Reno Gazette Journal October 17, 2021
Public education has lost its way | Sam Kumar (rgj.com)
In late-September, the National School Boards Association, NSBA, sent a letter to President Biden seeking “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence”. In that letter, NSBA claimed that the “immediate threat” could be “the equivalent of domestic terrorism and hate crimes”. The letter asked the President to get Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate such “threats” which should fall under the “PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism”. Within days, “moderate” Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland (Obama’s “moderate” Supreme Court nominee) sent a memo to the FBI Director telling him to “determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes”. No evidence of crimes was provided in the NSBA letter or the AG memo.
Who would have thought the friendly neighborhood soccer mom who juggles responsibilities between her children’s school work, soccer practice, meal preparation, laundry, house cleaning and a myriad of other things on top of a full-time job would be a domestic terrorist who needs to be prosecuted for hate crimes using the PATRIOT Act (which was passed in direct response to the 9/11 attacks to prevent bin Laden from launching another attack on this country). We live in a surreal world where parents yelling at school boards are criminals and shoplifting is not a misdemeanor as long as it is under $950.
School curricula have been loaded with political nonsense for a while now. As the advent of COVID resulted in schools teaching students online, parents gained visibility into what was being taught. What they saw being taught was far left political ideology such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), students being asked for their pronouns, renouncement their “privilege”, etc. This resulted in parents getting active in school board meetings and demanding action. Videos of these appeals from parents went viral. There was a Virginia mom who fled Communist China warning about CRT. There was the speech from a Colorado Springs dad, a direct descendent of slaves, clearly stating “I am not oppressed, and I am not a victim”. Florida mom Quisha King, another African American, calling for mass exodus from public schools. A former Fairfax County School Board member condemned the current school board for racism. The examples are endless.
The Biden administration’s response has been very telling. In addition to getting the DoJ and FBI involved, Education Secretary Cardona refused to say that parents are the “primary stakeholder” in a child’s education. In Virginia’s Gubernatorial race, former Democrat Governor and current candidate proclaimed that “parents shouldn’t be telling schools what they should teach”. In the liberal world, forget the taxpayers who fund the schools, forget the parents whose children are being taught, it’s the politicians, the unions, and the state who have the responsibility to determine what should be taught in schools. Go figure!
One final point: All too often, we get into the political back and forth and lose track of the issue at hand: the fact that our schools are failing. According to the NAEP assessment (also known as the Nation’s report Card), just 34 percent of American eighth-graders are proficient in reading and math. Shouldn’t our focus be on getting that number much higher? Our education system has clearly lost its way if we are talking about Critical Race Theory, the dubious 1619 project, selecting pronouns and other junk. How does this make us globally competitive? To paraphrase football coach Jim Mora, “Pronouns? Don’t talk about Pronouns! You kidding me? Pronouns? I just hope we can get the NAEP scores up”!