others as part of the oppressor class?

If we can say yes to the first set of questions, that rebuts the idea that parents who oppose CRT don’t want their kids to know the truth about slavery and segregation (and more). To the contrary, these parents are saying, “Yes, let the whole story be told, but in a fair and accurate way.”

If we can say yes to the second set of questions, that rebuts the idea that proponents of CRT want white children to feel guilty or that they want to incorporate identity politics into the classroom. To the contrary, they are saying, “We have no desire to lay a guilt trip on white Americans.”

On the other hand, those who want to whitewash our history will expose their own bigotry by saying “No” to the first set of questions, while those who have replaced anti-black racism with anti-white racism will expose their bigotry by saying “No” to the second set of questions.

But at least this way, we can expose and confront bigotry and bias while working with others of like heart and mind to do our best to continue to move forward as a nation.

Can we at least give this a shot by putting these questions on the table? It’s sure better than fomenting more division and anger by yelling and accusing as we sail by each other’s ships in the dark of night.

This article was originally published by AskDrBrown.org.

When it comes to education policy, the Biden administration is making the radicalism of the Obama years look mild by comparison.

The goal is to ultimately replace parents with bureaucrats and “experts” to facilitate the indoctrination of America’s youth. That transformation is accelerating.

Not only are the education system and America’s children being weaponized against America, federal law enforcement is now being weaponized against parents who speak out about it.

If left unchecked, catastrophe awaits. However, the more monstrous the federally directed abuses in schools become, the more outraged Americans join the fight.

The future of the nation is literally on the line in this issue. The outcome of the battle between who will raise children—government or parents—will determine the fate of America.

Parents, Get Out of the Way

The attitude toward parents in Washington has long been hostile. Hillary Clinton famously claimed in 1996 that it “takes a village” to raise children. What she really meant, of course, was a government village.

In fact, during the Obama years, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan publicly called for some children to be in government “boarding schools” 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Others should remain in school, including “after school programming,” for 12 to 14 hours each day, he declared.

A policy document (pdf) drafted by the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services called for home visits by government officials and argued that parents could be “equal partners” with government in the rearing of their children.

But as fringe as those totalitarian views may sound to normal people, the extremism has now been taken to a whole new level under the current administration.

When Republican U.S. Senator Mike Braun of Indiana asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona if parents should be the “primary stakeholder” in the education of their children, it would have been easy to spit one’s coffee on the floor.

“Stakeholder”?! What?

Of course, parents should never be viewed as mere “stakeholders” in the education of their children, “primary” or otherwise. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, “stakeholder” is defined as “one that has a stake in an enterprise” or “one who is involved in or affected by a course of action.”

To call a mother or father a “stakeholder” in one of the most important facets of their child’s life is like calling a pilot of a private plane a “stakeholder” in whether his plane will land successfully or not. Technically it’s true. But it’s an outrage nonetheless.

Mothers and fathers should be in charge of their children’s education—not bystanders or “stakeholders.” This has been the case in virtually every human society for millennia. It’s also what the Bible clearly prescribes.

But the Biden administration, by contrast, does not believe parents should have any say in the “education” of children.

Cardona could not even bring himself to concede that parents should be the “primary stakeholders” in their children’s education.

“I believe parents are important stakeholders,” Cardona responded to Braun’s question, adding that “educators” also “have a role in determining educational programming.”

Indeed. That’s a nice way of saying: Parents, get out of the way, the Biden administration and its “experts” know better what and how your child should learn. More on that later.

Democrat Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAullife, who wisely sent his children to private school, famously put it this way in a debate in September: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Targeting Concerned Parents as ‘Terrorists’

As if matters could not get any worse, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, responding to an outrageous letter from the National Association of School Boards (NASB) painting concerned parents as possible “domestic terrorists,” decided to sic the FBI on moms and dads.

Among other concerns, Garland cited (pdf) “harassment” and “intimidation” by parents against the people brainwashing their kids with critical race theory (CRT), Marxist ideology, gender confusion, hyper-sexualized propaganda, and more. No examples of actual, legitimate threats were cited.

One of the examples of the supposed “threat” cited by the NASB was Scott Smith. What sort of dangerous domestic terrorist was Smith? Well, he was arrested for “disorderly conduct” while trying to tell the school board about his daughter being allegedly sodomized by a male pretending to be a girl in the girls’ restroom under the federally supported “transgender” dictates on bathrooms.

The other examples are equally outlandish: a ticket for “trespassing,” a nasty letter, a “Nazi salute” to protest mandatory face masks, somebody describing the school board as “Marxist,” and similar horrors requiring the might of the federal beast.

This is, of course, not about actual threats or violence, however. It’s naked intimidation of parents who are struggling to make their voices heard.

It’s also the political weaponization of federal law-enforcement in a way that’s unprecedented in American history. In fact, most parallels involve totalitarian dictatorships rather than civilized and free societies.

Fortunately, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other state and local leaders are working to protect children in their jurisdictions from this outrageous abuse by the Biden administration. But it’s not enough to stop the freight train of evil being pumped into local schools by Washington.

The irony of treating desperate moms and dads as terrorists after pretending not to see months on end of actual domestic terrorism from rioters and looters burning down major American cities and even police precincts defies belief. Welcome to the “new normal.”

