Local parents 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

So the NSBA has backed down from its accusation that dissenting parents are terrorists. Good. But the U.S. Attorney General has not backed away from ordering the FBI to go after those dissenting parents. Bad. Parents have a right to watch over their kids' school experience and dissent when they see fit.

But are the parents violent? That, of course, would be unlawful. But check out this example in the NSBA letter of "violence" by dissenting parents:

A Loudoun County VA school district parent was called last spring and asked to come to the school about his daughter's "altercation" in the bathroom. It turned out that the police came and escorted the girl to the hospital for a rape exam which produced positive evidence, and the boy involved was charged and later found guilty.

The school board met weeks later to adopt a bathroom policy based on gender identity. The girl's mom and dad objected because the boy who raped their daughter in the bathroom was wearing a skirt. The superintendent flat-out lied that they had never had an assault in a bathroom. The parents were upset. The dad was pinned to the ground by police. 

photo

That's their example of "violence." The Attorney General should rescind his order to the FBI to target dissenting parents when it's based on examples like this.

from AEI

Move aside 7

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A power struggle is taking place in public schools over the question of who has authority to choose what is best for children. Government schools claim it for themselves (yesterday's post) and deny it to parents. Courts are deciding the answer in cases around America.

Decisions vary. Muslim, Jewish and Christian parents fought back in Maryland. They wanted the freedom to release their kids from LGBTQ curriculum, to opt out; but the judge denied them that freedom. She said parents had no right to do that.

photo

Is it true that parents don't have that right before the law in America? Judges are supposed to make decisions that are consistent with precedent, that is, "previous judicial decisions on the same subject."

Precedent in American law is solidly on the side of parents in multiple cases. In 2000, the Supreme Court said, "“The interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children is the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.” 

That Maryland judge was acting on her own preference or politics, but clearly not on the side  of established law in America. "Supreme Court precedent unequivocally establishes parents’ fundamental rights in raising and nurturing their children . . ."

from The Stream

Move aside 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Fortunately, there are a few Ph.D. educators who believe in parents. Dr. Keri Ingraham is one of them. She says it's time that new politicians and school boards are elected to work with parents in the education of their children -- not against them.

photo

It seems like parents were asleep with regard to some of their schools' policies until recently. Maybe it was watching their kids doing school on screens at home that triggered the wake-up. Maybe it was something else. But for some parents, their assumption that the school shared their values has died an abrupt death.

Parents don't want gender confusion taught to their children, for example. Kids as young as five may be taught to select whether they are girls or boys, along with a new name. Older kids can go to a "wellness center" for an abortion, or for opposite-sex hormones, all free of charge. All without parent consent, or in some cases without even their knowing about it.

Parents don't want the new racism called "critical race theory" taught to their kids either. It's why this dad made an appearance at his school board meeting to object in a very loud voice. It's why this "Mama Grizzly" goes to school board meetings. It's why this dad removed his daughter from her private New York school and sent a letter to all the parents urging them to wake up. It's how this dad feels about his babies.

from Discovery

(cont'd tomorrow)

Move aside 6

Follow-up to these posts

Should schools tell the parents if a student wants to change to the opposite sex? 

Parents say yes; schools often tell parents to mind their own business (in effect). Parents get the feeling that they're being attacked for trying to protect and raise their kids. 

Yes, it's hard to believe that schools violate parents like this, but they do. In California, the government throws its enormous weight on the side of the attack.

Rocklin Unified School District board of trustees voted 4-1 last month to require that teachers tell parents if their child wants to change their sex. Trustees said, "We trust our parents to know what is best for their children."

Orange Unified School District voted 4-0 to require the same kind of notification. Four others adopted this policy during the summer.

One of the four, Chino Unified School District, is being sued by the state's attorney general. A judge has temporarily put a hold on their chosen policy.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Parents say No

American Library Association (ALA) has been recommending pornographic, sexually explicit books to schools. Parents don't want their children or their neighbors' children exposed to this material.

photo

Parents in America historically assumed that the influence of their public schools and libraries would be in line with their own values. That used to be a safe assumption, but unfortunately a huge gap between the two now exists and parents are scrambling to take back their kids.

Battles are being fought in various localities across the country. But the one in Gillette, Wyoming, seems to have ended with a win for community and parents.

