August 15, 2023
Decades of research into children’s educational achievement repeatedly demonstrate the absolute necessity of parental engagement. Ranging from 1966 with the classic Coleman report to 2007 with a longitudinal NICHD study, parents and the family are by far the most influential elements determining educational outcomes.
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In fact, the NEA itself in 2006 called for including parents and training for teachers in the process. Particularly, respectful engagement is key:
“Respectful relationships where power is shared between school staff and family members provide the glue that holds the community together and positively influences parents’ involvement.”
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Indeed, some teachers and schools go to great lengths for parental engagement, providing online access to student grades, attendance, and behavior reports as well as resources and assignments. Regular email, voicemail, and text notifications keep parents informed while smartphone apps permit ongoing conversations.
But that is not always the case. Some teachers, unions, school boards, and government actors deliberately exclude parents, dissolving the communal “glue” essential to educating kids. Why?
In 2013, the NEA proposed ejecting “right-wingers” from school boards, while today an overtly partisan NEA supports parent-derisive politicians while declaring opposition to “anti–Critical Race Theory (CRT) rhetoric.” The NEA demands parents embrace one political view or be banished.
Such partisanship formed the Biden administration’s now-defunct National Parents and Families Engagement Council. Lamenting that conservative groups “attacked” efforts at parental engagement, partisan educators ironically called for “depoliticization” while pushing intrinsically political CRT-inspired diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) and LGBT activist curricula.
Despite lack of historical or factual basis for either the 1619 Project or the Zinn Education Project, the NEA trumpeted their use in 2021. Thousands of zealot teachers declared their intent to violate laws and push these pseudo-histories. Claiming allegiance to the CRT “truth” that America is “structurally racist,” they ignore evidence to the contrary.
Meanwhile, LGBT-activist educators expose students to pornography, while parents seeking opt-outs are deceived or denied. Myriad traumatic issues result including shock, damaged self-esteem, alienation, risky/violent sexual behavior and suicide. Sexually abusing children with pornography is exploited by child predators to manipulate or “groom” their victims — yet defended by partisan advocates.
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Never mind respectful parental engagement; CRT and LGBT ideology is covertly pushed. Undercover investigators with Accuracy In Media (AIM) exposed several CRT-allied school systems in Indiana; Nebraska; Dallas, TX; and North Carolina claiming they “can do more good under the radar.”
Meanwhile, these Indiana systems demonstrate abysmal student proficiencies in English and math (Figure). Roughly 7 in 10 students fail at the fundamentals under the guidance of subversive CRT-zealot educators — some in defiance of CRT curriculum bans.
Camouflaging “trans kids'” gender dysphoria from parents, educators from Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois discussed tactics via the Dept. of Education–funded Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP) for subverting laws due to their “code of ethics.” Dissenting input is ignored while activists share guidance on dealing with “disgruntled” parents.
Teachers resisting the agenda are forced to prioritize political and social activism over education. “Culturally responsive teaching” (CRT2) — another mask for critical race theory — is required for teacher licensing in Illinois and pushed in New York City and Baltimore while proficiencies in fundamentals fall to ludicrous levels.
Nationwide, an “anti-racist” online education service, Newsela, boasts deployment in three quarters of U.S. schools, exposing some 10 million students to “Teaching Tolerance,” CRT content from the partisan swindlers and radicalizers of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Meanwhile, CRT-embracing non-profit “think-tanks” in D.C. eagerly monitor progress of CRT2 across the nation: thousands of teachers are pushed into servicing a vast indoctrination treadmill while test scores nationwide plumb historic lows.
Products of academic monocultures, teachers are systematically radicalized by ideology. Universities in America replicate and exceed the worst features of Soviet institutions, including (i) chilling speech, (ii) ideological omnipresence, (iii) intolerance of dissenting views, and (iv) “Newspeak” thought control.
American taxpayers fund these brainwashing machines. Awards from the National Science Foundation support CRT-infused research in myriad fields, with the greatest impact on education. Based on false assumptions and demonstrably failed solutions, a pseudo-religious movement marches through our institutions with devastating effects for generations to come — fueled by your tax dollar in universities and schools.
Beyond compelling educators to explicitly deceive parents about their children’s “sexual identity,” legislators in “blue” states push laws to simply take the kids away. Soon, trans-activist therapists ignoring damage of permanent “gender-affirming” treatments will be empowered with discretion to seize children from LGBT-resisting parents under the guise of child protection.
Rights of parents are dismissed by advocacy journalists and activist academics, declaring them a “distraction.” Education professors claim that conservative parents must be interdicted — with no sense of irony — to prevent “indoctrination” before it’s too late. Lumped together with racism, “heteronormativity” is viewed analogously through the anti-racism lens of CRT zealotry. Bringing your kids up gay is the objective, and laying the groundwork for bringing the State to bear, “your” kids are not actually yours.
Justification follows for outright dismantling of families and society itself, seen as infested with heterosexual “normalcy,” akin to the Ku Klux Klan. With sanctimonious fervor, activists call these efforts “liberation” while partisans force libraries and schools to comply. Ignoring stories of kids suffering under the LGBT social experiment, resistance is grotesquely portrayed as child abuse.
Compulsion, consolidation, and centralization of power are decades-old weapons for deliberately shutting parents out. The Dept. of Education facilitates and enforces radical partisan polices across the nation, triggering former secretary of education DeVos to call for shutting it down.
Parents and teachers cry out against the tidal wave of indoctrination but meet stiff resistance. Detractors seek ending or controlling alternatives such as homeschooling while activist teacher unions — whose power drives down student performance — fight charter schools that perform better and escape the radicals.
A vast DIE and LGBT indoctrination complex confronts parents and their fundamental human rights “to know, to understand, and to share in decisions that affect the education of their children.”
Sanctimonious ideologues and activists view resistant parents and educators as obstacles regardless of educational outcomes. Failing to manufacture illiterate or sexually abused students by schools that ignore or perversely punish parents, partisan zealots then seek seizure of dissenting parents’ children by the State.
The communal “glue” for concerned parents and teachers protecting children from these corrosive ideologies is being bludgeoned with political weapons. Parents and their allies in education must therefore engage in politics at local, state, and federal levels. Otherwise, they may face Child Protective Services knocking at their door. At stake is not just kids fulfilling their potential as independent-thinking, emotionally stable, and productive members of society — but society itself:
“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”
—Thomas Sowell
Dr. Means is a mathematical biologist and Christian apologist with numerous publications in scientific journals, perpetually striving with university mathematics students wrecked by failing secondary schools.
Image via Pxfuel.
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