Even the former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, Kevin Brock, has warned that the FBI should ignore Garland’s Orwellian directive.

After sparking a firestorm of criticism and alarming Americans across the political spectrum—and after being rebuked by state and local school boards nationwide—the NASB reluctantly apologized.

But nobody with a brain believes for a second that the education establishment would not sic the FBI and Homeland Security on angry parents if it thought it could get away with it.

Targeting State and Local Leaders, Too

Not long before announcing that the FBI and the Department of Justice would be employed to bully and intimidate parents, the Biden administration announced “civil rights” investigations into state leaders that refused to force children to wear masks at school against their parents’ wishes.

The threat, made by Cardona, invoked the communist understanding of “rights” to claim that everyone has a “right” to a government “education.” As such, states that do not force all children to wear face masks are somehow violating the supposed “rights” of some children to an education.

Yes, seriously. This is the so-called logic of the people who have usurped control over “educating” your children for you.

When Florida and other states sought to limit the ability of local school boards to force masks on children against their parents’ wishes, the Biden administration also vowed to send COVID stimulus money to local officials who defied their state government and state law.

Before that, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a video urging children confused about their gender to report their local communities to the feds if government schools did not fully bow down to the “transgenderism” madness being pushed on America from D.C. and Hollywood.

The video, which featured transgender Health and Human Services bigwig Dr. Rachel Levine and senior officials from the Department of Education and the DOJ, gave multiple websites for children to get the feds involved in protecting their “rights” to use opposite-sex bathrooms, play on opposite-sex sports teams, and more.

The message was clear: Trust Biden, not your family or your community. And if anyone interferes with your supposed “right” to shower or relieve yourself or wrestle with members of the opposite sex, team Biden will unleash the fury of the weaponized federal machine.

So far there has been no federal intervention to protect the rights of Scott Smith’s daughter, though.

The Biden Agenda: CRT

At the top of Biden’s “education” agenda is using the education system to further divide parents and children, as well as the nation, while weaponizing impressionable youngsters in the war against their own country and its institutions.

Earlier this year, for example, the Department of Education proposed a “regulation” to inject even more Marxist race-mongering and CRT into public schools nationwide.

Under the scheme, the feds are bribing schools with “grants” and “incentives” paid with U.S. taxpayer money.

Among other elements, the administrative edict creates “American History and Civics Education programs” designed to radically change the teaching of history and civics. Between statements on “systemic racism” and “anti-racist practices,” the nature of the changes being sought is easy to discern.

Indeed, the Department of Education actually cited the debunked “1619 Project,” a fake history narrative addressed in part 17 of this series, as one of the inspirations for the effort.

The New York Times’ propaganda version of history, which has been ridiculed even by left-wing historians for its errors, turns U.S. history on its head. It paints the first nation in history founded on the premise that all are created equal—the first nation where abolition of slavery took root—into a uniquely evil nation with racism and slavery supposedly in its very “DNA.”

Also cited by the Education Department for the proposed regulation was the work of Ibram X. Kendi, one of the premier proponents of CRT and author of books such as “Anti-Racist Baby.”

Among other ideas, Kendi advocates a “Department of Antiracism” that would serve as an unelected racial dictatorship with power to overturn any law or rule it dislikes.

To qualify for the Education Department funding, state and local “education” officials would have to incorporate the administration’s extremist ideologies into the classroom—evil ideologies that divide children by “race” for sinister purposes while teaching a twisted (and false) version of American history and government.

Almost 40 U.S. senators and tens of thousands of citizens in official comments blasted the scheme’s overtly anti-American extremism.

Only after that massive outcry did the administration backtrack even slightly and remove some of the most outrageous language and references. But the somewhat scaled-back rule was still implemented, and the vision remains clear despite the attempted obfuscation.

To illustrate just how committed the administration is to this poison, in early October they appointed political activist Precious McKesson to a senior post at the Education Department. McKesson is a strong advocate of CRT, and she even recently expressed her support for teaching all children about the alleged “systemic racism” of America.

Ironically, perhaps, Garland’s son-in-law’s company reportedly supports CRT teaching in government schools, sparking concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the decision to sic the feds on parents.

The O’Biden Agenda: Centralize and Get Them Young!

The proposed $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” abomination that Biden and congressional Democrats are trying to ram through Congress without the support of a single Republican is packed with “education” gimmicks, too. If approved, the descent into collective madness will accelerate.

One of the major schemes Biden and his handlers are trying to get through, this time with the “Reconciliation” bill, is a $200 billion program for universal pre-kindergarten. The goal: Get all of America’s children into government indoctrination programs even earlier.

Under the proposed plan, which may be rammed through Congress on a partisan vote with no filibusters allowed, all children in America ages 3 and 4 would receive federally directed, tax-funded “pre-K” through government schools.

None of this should be surprising. During the Obama years, the same warped view of “education” and parents reigned in Washington and throughout the monstrosity improperly referred to as the nation’s “public education” system.

Common Core, for example, was used to cement national standards into place using bullying and bribes from the stimulus slush fund.

And lest anyone think this was actually about “improving” education, the federal government funded a study showing “significant negative effects” on grade 4 reading after the standards were put in place. Less than one third of the victims of government school at grade 8 are proficient in core subjects, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveals.

