Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Ask, We Won’t Sue

Solas, CRT, Critical Race Theory

Uh oh. Haul out the armament and load and aim — at least if you’re responsible for educating the young daughter of Nicole Solas.

Solas is among the many parents who missed the memo about how sinful it is to have some idea of and influence on what their kids learn in public schools.

She’d heard about how public schools have been indoctrinating kids with a noxious ideological brew about race and gender. So she asked the principal of her daughter’s school in the South Kingstown School District of Rhode Island whether collectivist critical race theory and gender theory were any part of the curriculum.

The principal give hints that this was indeed happening. But then the school stopped talking. Instead of elaborating, school officials told Solas to instead send formal public record requests to learn what was happening at the school.

Which she did. Then the school district began publicly harassing her for being a “threat to public education” (as we all should be, given such doings). The Rhode Island branch of the National Education Association even went so far as to sue this mom.

Nicole Solas could easily have been swamped by litigation costs. Fortunately, the Goldwater Institute stepped in to defend her against the lawsuit and help her pursue her inquiries about the school.

As for her little girl, she’s doing fine. In a private school that is open about what it teaches, which doesn’t include any corrosive political agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom national politics & policies

The Explosion in Alternatives

home school, student, education

“Across the country, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented explosion in homeschooling and alternative education,” Sharyl Attkinson reported last Sunday on her weekly news program, Full Measure, citing a “mass exodus from America’s public schools.”

And it’s not just about pandemic measures like mask mandates. In February, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly recalled three school board members over their fixation on wokeness to the exclusion of in-person education. And the school board’s antics in liberal Loudoun County, Virginia, turned last year’s race for governor into a referendum on whether parents have any say-so at all. 

They do, apparently. 

Though I have covered the enormous growth of alternative education during the pandemic — here and here, for instance — I have been looking for more specifics. 

“Relative to pre-pandemic levels,” Corey DeAngelis with the American Federation for Children told Attkisson, “homeschooling has at least doubled,” and now accounts for “closer to 4 million students.”

Too good to be true? I double-checked. The U.S. Census Bureau used the same language as Attkisson and DeAngelis: “the global COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new interest in homeschooling and the appeal of alternative school arrangements has suddenly exploded.”

At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, “about 5.4% of U.S. households with school-aged children reported homeschooling,” according to their Household Pulse Survey. “By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling.”

The increase was five-fold for “respondents identified as Black or African American,” with 16.1% homeschooling.

“Still more students have left for religious schools,” reminds DeAngelis, “or other private schools.”

Attkisson also pointed to a jump in support for school choice.

Parents of the world unite. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling term limits

Term Limits for School Boards

Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida, school boards, education

Statewide term limits on Florida’s school boards are finally here.

The limits passed by Florida’s legislature and signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis are not the best one could hope for. State senators pushed for and got a 12-year limit rather than the eight-year limit preferred by house members.

Regardless, parents and children are better off with at least some legal limit on the tenure of board members and on their opportunity to abuse power — some curb in addition to the possibility of surmounting the overwhelming electoral advantages that incumbents typically enjoy.

Governor DeSantis agrees that the legislation reaching his desk should have been an eight-year limit.

“They did three terms . . . and I wouldn’t veto the bill just over that. But if it were a standalone measure, I would have insisted on just two terms for school board members because I think that’s enough time to go, serve, get stuff done.”

In 2018, the Florida Constitutional Revision Commission sent eight-year limits on school-board tenure to the voters as Amendment 8. But the Florida Supreme Court knocked the question off the ballot because the limits were combined with other measures to reform education, like more freedom for charter schools.

It is a near-certainty that voters would have passed the measure — a prospect that terrified those who benefit from rampant school-board corruption.

Sure, what has now been enacted is only a partial remedy. But it’s something.

