https://www.zerohedge.com/poli.../great-parent-revolt



As overreach in classrooms by progressive school administrators, nonprofits and the federal government has reached new heights, parents are stepping up to fight back.

Moms for Liberty, Informed Parents of California, EdFirstNC, NJ Parental Rights, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Against Critical Theory are just a few of the hundreds of new parent groups that have emerged across the country in recent months. Many parents have become education activists because of schools’ failure to bring children back into the classroom or their continued imposition of mask mandates.

Others are engaging because of the content being taught. Whether it’s age-inappropriate sex education, critical race theory, or anti-American history, parents are seeing more of what their children are learning—thanks to COVID’s virtual learning—and they don’t like it. As a result, parents are organizing, speaking out, and pushing back, and they are having a noticeable impact.

Some of the most effective efforts have begun with individual parents who reached a boiling point and decided to speak out. Mom and investigative journalist A.P. Dillon helped expose critical race theory training in Wake County, N.C., public schools. Elana Fishbein was a lone parent in Lower Marion, Pa., who objected to content in her children’s curriculum, which, in her words, “described ‘whiteness’ as an entitlement to steal land, garner riches, and get special treatment on equity and race.” That letter reached a national audience when Tucker Carlson invited her onto his Fox News Channel show.

Andrew Gutmann also made national news when he sent a letter to 650 families criticizing New York City’s Brearley School, which his daughter attended, for its obsession with race and for “desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Meanwhile, the 11-minute takedown of a Putnam County, N.Y., school board by Tatiana Ibrahim has well over 1 million views on YouTube.

Individual parents speaking out have helped to kick off what is proving to be a rapidly growing parent revolt. They have helped to galvanize others who were either unaware of the bad content or too afraid to speak out. After Elana Fishbein appeared on Carlson’s show, hundreds of parents across the country reached out to her on social media. And today No Left Turn in Education has 35 chapters across the country and is growing.

When Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice finished their terms as school board members in Florida, they decided to form Moms for Liberty to teach parents how to serve as watchdogs of their local schools boards. When they established the organization in January of this year, they had intended it to serve as a statewide entity in Florida. But today, just over six months later, they have 65 chapters nationwide and have more applications for new chapters.

Wherever these parent groups have emerged, they are finding creative ways to challenge the attempted progressive takeover of K-12 education. Sloan Rachmuth, founder of EdFirstNC, has held webinars and in-person events to educate parents on how the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction rewrote the social studies standards for K-12 based on critical race theory. Patti Hidalgo Menders, a mother of five boys in Loudoun County, Va., read aloud to school board members obscene passages from Tiffany D. Jackson’s “Monday’s Not Coming” and Gretchen McNeil’s “#Murder Trending.”

Educating parents is a critical part of the work. As Hannah Smith, a newly elected board member in Texas explained, “There were a lot of people who had, by their own admission, just kind of fallen asleep. They just thought we’ve got these award-winning schools, we’ve got this awesome community, everything’s going well. I don’t need to show up at board meetings. I don’t need to be worried about what’s happening in the schools.”

In addition to raising the alarm about what’s happening in the schools, parent groups are challenging school boards through recalls — for example in Loudoun County and San Francisco — and by actively running candidates for school board, with some notable successes.

When the Carroll, Texas, Independent School District introduced a Cultural Competence Action Plan, which would require “social justice training” and establish a “diversity and inclusion” week, at the cost of $3 million over 10 years, local father Cameron Bryan decided to run for school board and won. As Bob Lubke, from Civitas, has written, “Historically, conservatives have not been as vocal about down-ballot races. That’s a mistake. Education is often the largest expenditure for state and local government. Local school board members not only make budget and policy decisions that impact the day-to-day operations of how our schools are financed and administered but also how our children are educated. Few local positions are as consequential.”

With the growing anger over the indoctrination of their children, parents have become much more engaged in school board elections, and it is having an impact: In 2021, the number of board member recalls has more than doubled from previous years, according to Ballotpedia.

Parents are also initiating lawsuits as an important tool in their fight against overly progressive schools. According to John Murawski at RealClearInvestigations, about a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018. A new wave of lawsuits is being driven by the recent surge of concern among parents over critical race theory and its implementation in schools.

The first lawsuit against CRT was filed on Dec. 22, 2020, in Nevada. Gabrielle Clark and her son William brought the suit on the grounds that the school violated William’s free speech and due process rights. According to the No Left Turn in Education website: “the Sociology of Change teaching in his civic classes required him to publicly reveal his race, gender, religious, and sexual identities, and then attach derogatory labels such as ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressor’ to those identities. Students were then asked to ‘undo’ and ‘unlearn’ their ‘beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that stem from oppression.’ William and his mother objected, and he was punished with a failing grade and his graduation was at risk.”