But academic achievement was never really the goal. Under Obama and Common Core, parents and elected school boards were out, while D.C. bureaucrats and special-interest groups funded by billionaire profiteers were in.

The plan succeeded wildly, with parents nationwide unable to help their children with “Common Core” math while states and school districts struggle for breathing room in the straitjacket of the national standards.

Also under Obama, federally funded so-called Full-Service Community Schools revealed perhaps the most brazen attempt to sideline parents in American history. These federally backed institutions, which are now scattered across the nation, promise to handle the dental health, mental health, nutritional needs, and much more for every child in their “care.”

It would be more honest to refer to these institutions as “parental replacement centers,” but of course those behind the agenda would never be so honest.

As explored in part 10 of this series, this federal usurpation of authority over families and schools accelerated rapidly under Obama. It’s now reaching a climax under Biden. And it has resulted in the absolute decimation of whatever may have once been decent in America’s disastrous “education” system.

From the 1960s’ U.S. Supreme Court opinions imposing humanism and ousting Christianity to the federal funding that eventually paved the way for control over standards and so much else, Washington’s influence over schools has been toxic from the start.

Under Obama and now Biden, the globalization of the indoctrination system described in part 9 of this series also came out of the closet, with Obama’s Education Secretary referring to the U.N. education agency as his “global partner” in the process.

Indeed, Common Core’s own architects and proponents bragged that the controversial standards were aligned with “international standards” even as training for “global citizenship” became ubiquitous.

This is about more than the government simply brainwashing your children. This is about removing you from the picture almost entirely so that the forces of wickedness, perversion, and tyranny can poison your children’s minds and souls unimpeded by pesky parents.

As this series has documented extensively, this was always the goal of the “education” establishment going back to the Utopian and even socialist architects of the system: communist Robert Owen, collectivist Utopian Horace Mann, and socialist–humanist luminary John Dewey.

Obviously, attending school board meetings to express concerns is not a viable strategy for protecting children. In fact, it may even lead to harassment and intimidation from the politicized and disgraced FBI. It may be worth doing, but it will not save your children.

While it’s critical for parents to be involved and for state and local government to resist the Biden administration’s escalating attacks, the only true long-term solution is an exodus from the government’s indoctrination system.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

The totalitarian-minded education establishment and its extreme left-wing allies are starting to freak out as conservatives abandon futile efforts to “reform” government schools in favor of a mass-exodus strategy. Even powerful union bosses are starting to panic.

The trend has been building quietly for years. But it has accelerated rapidly in recent months as a trickle of families fleeing the system became a tidal wave amid face-mask edicts, vaccine mandates, Critical Race Theory, Marxist indoctrination, extreme “sex education,” and other controversies.

The first major shoe to drop in response came on September 30, when the fringe left-wing magazine New Republic released a major article claiming Republicans were now out to destroy the public-school system instead of “reform” it.

“Republicans Don’t Want to Reform Public Education. They Want to End It,” blared the headline in the far-left magazine, famous for lying about and even praising the mass-murdering Soviet dictatorship. “Florida’s recent struggles over masks in schools augur a terrifying shift in the right’s approach to education policy.”

According to the article, conservatives are increasingly abandoning the idea of “reforming” public schools. Instead, the article argues, the new approach is to get as many children as possible out of the system and into private schools or homeschooling.

The article begins by examining a speech by Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran at Hillsdale College. Corcoran noted, correctly, that education will be the key to winning other issues, too. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the article claims, is at the helm of pursuing the strategy to destroy government education.

“Trading in the decades-old, substantially bipartisan education reform agenda, a formula that was born in Florida, he is mustering a naked attack on the very existence of public schools,” the magazine claimed, arguing that this shift is taking place in the broader Republican Party in general as well.

And bigwigs of the trillion-dollar-per-year “education” regime are getting nervous. For instance, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten, who is quoted in the New Republic article, blurted out her concerns on Twitter.

“This isn’t just about masks or about Governor DeSantis’ political aspirations,” she said as state-level union bosses parroted her comments as well. “It’s about the complete destabilization of public education so that parents will choose private schools.”

And it is true: Conservative leaders nationwide are increasingly advocating an exit from government schools altogether. Just this weekend, conservative heavyweight Candace Owens urged parents to remove their children from government schools on Fox News.

“Pull your children out of public schools,” Owens told the cable network on Sunday. “The time is now, remove your children from these indoctrination camps, they’re not learning to be smart,  they’re not focused on hard academics, they are being brainwashed and and systematically controlled and what they want to produce, by the way, are failures.”

Before that, Evangelical leader Franklin Graham, conservative pundit Dennis Prager, talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh, and many others also called for parents to remove their children in recent years.

Some have been sounding the alarm for decades. Exodus Mandate Director Lt. Col. Ray Moore (Ret.), the godfather of the exodus movement, was thrilled by the shift in the conversation. “After decades of futile efforts to reform government schools, conservatives and Christians are permanently opting out,” Moore told us by phone.