After months of hearing parents bring their concerns to public meetings, the Campbell County Commission took the extreme step of banning all public comments. Eventually the ban ended, and the commission was re-populated with members friendly to the parents.

Last month the county library board cut all ties with the ALA.

from Mass Resistance

Move aside 8

Follow-up to these posts

Welcome to the week of celebrating Independence Day (4th of July). We start with an excellent ruling coming down last week from the Supreme Court: 

Parents are the authority in choosing what is best for their children. Schools cannot take that authority away from them. 

In a post from 2022, I reported that Muslim, Jewish and Christian parents tried to "opt out" their kids from classes promoting LGBTQ. School administrators would not cooperate, saying that parents have no right to "opt out" their kids. The Supreme Court decided with the parents that they do have that right. 

Many schools are trying to subvert the choices of parents, trying to get parents to "move aside" and let them take control (image generated by Grok). With this SC decision, that will end -- or should. When school teachers or administrators in the future try to re-assert dominance, a lawful judge will have to decide with the parents.

Good parents 1

Everybody on earth gets just one childhood. Nobody affects their experience of childhood like the parents. It's a potentially daunting responsibility that some adults don't want to take on, but that most will do. 

Good parenting is not perfect parenting. But do your best to be a good parent (it will often require courage). Today and tomorrow the posts are about parents trying to guide their kids' childhoods toward good outcomes. The stories are from earlier this year. First, from last June:

Two months ago, a dad in New York City wrote a letter to parents of students at his daughter's private school. It voiced the alarmed concern of many of the school's parents. It went viral. 

He objects to the school's empty claim to favor diversity. If it really did, it wouldn't work so hard at indoctrinating students and families to a single mindset.

photo

He objects to the school's empty claim to favor equity. If it really did, it would cease preferring rich and connected students for admission.

He objects to the school's empty claim to favor inclusiveness. If it really did, its curriculum would not drive every child into one of two classes, oppressors and oppressed.

He objects to the school's support for the Black Lives Matter organization. He objects to the censoring of good books simply because of dated language. He objects to grade inflation and reduced standards for classwork.

He objects to the school teaching racism while it claims to favor anti-racism. Its policies are "misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous." And he calls on other parents to speak up.

from bariweiss

Move aside 1

Does the government or the school board own your kids? Many seem to think:

Move aside, parents, we've got your kids. We decide what they learn and what they value. We  protect them from you. Your values and opinions are wrong. Ours are right, so you must obey our agenda. Accept it: we are in charge, so move aside.

No one to my knowledge has actually said those words, but the attitude is very real. Here are the actual words of a real Ph.D. educator:

"Parents have always tried to interfere with curricula . . . Part of the problem is that parents think they have the right to control teaching and learning because their children are the ones being educated. But it actually (gasp!) doesn’t work that way."

Their goal, she says, is to train students in "empathy, passion, intelligence and engagement," in thinking for themselves--while parents' influence would produce "the exact opposite." So, in her view, parents want their kids to be cold-hearted, stupid and isolated. 

When it comes to empathy, she seemingly has none for parents.

from NBC News

(cont'd tomorrow)

CA vs family 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"Break the parent-child relationship" -- yes, it has come to this. The Left claims the right to stand between parents and children when parents want to protect their child and have broken no law. 

Author Abigail Shrier recognizes a pattern in the California government's new law, a pattern she's seen before:

"Child predators follow a common playbook: target the victim, gain their trust, fill a need, and, crucially, isolate the child from her parents. For several years, this has also been standard California state protocol with regard to school children questioning their gender identities. On Monday [July 15], this scheme became law."

image

Just a few years ago, parents could organize at the local level to re-assert their own values and keep their school boards from deceiving them. They can't opt their kids out of gender identity training anymore, either, because it's in the required bullying curriculum, not in the sex ed classes. A lot of parents are alarmed and upset.

from The Free Press

(cont'd tomorrow)

CRT in school

After living through real and terrible oppression, Yeonmi Park was shocked to find Columbia University teaching that their free and relatively wealthy students are oppressed in America. 

This dad stood up to fight CRT at his Chicago school. This dad withdrew his child from a private New York school, and spelled out exactly why in an open letter to all the other parents of students. Parents are waking up to pervasive "critical theory" ideology in their kids' schools, and doing their best to stop it. Will they be successful? Unknown. 