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of organizations, led by The Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth and Poverty, with support from the Upper Midwest Law Center, Schoolhouserights.org, and others. According to CRT expert Chris Rufo, several more lawsuits are in preparation.

On June 20, Patti Hidalgo Menders, Scott Mineo and several others, represented by the Liberty Justice Center, filed a lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board (Menders v. Loudoun County School Board). On June 23, 2020, LCPS published its Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism. The plan included the creation of a Student Ambassador Equity Program, which was only open to “students of color” and those with “a passion for social justice.” The lawsuit also states, “The ‘Share, Speak-up, Speak-out’ meetings in which Student Equity Ambassadors are entitled to take part are not an everyday opportunity for student/faculty engagement. Rather they are part of an explicit initiative to stifle speech under the guise of eliminating ‘bias’.”

While 26 states have introduced or passed bills to reject the teaching of critical race theory, it will likely be the courts that ultimately decide whether it fundamentally violates American principles, and even in that process, the role of parents will be pivotal. As John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently said, “I think that what's going to happen is that there have to be more parents, more communities involved, challenging these kinds of efforts to use race explicitly in the schools or in their local governments, and those will generate the cases that get to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court can make clear, as I think it should, that race is just never to be used in the government and in state and local at all, for whatever reason, whether it's allegedly benign or it's for malign reasons.”

The bottom line is that education in America will likely never be the same, thanks to the Great Parent Revolt of 2021, and that’s good news. For decades, many parents have outsourced the raising of their children to the schools, trusting that administrators, school board members, and teachers would share their values. We blindly believed that schools would care about our children as much as we do. We believed that if the teaching went astray, if the books were inappropriate, or if the civics and history were a little un-American, what we did at home would serve as a gentle correction and all would be well. The past two years have taught us how wrong we were.

Thankfully parents are reengaging in their children’s education and reasserting their rightful place in decisions about curriculum and content. The question will be whether their efforts are strong enough and sufficiently sustained to win the battle against the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats who are working to rewrite American history.

I live in Loudoun County which is for some reason is the epicenter of the publicized fight against CRT and 'LGBT Rights'. We are losing every battle because that's what the majority leftist constituency wants.

I'm perfectly fine with teaching children to love their fellow students no matter their skin color or sexual preference. What they are doing is not that. Calling people victims or oppressors based on their skin color is racist. White kids don't choose to be white and they aren't inherently racist, that's a learned behavior. How about we teach love and understanding instead?

I don't know the solution, you can talk your face blue, but there's no getting through. The only solution I can come up with is school choice. Let the parents shop for a school that aligns with the teaching style and subject matter they believe in. I don't understand the pushback against school choice. It benefits the disadvantaged communities the most and allows them to move their talented students out of failing schools and give their kid's a shot at escaping the failing big school systems.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
I don't understand the pushback against school choice.

You're kidding, right? One, the current educational system is not about the best interests of kids or their education, its about the teachers unions maintaining control over the huge pot of cash that government allocates to 'education' every year. They know if school choice were allowed nationwide, competition and innovation would have most of the unions teachers unemployed and the union virtually bankrupt. How many Dem's do you think want to see that happen given the amount of money the teacher's unions pass back to them each year come election time.

Face it. The current educational system has virtually nothing to do with educating kids at this point, and has everything to do with keeping Dem's in office so they'll keep the government cash pipeline flowing.

This gives me hope in our kids future. Parents willing to speak out against the bs that is going on in our education system.

America wasn’t founded on slavery in 1619 — but on Pilgrims’ ideals written in 1620

https://nypost.com/2020/11/07/...-on-pilgrims-ideals/

In August 1619, a pirate ship, the White Lion, stopped at Jamestown and traded 20-some captive Africans for food. The Africans were treated as indentured servants and soon released.

Fifteen months later, in November 1620, an English ship blown off course on its way to Virginia ended up off the barren coast of Massachusetts. It landed more than 100 men, women and children. Those voyagers founded Plymouth Colony.

Which event mattered more?

Last year, the New York Times declared that the arrival of the captives in Virginia was the “true beginning” of America — an America that the Times characterized as a “slavocracy.” The Times calls its campaign to promote this story The 1619 Project. In my new book, “1620,” I argue that the arrival of the Pilgrims along with dozens of non-Pilgrims (“strangers” as the Pilgrims called them) aboard the Mayflower is the real beginning of America.

Why? Because before this mixed group stepped ashore, they signed an agreement, which we now call the Mayflower Compact. In that document, they set aside their deep divisions and voluntarily joined together to govern themselves with “just and equal laws.” This was the very beginning of principled self-government among European settlers in the New World. The Mayflower Compact is not quite 200 words long, but those words pack almost as much meaning as Thomas Jefferson distilled into the Declaration of Independence 156 years later, or Abraham Lincoln in 1863 condensed into the Gettysburg Address.