“The dam is about to break,” added Moore, who is also chairman of Public School Exit (where this writer serves as executive director) and the Christian Education Initiative (CEI). “When this happens, on a large scale, Christians and conservatives will become good neighbors again, by providing Christian education services for our nation. This is the great hope for renewal of our families, churches and our nation.”

Conservatives and Christians now have the momentum — the wind is in their sails when it comes to rescuing millions of children from the dumbing down, sexualization, and indoctrination in government schools. The exodus is already happening, and it will accelerate in the years ahead.

As the forces of liberty advance, the next challenge will be to keep the same “education” establishment from destroying homeschooling and private school by providing tax funding with strings attached or other subversive methods. The future of America depends on the outcome of this fight.

This article was originally published by FreedomProject Media.

“Peter” Fray-Witzer, a privileged white female student at uber-woke Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio claims to have been recently triggered big time by the presence of workmen in her dorm room who came to install a spanking new radiator so Fray-Witzer (birth name “Ava”) would be cozy in her segregated dorm throughout the cold Ohio winter.

The regressive Oberlin is deeply committed to “identity-based” segregation. Oberlin is so committed to segregation that it provides student housing segregated by race, ethnicity, and “gender identity.”

In an editorial published in the student newspaper, Fray-Witzer waxed aggrieved that she “had less than 24 hours to prepare for the arrival of the installation crew.” She “was further perturbed by the ambiguous” period of time the installers would be in her room. Evidently, she expected to know precisely how long it would take for workers to install a new radiator. Good luck when she moves into the real world.

The too easily triggered, self-absorbed Fray-Witzer wants all of Oberlin to know that she is “very averse to people entering” her “personal space.” And she wants the Oberlin community to know that the likelihood of the radiator installation crew being “cisgender men” exacerbated her “anxiety.” To be clear, “cisgender men” are normal men. In other words, they are men who accept the scientific reality that they are biologically male and will remain so in perpetuity.

The bewhiskered, male-appearing Fray-Witzer lives in Baldwin Cottage, one of Oberlin’s two housing facilities reserved for women and “trans”-identifying students. If her melodramatic retelling of her response to an ordinary dormitory occurrence is truthful, she is mentally unwell:

I was angry, scared, and confused. … I waited apprehensively. The workers began installing in common spaces, and I could see immediately that they were all men. It was clear that the College had not made a special request that male workers not be allowed onto the upper floors of Baldwin.

How exactly could the terrified Fray-Witzer determine the workmen’s sex, let alone their “gender identities”? By looking at them? By their clothes? Is she a genital policeperson? Does she have x-ray vision? Is she a mind reader? Did she ask for their pronouns? Is she herself controlled by the ugly tyranny of socially constructed gender norms? I thought “transmen” were actually men, and Fray-Witzer is a “transman.” So, is she male or not?

Maybe Fray-Witzer is not as fully woke as she thinks she is. What went wrong? Surely, her wealthy, woke parents, attorneys Evan and Sharon Fray-Witzer, did the best job they could in affirming the “trans” ideology.

By the time Fray-Witzer returned from class, the workpersons who Fray-Witzer assumed were “cisgender males” were done but had to return the next day, which left Fray-Witzer feeling “mildly violated and a little peeved.”

Why would any college student feel violated by the presence of college workmen in her room during the day accompanied, I might add, by a college official? Fray-Witzer explains:

[M]any people—myself included—choose to live there [i.e., Baldwin Cottage] for an added degree of privacy and a feeling of safety and protection. A significant portion of students choose to live in Baldwin because they are victims of sexual assault or abuse, have suffered past invasions of privacy, or have some other reason to fear cisgender men.

Does living in a safe rental place require excluding every member of the feared sex from every setting foot in the safe space for any reason?

Why would women who have been sexually assaulted or suffered past invasions of privacy fear only “cisgender” men? Aren’t some biological males who identify as women capable of sexually abusing women? Aren’t some biological males who identify as women capable of invading the privacy of women? Do women who have been sexually abused or had their privacy invaded know the “gender identities” of the men who violated them?

Most important, don’t women who have been sexually assaulted or had their privacy invaded by biological males have a right to be free of the presence of all biological males—including males who identify as female—in their private spaces (with the exception of workmen who occasionally have to fix stuff)?

Fray-Witzer’s fears and “gender-normative” assumptions expose the incoherent, self-contradictory nature of the “trans” ideology, which is also exposed by the demands of  “trans” students that they be free to use private spaces intended for opposite-sex students. “Trans” students claim they want to use private spaces with only those whose “gender identities” they share. “Gender identity” is defined as the subjective, internal feelings one has about one’s maleness or femaleness. So, how do “trans”-identifying students know the “gender identities” of the persons in their private spaces? How do they know, for example, whether the boys in boys’ spaces identify internally as boys or whether the girls in girls’ spaces identify as girls?

Obviously, they can’t know the “gender identities” of all the students using restrooms and locker rooms. Boys who pretend they are girls cannot know the “gender identities” of the boys in the boys’ locker room or the girls in the girls’ locker room.

So, what their demands reveal is that they want to use private spaces with only those who have the anatomy they wish they had. In other words, biological sex as manifest in anatomy is incredibly important for “trans”-identifying persons,” but biological sex is supposed to be meaningless for everyone else.