Do parents still have authority for decisions on behalf of their kids? Dad and mom can no longer assume the school represents their values. They must look into what's being taught and find out. 

Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina have either passed or are considering legislation to make school boards more responsible to parents or to publicly post a list of materials they use. 

Parents want a clear look into their kids' classrooms. They demand transparency.

photo

(cont'd tomorrow)

Success factors

(cont'd, How Children Succeed)

Fully living life means that you overcome problems and obstacles, that you choose between possibilities, that you imagine better things and you build something. Stress is involved.

Stress happens to everybody including children, and that's a good thing.  If a child has a parent who helps him recover from failure and adversity, he/she will be resilient and braver for life.  

But disadvantaged children by definition grow up in a chronically stressed home that may  include abandonment, abuse, alcohol, poverty, etc.  Living like this means that the child's chemical stress response system does lifelong damage if, as is often the case, no one trains him/her to recover from stress and adversity.

The emphasis to help children succeed at school has lifted off of flashcards and educational toys - to an effort to help parents be supportive.  Non-profits often coach parents now to build character qualities into their kids, something they don't know how to do if they haven't had it from their own parents.

The KIPP organization is one effort to work with parents to build successful behavior and thinking into the lives of poor children.  KIPP schools combine intense academic training with equally intense training in character qualities like self-control and optimism.  

Local parents 1

(follow-up to Oct. 8 post)

Local school boards across America have their own state associations, and the state associations belong to the National School Boards Association (NSBA). The national association is run by executives and staff, all of whom answer to its own Board of Directors . . and that board made a huge course correction last Friday.

In a September 29 letter to the White House which was written by NSBA executives, parents who protest the policies of their local school boards are compared to violent "domestic terrorists" and the executives wanted the federal government to take action against them.

Parents across the country were understandably shocked and angry.

The course correction came in a letter from NSBA's Board of Directors to all its association members saying they "regret and apologize" for the Sept. 29 letter, and that "there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.” 

So the corrected position of the National School Board Association is that parents who lift their  voices at local school board meetings are not to be called terrorists. A step back from the brink.

from NYPost

(cont'd tomorrow)

Resistance 1

In a (mostly minority) suburb of Los Angeles, parents resist the schools' telling students that they can/should change their sex -- they resist strongly, taking the fight to their local school boards: "How dare you teach these lies to our kids?!"

Los Angeles County, using federal government funds, builds "Wellbeing Centers" in schools where Planned Parenthood-trained staffers carry out PP agendas.

Skirmishes like this one take place all over the country. Parents used to trust their local schools to teach their local values. Then they found, to their horror, that something weird happened when they weren't looking. The people who run the schools at some point devolved into strangers with opposite values. And it seems those strangers don't respect parents' opinions.

As these parents take a stand, they have to call on their courage. They are often awkward in the spotlight. But they're determined to call a halt to the damage being done to children.

Children succeed

(cont'd, How Children Succeed)

A number of studies now show that IQ is not the best predictor of success in school.  The key seems rather to be a set of character qualities.  High GPA may occur all along the intelligence range if the student is able to delay gratification, stick to a goal, ignore distractions, control fear, pursue curiosity, and many more.

The strongest predictor of perseverance and social skills in students is not IQ but rather . . how their parents took care of them.  Really?  Yes.  Here are some summary statements of the findings of a number of studies:

"Babies whose parents responded readily and fully to their cries were, at one year, more independent and intrepid than babies whose parents had ignored their cries."

"Early parental care predicted which students would graduate even more reliably than IQ or achievement test scores."

"Children with secure attachment [to mother] early on were more socially competent throughout their lives."

"Children whose parents had been judged disengaged or emotionally unavailable in early assessments of their parenting style did the worst in preschool,"  that is, they were more often mean, antisocial, and insecure.

"Counselors rated campers who had had secure attachment in infancy as more self-confident, more curious, and better able to deal with setbacks."

"The early nurturing attention from their mothers had fostered in them a resilience that acted as a protective buffer against stress."

"High quality mothering  . . can act as a powerful buffer against the damage that adversity inflicts on a child's stress-response system."

Racism & school

Last week's posts told the story of teacher Paul Rossi in a New York school. He objected to the new racism required there, and the Head of School agreed, but the ideology still continues to rule. New York schools are not alone.

Minnesota schools do likewise, largely unknown to parents and taxpayers.