The Mayflower Compact is a much humbler document than those two, but it has the advantage of being the first: the first time a mutually suspicious collection of settlers decided, without compulsion, to respect one another’s rights. Plymouth enacted its own laws, elected its own leaders, and after a winter of severe hardship, thrived as a peaceful self-governing community.

Meanwhile, Virginia was run by a private company in England that allowed the settlers some limited choices. Jamestown’s place in American history is secure, but it never became the model for American independence or a template for self-government.

Americans have so long cherished the story of the Pilgrims surviving in the wilderness with the help of Native Americans that we sometimes forget why this tiny colony was so important to our history. It is because they invented a prototype of our republic. The New England town became the very model of American self-reliance and ordered liberty. Plymouth also lived in peace with its neighbors, the Wampanoags, in a treaty that was unbroken for more than 50 years.

As pioneers of later generations carved new towns out of the wilderness, they looked back to Plymouth as the ideal of how to form a moral community based on equality. The signers of the Mayflower Compact were both Pilgrims and Strangers, young and old, prosperous and poor. Hierarchy was ignored. Masters and servants both signed. We can see this now in the seeds of the egalitarian America that would eventually shake off British rule and the yoke of Old Europe’s class system.

By contrast, the arrival of those pirates in Jamestown with their twice-stolen African captives laid no foundation at all. Slavery was already present in the Americas but it wouldn’t take root in the English colonies until more than half a century later.

The New York Times portrays slavery as starting in Jamestown in 1619 and spreading from there to become the bedrock of American society. That’s a false history, a myth.

The Pilgrims have also been mythologized from time to time, but the difference is the Mayflower Compact truly is the precursor to 1776, and Plymouth the archetype of American self-government.

Editors and fact checkers at the times should lose their jobs if they can't get written history right.

In the past when objective journalism mattered, they did.

In today's era of marxist propaganda substituting for journalism, you are required to slant the story to fit (or in the 1619 projects case, create..) the narrative.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
Editors and fact checkers at the times should lose their jobs if they can't get written history right.

I don't have kids, but I do pay taxes into the school system so I suppose I am entitled at least to an opinion.

Apart from the so-called "woke" agenda, there is another factor that I think is important. The simple fact that the money we as taxpayers are providing is being wasted, thrown away on subject matter that provides nothing of value to students, and taking the place of skills and knowledge they can use, in some jurisdictions, even to the point of not requiring high school students to be able to read, write, and do simple math.

Yes, teaching CRT is yet another example of govt. lies, but to me, failing to prepare students to be effective members of the workforce, provide for themselves and a family, and leave the world a better place than they found it is the biggest tragedy of the "progressive" educational agenda.

It appears those who claim victim status form racism, bigotry, prejudice, racial persecution etc. are not repulsed by those injustices, only that they were not the perpetrators. CRT and its effort to impose so called equity are remedial retribution. We’d better nip it or it will get out of control and innocents will suffer.

25 years ago I taught in what was essentially a school for gang kids, and closed out my career teaching in an upper-middle income district’s alternative school. The gang kids from 25 years ago demonstrated a better grasp of basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics then many of the kids today.

Many of you might be shocked at the number of kids in regular education who are unable to read above the 4th grade level.

The collapse of basic academic skills is, in my view, at least as threatening to the future of the nation as CRT.

The best solution might just be to get your kids out of public schools. School choice? Great idea but do we really expect it to happen within the next couple of generations of school kids?

Silent

Local to me dad who fled Iran says they have less indoctrination in their schools.


Iranian immigrant dad slams indoctrination in schools: ‘They’re making our kids dumber’

Loudoun County Schools has been one district under fire for pushing the ‘woke agenda’ in the state of Virginia and parent Dimis Christophy, an Iranian immigrant, sounded off on the indoctrination of what he calls ‘garbage ideologies’ taking place.

Christophy told "Fox & Friends Weekend" that he aims for his children to have a better life than he did after his parents took "the greatest risk" in coming to America.

"When I hear this kind of stuff it pisses me off because the kids nowadays are distracted with so many different things other than their school work," he said.

The Loudon County father said these distractions from core curriculum "screws with everybody," including, he maintained, members of the LGBTQ community and minorities.

"This has nothing to do with hatred," he said. "This is part of the systemic ideology that they want to pass on."

Christophy explained that, during his childhood, the Iranian education system made sure the students were educated first while keeping its indoctrination agenda separate. He noted that, even as an immigrant who spoke no English back in 1993, Christophy was performing at a much higher level in his courses as a result.