The truth—something colleges and universities used to pursue—is that biological sex is profoundly meaningful. How we understand embodiment will determine the future of America. How we think about biological sex, what we think about the proper use of our bodies, and what ideas about sex society affirms will determine whether our cultural collapse continues. If individuals, churches, schools, and political parties do not stand boldly for sexual truth, America will no longer be a place conducive to human flourishing. Getting sexuality right is far more important to the health and future of any society than tax rates or business regulations.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Oberlin-College-Student-Exposes-Transinsanity.mp3

Someone I know from California told me recently that he has decided to pull his child out of public school and enroll him instead into a private, Christian school.

Why? Because during some of the Zoom instruction during the coronavirus pandemic, this concerned parent discovered some of the lessons they were trying to foist on his child. In this case, it was the anti-American historical revisionism that disgusted this parent.

Multiply this story many times over, and we are seeing a very important development right now—many parents are finding better ways to educate their children, including home-school and home-school co-ops, than the failing public schools.

But the left is pushing back. Perhaps the most galling thing about this debate is the arrogance of the educrats who think they are the ones who should be responsible for the education of the children—not the parents.

Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe let the cat out of the bag. The Democrat is currently running for governor again, and he said in a recent debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Unfortunately, McAuliffe is not alone in these sentiments.

Writing in wnd.com (10/3/21), Art Moore points out that parents are supposedly “not the ‘primary stakeholder’ in their children’s education”—even though they are “important stakeholders.” Who says this? Some left wing nut job on a TicTok video? No, Joe Biden’s education secretary Michael Cordona said this.

What’s more, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) asked the Biden administration to treat concerned parents at school board meetings as essentially domestic terrorists. They write, “Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials through existing statutes, executive authority…to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses.”

They add: “Further, this increasing violence is a clear and present danger to civic participation.”

Apparently, President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland agrees. He is now claiming that concerned parents protesting at school board meetings are guilty of “domestic terrorism.”

In his End of Day Report (10/5/21), Gary Bauer of American Values responds, “So, let’s get this straight: The radical forces indoctrinating your children are trying to shut you up by utilizing the same agency, the FBI, that the left used to smear Donald Trump with the fake Russia collusion hoax.” He observes that the Biden administration is “turning the FBI loose on soccer moms.” Critics note that Garland has a conflict of interest here. Bauer says:

“His son-in-law is the president of a consulting firm that makes millions of dollars contracting with school boards to push the left’s radical agenda.”

If you look at the videos of the unruly school board meetings, what you see are parents visibly upset that their children are being taught a bunch of lies. They are not resorting to “violence.”

The most prominent areas of curriculum conflict include:

• Critical race theory (CRT), where by definition whites are oppressors and blacks are the oppressed. Little children who have done nothing wrong are being vilified for the color of their skin.

• Historical revisionism, which turns American history on its head. The settlers and founders of America were far from perfect. But they created a nation with unparalleled freedom and prosperity. Now political correctness has turned America’s founders into villains. One can only wonder why those would-be American immigrants trekking through Central America are currently risking their lives to come to this supposedly evil country.

• The dogmatic LGBTQ agenda. Many children (mostly girls) are questioning if they were born in the correct gender. Because of this fad that is sweeping through many of the schools and is being promoted by teachers and the school administrators, many young people are undergoing “irreversible damage” as puberty blockers and even surgery are administered to try and resolve a conflict that usually resolves itself in puberty. The fallout is horrible. Journalist Abigail Shrier wrote a book documenting this dangerous trend—Irreversible Damage.

The schools and teachers unions are acting as if they own the children. They do not. Children are on loan by God to the parents. Indeed, who is responsible for children’s education? Parents or educrats?

Who knows better than the parents what is in the children’s best interest? To whom have the children been given? Hasn’t God given the parents the responsibility of teaching their children, even if they delegate that teaching to others? Traditionally, teachers have been described as “in loco parentis”—acting on behalf of the parents, not against them.

Our current education crisis could actually prove to be a good thing—if we handle it correctly. This could be the time when many Americans seek to rescue their children from leftist and false indoctrination promoted by too many of our public schools.

This article was originally published by JerryNewcombe.com.

An assault has occurred on parental rights within the public school system. Parents have voiced their concerns across the nation about everything from perverted curriculum to forced masking. If any good came from the pandemic, it is that parents have seen what public schools are doing behind closed doors. This revelation should lead parents to remove their children from the grip of the government-run education system.

Here are my top ten reasons to leave public schools:

The Marxist Agenda:

Many parents and grandparents were in school during the Cold War, or just following it, and view Communism as the enemy. However, universities hid a dark secret: Marxist philosophers, economists, and educators were devoted to continuing to teach the theory to the next generation. As the Marxist agenda became more elevated on college campuses in the 1980s and 90s, we were unconcerned. After all, this action only involved a handful of academic elites, right? Wrong. Today the consequences of ignoring the indoctrination of university students are readily apparent in our public schools. Those university elites educated the current teachers, curriculum developers, and administrators that now teach in your child’s school. The ideas of hatred towards capitalism, American exceptionalism, and devotion to humanism have slowly infiltrated public schools, starting with high schools and are moving towards younger students. Now, even kindergarten classes are taught Marxist ideologies.