Last fall the Hopkins Superintendent told staff that they were going to focus on how the white race is responsible for a pandemic of injustice. They fight white supremacy with policies like not requiring black students to turn in assignments on time (racial injustice). Presumably white students must still be on time.

It's hidden from parents. A Sartell student says all the students had to answer personal questions on an "equity" survey whether they understood them or not, and were forbidden to tell their parents about the questions. It made her very uncomfortable, and she apparently told her parents anyway.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Move aside 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A political campaign last fall brought the issue to national attention. A candidate for governor took his stand against parents in a similar way to the educator in Tuesday's post. Shocked parents voted "No" to his campaign, and he lost. The new governor seems to have their backs.

It came as a shock to find out that political indoctrination had replaced academic learning in their children's classes. Parents know that gender confusion, malicious new racism, declining academic standards, etc., may result in permanent harm to their kids - not the empathy/intelligence claimed by this educator.

Now we've found out that there's a sizable number of parents who are by no means ready to give away their responsibility and rights. Eventually we'll find out if enough of them will stay engaged with their children's education long term . . long enough to turn this ship around.

photo

Underperform 1

Parents in large numbers are disappointed with their kids' schools, a big trend in the last couple of years. When they objected to school boards and administrators, they were often told that they had no right to object - that they must humbly submit to schools' decisions on what their kids would learn.

So there is a war being fought over who has the ultimate responsibility and authority in children's lives. Many parents refuse to hand over the right to protect their kids to the government.

At least they want to choose what school would give their kids the best education. In most places, they are legally free to choose a non-public school . . but they would have to pay all the fees while their taxes still fund that under-performing public school. The movement for "school choice" would re-direct the parents' taxes to the school their child attends.

Sometimes they're able to elect government officials who will help. It looks like that happened in the state of Arizona, where their governor says: "Fifty-plus years ago politicians stood in the schoolhouse door and wouldn’t let minorities in, today union-backed politicians stand in the schoolhouse door and won’t let minorities out. Many of our poor kids and children of color are trapped in a failing school. It’s time to set these families free."

from Discovery Institute

(cont'd tomorrow)

Patriotism

Erik Metaxas has immigrant parents, his dad from Greece and his mom from Germany. They raised him to love America. "When my parents passed the Statue of Liberty in the ships that carried them to our shores, they didn’t roll their eyes — they were deeply moved."

But his education taught contempt for America, and he "drank this anti-American Kool-Aid." As a young husband and dad, things changed for Erik, and--with his own mom and dad--he loves his country today. He says his parents "understood that this was the real thing, a noble experiment in liberty that was worthy of celebrating and, if at all possible, joining."

"If we do not begin to understand and appreciate what made us great — including the noble and flawed heroes of our history, who risked life and limb so that we could have liberties unlike any before in the history of the world —  we can never again be great. We can never again be the “shining city on a hill” that caused millions to want to be like us."

Lazy stereotype

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Forbes writer Mike McShane joined the blowback on that Harvard law professor's campaign to outlaw homeschooling.

His article, "Harvard's Lazy Attack on Homeschooling," makes the same point I did this week, which is that their case is easily countered. (The image above was used in the Harvard Magazine article - how funny is it that they originally misspelled "arithmetic!") Studies show that homeschooled kids do very well academically and are no less safe at home.

Regarding the professor's objection to "conservative Christian" parents, she should know that she can't get a law passed to silence political opinion she doesn't like (yesterday's post). 

McShane adds that homeschooling parents are actually diverse, not only the stereotype. Kids with special needs are the primary reason why about 10% of parents do homeschooling, while 8% are African-American and 26% are Hispanic. 

CRT & school

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Alarmingly, the U.S. government has taken a side against . . parents . . who object to what they've discovered their kids are learning at school.

It's in response to the National School Boards Association's letter to the U.S. president claiming that local boards are under "immediate threats" of violence and intimidation that may be too much for local law enforcement to handle. The feds must step in. 

Quick to respond, the U.S. Attorney General ordered the FBI to target and investigate protests toward local school boards and to potentially prosecute them. Dissenters are likened to domestic terrorists.

photo

What's going on? Violence against school board members would be immoral and unlawful. Everyone agrees on that. But dissent and protest is an obvious and court-approved right in America and must not be targeted by the government. 

Parents Defending Education says, "Concerned parents are not domestic terrorists!"

(cont'd tomorrow)