"They are making our kids dumber," he said of the American education system. "They’re dumbing down the children. They’re not making them smarter. They’re just distracting them with all this dumb ideology stuff. They just want to push their agenda. I have no idea what the end result is going to be, but this has to stop."

Christophy encouraged other parents to speak up against the ‘woke’ agenda in their school districts without fear of judgment from others.

"We need to show these people that they don’t run the community," he said. "We run the community. We are the people."

Former Education Secretary Bill Bennett later joined ‘Fox & Friends Weekend’ to weigh in on Christophy's take, echoing that parents don't want this "ideological baggage" schools are supplying.

"Let's drop the ideology, let's keep the basics and get these kids ready," Bennett said. "Math, English, History, Music, Arts, Science — that's what schools should be teaching."

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
I don't understand the pushback against school choice.

You're kidding, right? One, the current educational system is not about the best interests of kids or their education, its about the teachers unions maintaining control over the huge pot of cash that government allocates to 'education' every year. They know if school choice were allowed nationwide, competition and innovation would have most of the unions teachers unemployed and the union virtually bankrupt. How many Dem's do you think want to see that happen given the amount of money the teacher's unions pass back to them each year come election time.

Face it. The current educational system has virtually nothing to do with educating kids at this point, and has everything to do with keeping Dem's in office so they'll keep the government cash pipeline flowing.

You are absolutely correct!!

quote:

Originally posted by architect:
I don't have kids, but I do pay taxes into the school system so I suppose I am entitled at least to an opinion.

Apart from the so-called "woke" agenda, there is another factor that I think is important. The simple fact that the money we as taxpayers are providing is being wasted, thrown away on subject matter that provides nothing of value to students, and taking the place of skills and knowledge they can use, in some jurisdictions, even to the point of not requiring high school students to be able to read, write, and do simple math.

Yes, teaching CRT is yet another example of govt. lies, but to me, failing to prepare students to be effective members of the workforce, provide for themselves and a family, and leave the world a better place than they found it is the biggest tragedy of the "progressive" educational agenda.

It is SO MUCH Bigger, and SO MUCH Worse than that! CRT, at it's core IS Racism!

Children are not born with ANY racist tendencies, and as such, ALL 'racism' is a learned trait! CRT actually teaches children to judge people by their skin color....Ultimately leading to tribalism & racial hatred. It's not just that NO good will come from it, it's that it will have significant consequences for our society if we don't defeat it, permanently!

quote:

Originally posted by nhracecraft:

quote:

Originally posted by architect:
I don't have kids, but I do pay taxes into the school system so I suppose I am entitled at least to an opinion.

Apart from the so-called "woke" agenda, there is another factor that I think is important. The simple fact that the money we as taxpayers are providing is being wasted, thrown away on subject matter that provides nothing of value to students, and taking the place of skills and knowledge they can use, in some jurisdictions, even to the point of not requiring high school students to be able to read, write, and do simple math.

Yes, teaching CRT is yet another example of govt. lies, but to me, failing to prepare students to be effective members of the workforce, provide for themselves and a family, and leave the world a better place than they found it is the biggest tragedy of the "progressive" educational agenda.

It is SO MUCH Bigger, and SO MUCH Worse than that! CRT, at it's core IS Racism!

Children are not born with ANY racist tendencies, and as such, ALL 'racism' is a learned trait! CRT actually teaches children to judge people by their skin color....Ultimately leading to tribalism & racial hatred. It's not just that NO good will come from it, it's that it will have significant consequences for our society if we don't defeat it, permanently!

Minorities can't be racist.......that's what they are told. That's what many believe.

I'm far from an expert but Indiana does have school choice. If you want out of public schools there is a stipend that can pay for private schools. Some use it for Catholic and some use it for Christian schools and both seem to be flourishing. Not sure if there is a voucher for homeschool.

Our public school system is as corrupt as it could be. They own the elections by stacking the primary with ringers and even same name candidates and then teachers union does the rest. Honest people have tried to get elected but can't beat the system.

My wife and I have decided to homeschool our children and my oldest son (6) started officially this past school year and will be moving into his 1st grade curriculum this coming school year. There’s no way in hell we are letting these kids be brainwashed and taught to hate their country and be shamed for having white skin with this horrific CRT bullshit, and don’t even get me started on the LBGT nonsense. NOPE.

My biggest fear honestly is that the public school system will bleed SO MANY children lost to homeschooling and private schooling that these teachers unions will try to pressure politicians into making homeschooling illegal or at least extremely difficult to do.

quote:

Originally posted by TRIO:
This gives me hope in our kids future. Parents willing to speak out against the bs that is going on in our education system.

Agreed. I think the biggest mistake conservatives made was laughing this nonsense off and assuming these kids would figure it out when they got into the real world.