Critical Race Theory:

CRT is in direct relation to the Marxist theory. As a result, CRT, which started in universities, is now spreading like wildfire across public school systems. Schools across the nation are telling teachers to divide their students by race. Instead of finding common ground and cooperative ways of interaction, students are divided and labeled according to race and ethnicity.

LGBT Agenda:

The LGBT lobby and organizations have forced their agenda into every facet of life, including schools. Girls’ sports are being decimated by male athletes masquerading as females, and neither girls nor boys can assume privacy in their respective bathrooms or locker rooms. Teachers are asking students to “choose” their sexuality and pronoun identifiers. Children are allowed to change their name and gender on school records without parental permission. Schools across the country are forming clubs like the Gay-Straight Alliance, yet denying official status to Bible clubs. The agenda has taken over the public schools to such a degree that parents cannot question the schools’ policies. (Illinois lawmakers passed legislation in 2019 to mandate the teaching of LGBT history in classrooms K-12th grade.)

Explicit Sexual Education:

The LGBT agenda has given birth to explicit sex education programs. In previous generations, kindergarteners were taught about proper touch and “stranger danger.” Now, school programs are teaching about masturbation and sodomy, and even grooming children for pedophilia. The new, approved curriculum in Illinois is entirely lewd. This curriculum includes cartoon-drawn images of acts of hetero and homosexual acts. Children are encouraged to participate in masturbation. Although the Department of Education claims parents can opt-out of the classes, parents will not be able to stop their children’s classmates from sharing the curriculum’s text and pornographic images. (Illinois lawmakers passed legislation earlier this year to require all public schools—including charter schools—to align teaching in grades K-5 on “personal health and safety” with “National Sex Education Standards.)”

Declining Academics:

It should not come as a surprise that academics are declining. As educators push their agendas, there is little time to teach mathematics or reading. In the last year, Illinois raised funding per student to $14,492, one of the highest per-student budgets in the nation. Yet, Illinois students are not succeeding academically. In Illinois and across the country, students are falling behind. The US ranks 38th in the world in math and, according to a recent study by Gallup, deficiencies in reading cost trillions of dollars. Many business owners state that they cannot find entry-level employees with basic skills such as money counting, phone etiquette, or even basic reading abilities. Declining academic achievement is devastating our children and our economy. (Click HERE to view the proficiency scores of the largest school districts in Illinois.)

Lack of Transparency:

The local school board and the state have actively limited transparency. They often refuse to show how funding is being distributed and deny parental involvement in the decision-making process. In January of 2021, the Williamson County Circuit Court ordered the Illinois school board of Herrin District #4 to repay $2.7 million in misused tax funds. The school was taken to court by one taxpayer who noted the misappropriations. Parents could prevent fraud and misappropriations if school boards would issue regular reports on the distribution of funds. Schools also lack transparency regarding the curricula they choose. A group of Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin are circulating a bill requiring schools and teachers to publish a list of materials and all curricula utilized by the school. If approved, schools failing to publish these lists will incur a $15,000 penalty. Transparency of materials and texts is an excellent idea; however, the Department of Education and teacher unions are fighting this bill and any attempt to require transparency.

Impediment of Parental Involvement and Rights:

The governmental system does not respect parents or their rights. During the pandemic, parents discovered the nature of curricula and were outraged at the indoctrination occurring in schools. As a result, parents and grandparents are attending school board meetings in large numbers. Parents have expressed concerns ranging from requests to remove CRT and Marxist curricula to concerns about forced masking. These parents are vocal but have been peaceful, with a few rare exceptions. Even though parents have a right to voice concerns about their children’s education, the local boards and teachers have been defiant. Often school boards have refused to answer questions. Have these board members forgotten that they are elected officials? Regardless, parents have been vilified, doxxed, and faced cancel culture for simply wanting to protect their children. Recent Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe (D), stated, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This statement is a shared opinion held by teachers, unions, and board members across the nation.

Authorization of Greater Federal Control:

A memo from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) was sent to the Biden administration claiming that parents attending school board meetings were a threat to teachers and board members. As a result, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to investigate parents attending school board meetings as domestic terrorists. The federal government’s defamation of parents’ character is just the beginning of bringing the federal government into a more significant role in education. If the elimination of parental control in education occurs, then the states and the federal government can indoctrinate children without interference. Federalization can occur not only through the removal of parental influence, but also through financial control. Politicians such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) have long called for the federalization of funding. Complete federalization creates an oversight nightmare. This type of system would likely eliminate all local control within the schools.

Removal of God and Country:

The landmark decision of Engel v. Vitale (1962) removed school-mandated prayer from the classroom. It did not end there. Students have had a constant fight to keep student-led, voluntary prayer and Christian clubs in schools. However, we should be clear that the Left intends this ban to only include prayer to the God of the Bible. At the beginning of the school year, parents in California filed suit after the California State Board of Education unanimously approved a curriculum that included chanting to Aztec gods. These are the same false gods that the people of ancient Mesoamerica worshipped through the practice of human sacrifice. Schools have also removed anything that might resemble patriotism. One teacher, who has now been dismissed, removed the American flag and replaced it with the gay pride flag. Although this teacher was fired, many teachers across the nation are denouncing both God and our country in their classrooms.