I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that something good is better than nothing good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Cowardice 101

racism, reverse discrimination, quota

An anonymous author at Quillette reports a 2017 conversation between the author, a professor, and a student, Daniel. Daniel had carefully analyzed abundant evidence of race-based “affirmative action” policies at their university and the destructiveness of those policies.

The author says he stressed that “it would be unwise for Daniel to launch a campaign against the admissions committee,” no matter how solid the data.

Bury the findings, was his advice. The campaign would fail and “probably” do no long-run good. (Implying that bad cultural trends are not even partly reversible, or at least “probably” aren’t; ergo, good men, do nothing.)

Also, publishing “would probably end up hurting him rather than helping him.”

Suppose a scholar like Thomas Sowell, who has compiled massive evidence contradicting the assumption that racism or the legacy of slavery “explains” all economic patterns and disparate outcomes, had followed such vicious advice when starting out?

“Don’t do it! Don’t report your research and conclusions, Mr. Sowell! You’ll never advance by pursuing the truth! Just go along to get along. Like me.”

According to the professor, Daniel was not entirely consistent in his indictment of quotas. The professor could have encouraged him to be more consistent. Instead, he encouraged him to give up.

Our quisling Quillette academic could have told Daniel: “You’re right, and I can help you to strengthen your argument. Why don’t we co-author something about this so that you won’t have to deal with the flak alone?”

Did the possibility even occur to him?

What an education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Woke Board Broke

San Francisco, school board, recall

The pro-education, anti-indoctrination counterrevolution is chalking up a major win in . . . San Francisco?

Homeschooling — or at least private-school schooling — sounds better every day. Pandemic-rationalized permanent shutdowns of classrooms, along with the accelerating ideological assaults that many school boards are waging on behalf of gender fluidity, racist “antiracism,” regimented speech, etc., do more than merely suggest we find alternatives.

Yet, for one reason or another, many families are stuck with public schools.

But they are apparently not stuck with the very worst that public schools can impose. Last Tuesday, in the first recall election in San Francisco in some 40 years, fed-up parents threw giant butterfly nets over three local school-board malefactors and dragged them off stage: Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga.

Instead of working to reopen schools, the board’s been busy these last couple of years killing merit-based admissions at the magnet school Lowell High, scrubbing the names of dozens of schools to get rid of such blighted appellations as “Abraham Lincoln” and “George Washington,” and spending a million bucks to repaint a mural of the life of Washington. Last year, the district’s budget deficit swelled to around $125 million.

After the votes came in, other educrats in town scurried to the defense of the downfallen trio and prayed that their replacements would consist of more of the same.

But what parents can do once, they can do again, and not just in San Francisco. 

Kids, shake their hands. Your moms and dads are cool.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

Freedom Fighting Washougal-Style

Three young men at Washougal High School in Washington state are leading a common-sense rebellion against mask mandates.

The evidence has been in for a while. Young people aren’t at much risk from COVID-19. And masks with less than N95-level filtering don’t much help in reducing the risk of being infected by COVID-19.

The form of the protest is simple. Walkouts and refusal to mask up. The leaders are Washougal High School seniors Cade Costales, Caleb Bennett, and Harrison Tanner.

They stress that the target of their protest is the state government, which imposed the mandate.

“It’s not the school district, as it is the state that is mandating masks,” Tanner says. “We are trying to get notice up to the state level to get the mask mandate revoked so it’s optional in schools. So we have freedom and liberty.”

Costales urges students to be respectful: “We want this to be a peaceful, respectful movement. We are just trying to gain back our rights as citizens. The teachers in the end are just doing their jobs. It doesn’t come from them. It comes from the state. . . .

“We’re doing this peacefully and respectfully. If a staff member asks you to put a mask on, you say ‘No, thank you’ and keep walking. And if they kick you out, then go home. If people need rides home, then I’m sure some of the seniors can start giving people rides home.”

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says that the time is not yet right to take away indoor mask requirements. Just like Canada’s Justin Trudeau, it’s time he stopped talking and started listening.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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