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New Year’s Cheers

I recently reported on many of the dreadful happenings in the education realm as we kick off the new year, but there have also been some promising turns.

DEI

Following Florida’s lead earlier in 2024, other states, including Georgia, Alabama, Utah, and Iowa, have passed anti-DEI measures.

Then, in December, the Idaho State Board of Education approved a ban on DEI ideology in higher education as part of its commitment to “the success of every student.” Their resolution states, “Institutions shall not establish or maintain a central office, policy, procedure, or initiative that promotes DEI ideology,” which they define as “any approach that prioritizes ‘personal identity characteristics’ (race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, or gender identity) over individual merit.”

School choice and possible political consequences

Ed Tarnowski, policy and advocacy director at EdChoice, affirms that in 2024, five states created new school choice programs and six expanded existing ones. Alabama and Louisiana now have universal programs, while Georgia’s Educational Savings Account law provides limited eligibility.

In Utah, the state doubled its program’s funding, doubling the number of students eligible for their choice program.

North Carolina’s legislature acted by overriding the governor’s veto on legislation to expand its school choice program.

Additionally, New Hampshire is in a position to achieve true universal choice this year, especially because every student is already guaranteed funding. As Tarnowski explains, the state legislature would not have to pass new appropriations laws or alter funding caps.

Furthermore, Tarnowski expects school choice measures in Tennessee, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Carolina during 2025.

This year also holds promise for new programs in Texas, where school-choice advocates won seats in the legislature this past November.

As school choice advances, Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, declares that voters no longer trust Democrats to deliver on educational needs. He writes that American schools are failing too many children, “particularly those from the very communities Democrats claim to champion. Literacy and math proficiency rates are abysmal, and too many students graduate unprepared for college or careers. And yet, too many Democrats have positioned themselves as defenders of the status quo. This is both morally indefensible and a core reason why we have lost touch with our base.”

Colleges

On the national level, incoming Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has some plans to do something about our broken college system, with its outrageously expensive, ineffective, and typically agenda-driven curriculum. Insane tuition rates have saddled students with a collective $1.8 trillion in debt. At the same time, many graduates lack even the basic skills necessary to succeed in the workforce.

McMahon is committed to addressing what she correctly views as “educational malpractice” in our universities. Her focus on outcomes, accountability, and transparency has higher education leaders quivering at the prospect that their world is about to be shaken up.

The sex and gender-obsessed crowd has taken several hits

On Jan. 3, House Republicans passed a bill that would amend Title IX by prohibiting federally funded colleges and K-12 schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate in sports teams aligning with their new gender identity. (The original Title IX, drafted in 1972, simply prohibited sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.)

On a similar note, on Jan. 9, a federal judge struck down the Biden administration’s revised Title IX rule nationwide, declaring that the regulations violate the Constitution.

Additionally, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has scored several legal victories by defending teachers who object to using students’ preferred pronouns, which were mandated by school districts.

Ethnic studies pushback

A new organization is focused on providing an alternative to the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC), which is infused with Critical Race Theory and employs every CRT buzzword imaginable to advance its propaganda. For example, it asks students to “critique imperialist/colonial hegemonic beliefs and to critique empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

Mitch Siegler, a California businessman, has just launched the THINC Foundation, which stands for transparency, honesty, and integrity in the classroom.

“I think this is one of the more important issues facing our society, and there are ways to make it better, Siegler told Chalkboard News. “We certainly spend plenty of money on education in this nation, and we ought to get it right.”

Siegler stresses that THINC is “shining a light” on liberated ethnic studies and will give parents “a fighting chance to know what their kids are being taught.”

Because the LESMC curriculum claims that Israel is a colonialist and settler state created through “genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid,” Jewish parents and teachers are currently fighting a pitched legal battle to keep these lies out of the Los Angeles public schools. At this time, they are planning to appeal a federal judge’s ruling dismissing their lawsuit against the Los Angeles teachers union and the consortium that created the curriculum.

The appeal is expected to be filed by the end of January.

The education wars are not new

Hence, the new year will see a continuation of the ongoing education culture clashes that have been with us for some time now. In fact, they have been raging for more than a quarter of a century. I wrote the following in 1999 when I was still a middle school teacher:

“We have children who think of themselves as casualties of one ism or another and teachers who lower their expectations accordingly, which is an effective and insidious form of prejudice. (In 2006, then POTUS George W. Bush referred to this as ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’)

“Our time with these children is limited, and the effort spent teaching about the various cultures and multiple perspectives and helping each child to ‘feel better’ about who he/she is and where they came from is always at the expense of teaching essential subjects. So, hand in hand with multiculturalism came the dumbing down of our curriculum and standards. California’s academic free fall in the last twenty years speaks for itself.”

Stay tuned.

***

Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network—a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

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About Larry Sand

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network—a nonpartisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

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