Your Children Deserve Better:

The best reason to remove your children from the failing public school system is that they deserve better. The current system is rooted in hatred and indoctrination. Twenty years ago, Christian parents sent their children into the public system to be young evangelists. Today any possibility of that is squelched before the child even leaves the primary grades. Before they reach middle school, they will have already seen lewd images and been given ample opportunity to denounce all values their parents instill. Protecting our children means finding alternatives to public school that will support parental rights and values. We must develop our own systems that uphold Christian values. Whether it is home education, private schools, or church co-ops, now is the time to determine what option works best for your family and remove your children from the tyranny of government-run schools.

Then get the right people elected to the school boards.

Written by Ben Boychuk

Suddenly, but unsurprisingly, the U.S. Justice Department is interested in parents protesting local school board meetings. Because of course it is.

In America in 2021, citizens’ loud but nonviolent demonstrations before elected officials are tantamount to domestic terrorism and “hate speech,” while the Black Lives Matter and Antifa insurrectionary violence of 2020—which resulted in at least 30 deaths, over $1 billion in property damage, and the brief rise of lawless “autonomous zones” in Seattle, Philadelphia, New York, and Richmond, Virginia—is “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.”

The danger is clear and present—it simply depends upon who is protesting. As one wag put it on Twitter, “The DOJ used to go after MS13. Now you want them to go after Moms of 13-year-olds?”

Parents don’t like what they see coming out of their local schools. But government officials would prefer to do their work unencumbered by public input. This is old news, with an arrogant new twist. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe summed up the current conventional wisdom nicely at a debate with his Republican opponent the other week: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

That depends on what the schools are teaching, doesn’t it?

Indoctrination Nation

Parents have two grievances, broadly speaking. First, they oppose COVID-19-related mask mandates for their children. They note that the European countries we’re so often asked to emulate do not have mask (or COVID vaccine) mandates for schools. Sweden, where school is compulsory through the age of 16, actively discourages kids from wearing masks. And yet that country’s transmission rates have gone down population-wide.

The second grievance is also COVID-related, in as much as the lockdowns compelled more parents to notice what their kids are—and are not—learning. Many parents, including many black and Latino parents, do not want their children to be taught that America is a systemically racist nation and that its institutions (capitalism often gets mentioned here) are irredeemable

Parents across the country have shown up to normally staid school board meetings to demand that critical race theory be removed from the curriculum. Defenders of the race-based curriculum like to point out that “critical race theory” is not actually being taught in schools. But that’s just a semantic sleight of hand. No, kids aren’t reading Derrick Bell. Instead, they’re getting “social studies” (since American public schools don’t really teach history anymore) heavily informed by critical race theory and Marxist-tinged critical theory.

Parents are on to the scheme and they’re unhappy about it. The National School Boards Association on September 29 asked Joe Biden to intervene, alleging “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.” The group says its members have “received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in person.”

Making a terrorist threat is a crime not protected by the First Amendment. But it’s unclear why such threats could not be investigated by state and local law enforcement, rather than the feds. Well, the NSBA has an answer for that, too, although the rationale is paper-thin: “NSBA believes immediate assistance is required to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.” (Emphasis added.)

Interstate commerce? The NSBA knows that the federal government can do just about anything under the auspices of “interstate commerce,” even if the commerce never crosses state lines. The NSBA’s letter mentions “interstate commerce” three times, even though it never bothers to explain how parents protesting in Loudoun County, Virginia or Coeur d’Alene, Idaho affect the free movement of goods and services among the several states.

While the NSBA notes that some of its members have received threatening letters, and several meetings have been ended early because of crowds “inciting chaos,” it strains to document any actual violence. The NSBA leans on a “fact sheet” published in July by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, which only documents an increase in demonstrations and notes the presence in some instances of “militias and other militant right-wing actors” whose mere presence is supposed to be seen as intimidating.

(It’s unclear whether any school board members have been followed into bathrooms by irate demonstrators, as Arizona’s Democratic U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema was last week. Would that make a difference? As Joe Biden said the other day, such harassment is “part of the process.”)

The Tedious Work of Politics Redux

Obviously, it’s no fun for a school board member to be shouted at by a throng of 200 angry parents. But the First Amendment for the most part protects what parents are doing. Harsh speech is still protected speech.

That doesn’t mean federal authorities can’t make our lives miserable and chill legitimate speech. During the 1990s, attorney Hans Bader reminds, civil rights lawyers with the Clinton Administration “investigated citizens for ‘harassment’ and ‘intimidation’ merely because those citizens spoke out against housing projects for recovering substance abusers or other classes of people protected by the Fair Housing Act.” Those investigations ended after a federal appeals court ruled they violated the First Amendment. But how much did those people lose in time and money battling the federal government before they won?

And just because the courts ruled one way 20 years ago, doesn’t mean a different set of judges ruling on a similar set of facts wouldn’t go the other way today. Bader notes that in 2017, a federal judge “allowed bloggers to be sued for intimidation for angry blog posts that allegedly created a ‘hostile housing environment.’”

Here, once again, the tedious work of politics becomes unavoidable.

Parents might take a leaf from the literal playbook of a Los Angeles-based group called Parent Revolution. About 10 years ago, Parent Revolution was involved heavily with organizing parents at failing public schools to use a (now largely toothless) state law called the Parent Empowerment Act, also known as the “parent trigger.”

Parent Revolution’s insight was to teach parents to use labor-union organizing tactics. They produced a hardcover book, small enough to fit into a pocket, called The Parent Power Handbook. It detailed, simply and directly, how parents could use the law to organize and transform their children’s schools.

Most importantly, anyone could follow the model Parent Revolution laid out in the handbook.

“Step 1: Build Your Base,” “Step 2: Establish Your Chapter,” “Step 3: Pick Your Focus,” “Step 4: Launch Your Campaign.”

Every step involves practical organization advice. Schedule one-on-one conversations. Host house meetings with people you already know. Ask questions like, “What would an ideal school look like?” Try to identify parents who show an extra level of interest. Form a leadership committee. Decide on a focus—in this instance, removing noxious race-based curricula from schools. And then get people excited about it.

California’s parent trigger law had some limited success. It showed that motivated parents could make substantive changes. It also showed that the education establishment would fight viciously to stop them. (Almost every parent-trigger effort ended up in court.)

But if parents cannot get a receptive audience with their elected school board officials, they may need to resort to a tried-and-true, red-white-and-blue act of civil disobedience: the boycott.

When well organized, boycotts can be a highly effective form of political action. In 1968, Chicano activists in east Los Angeles organized a mass boycott of local schools to demand bilingual education. They got it.

Twenty years later, a smaller group of Latino parents organized a boycott of their own—this time, to insist that their kids learn English. They believed, correctly, that their children were being ghettoized in Spanish-only classes and receiving a second-class education. As one mother of a seven-year-old told the Los Angeles Times, “We want our children to be taught in English . . . that’s why we came to the United States. If not, better to keep her in my country. There she can learn in Spanish.” They won. And in 1998, Californians passed Proposition 227, which eliminated bilingual education statewide.

The boycotts succeeded for at least two reasons. First, schools are funded based on the number of pupils in attendance. In other words, the schools were losing money. Second, the parents avoided running afoul of truancy laws by enrolling their kids in free alternative schools for the duration of the boycott. Eventually, the authorities had to accept the parents’ demands.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Unseat ’Em

Every few years or so, parents recognize that what goes on at those otherwise boring school board meetings is pretty important to their kids’ wellbeing and educations. Local school boards may not have as much power as they once did—the number of U.S. public school districts has shrunk from more than 117,000 in 1940 to around 13,000 today—but they’re still important. In states with term limits (such as California), one party recognized decades ago that those seemingly insignificant local boards are ideal proving grounds for future candidates for statewide office.

Parents’ impassioned denunciations of noxious critical race theories and their offshoots make for great viral videos and may help shape future policies. Ultimately, however, they’re little more than political theater.

Unless and until these parents are in a position to persuade board members to change their votes, the only other option is to replace the board.

To that end, it isn’t enough to show up once to lodge a complaint. Attend every board meeting, not necessarily to speak, though sometimes to speak to put certain thoughts on the record. Mainly, be there to watch and listen. Pay close attention to the structure of the meeting. Scrutinize the agenda and the minutes, which usually appear online in advance. Take note of who else addresses the board during public comment. Get ahold of the budget and break it down line by line. Study state and local education codes.

Oh, and don’t forget to read the contract with the local teachers’ union.

On August 20, 2021, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed into law a comprehensive sex-ed bill that sexualizes your child and strips them of their innocence beginning in kindergarten. What exactly is comprehensive sex-ed? Read about it HERE.

According to this law, all government schools that provide personal health and safety courses must align their curricula with the National Sex Education Standards, formulated by so-called “experts” who supposedly know what’s best for your child: Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, and GLSEN, among others. In other words, as these standards change, the Illinois sex ed curricula will change.

These people want your child to be introduced to masturbation, gender identity, and different types of families in kindergarten through second grade. In grades 3-5 (ages 8-10), they will learn about hormone blockers for those who identify as transgender, be able to define “sexual orientation,” “cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive, and gender identity,” and have masturbation reaffirmed to them as normal.

In grades 6-8 (ages 11-13), they will be required to define “bisexual, lesbian, gay, queer, twospirit, asexual, pansexual,” “vaginal, oral, and anal sex,” know where to access “short- and long-term contraception,” and be able to list at least 4 methods of contraception available without a prescription. They will be required to describe pregnancy options including abortion. Absolutely nothing is left to the imagination as they get older.

Make no mistake, students will be encouraged to “experiment” with their sexuality and be exposed to ideas that have historically considered perverse, sinful or abominable.

The law states that materials must be “age and developmentally” and “culturally appropriate,” but those terms are not defined. Apparently that’s left to the groups who write the standards to determine what’s age-appropriate for your child, not to mention the financial profits they will amass from your child’s sexual experimentation.

Parents, if you’re unable to homeschool your child or afford private education, please consider protecting him/her from radical sex-education and other godless indoctrination. Click on the check below to access the form to opt them out of these classes.

This Opt Out Form should be printed and signed. As a parent, you are responsible for their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Not the school and not the teacher. If you do not want your child exposed to sexual deviancy, please download this form and check the appropriate box(es). Instructions are included.