by Loretta Hunnicutt | Nov 16, 2022 | Education, News
By Loretta Hunnicutt |
From the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) to local school board positions, several conservatives are currently leading or have already won key races on the education front in the 2022 General Election.
As of press time, Republican candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), Tom Horne, had increased his lead in his challenge of incumbent Kathy Hoffman. Horne previously served as SPI from 2003 to 2011, prior to successfully running for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. If the results hold up, Horne says his focus as SPI will be on improving student performance and eradicating Critical Race Theory-based curriculum from Arizona’s public schools.
In the Peoria Unified School District race, Heather Rooks won a hard-fought and challenging race. Her efforts to expose the Social Emotional Learning-based policies and practices in the district eventually led her to request an injunction against an activist parent. As reported by the Arizona Daily Independent, Rooks, a mother of four school-aged children, obtained the injunction based on threats from Democrat activist, Josh Gray.
Two other conservative candidates, Amy Carney and Carine Werner, secured seats on the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) Governing Board. Their victories serve as a powerful repudiation of out-going Governing Board Member Jann-Michael Greenburg. Greenburg was sued by parents who accused him of trying to silence them after they exposed his secret Google Drive dossier on them. As AZ Free News reported in April, that dossier included a trove of political opposition research on parents, who opposed the district’s adoption of Social Emotional Learning and Critical Race Theory.
In the race for Flowing Wells School District Governing Board—an area known for being blue—conservative Brianna Hernandez Hamilton is currently holding on to one of two open spots. A mother of three very young children, Hernandez Hamilton ran with the slogan: “Parents + Teachers = Quality Education.”
Kurt Rohrs, a long-time education activist and frequent contributor to AZ Free News, won a spot on the Chandler Unified School District Governing Board. Rohrs, like Horne, focused on improving student performance and eliminating the divisive Critical Race Theory from the district’s curriculum. Many see Rohrs’ presence on the board as an opportunity to restore calm to the district which had become the center of controversy thanks to out-going board member Lindsay Love.
In the race for Dysart Unified School District Governing Board, conservative Dawn Densmore was retained by voters. As current president of the board, Densmore successfully led the fight to end the district’s relationship with the Arizona School Board Association (ASBA). Jennifer Drake also won a seat on the board.
Sandra Christensen is set to win a seat on the Paradise Valley Unified School District Governing Board. Libby Settle and Madicyn Reid are in the lead for spots in Fountain Hills. Paul Carver should take a win in Deer Valley. Jackie Ulmer appears to have been successful in Cave Creek as well as Rachel Walden in Mesa and Chad Thompson in Gilbert. In the Higley Unified School District, conservative Anna Van Hoek also won a seat on the board.
In a tweet from earlier this week, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos summed up what many parents have been feeling over the past few years – left out. In response to the National Education Association’s claim that teachers “know better than anyone” what students need in the classroom, DeVos responded, “You misspelled parents.”
by Dr. Thomas Patterson | Nov 11, 2022 | Opinion
By Dr. Thomas Patterson |
One of the things I appreciated most during my 30 years practicing medicine in community hospital ERs was that race just didn’t matter very much. ERs were open to all, and there was one standard of care for all races and classes.
That was then. Today a wave of intolerant wokeness is sweeping over our healthcare system, insisting that medicine is shot through with systemic racism and that research and education efforts must be diverted from medical science to “dismantling white supremacy” in medicine.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently introduced their new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) guidelines, which require that all medical students be taught to practice “allyship” when “witnessing injustice such as ‘microaggressions.’”
Residents are told to use their more advanced knowledge of intersectionality in making clinical decisions. (Just when you thought that race-based medical protocols were in our dark past.). Faculty are charged with teaching how “systems of power, privilege, and oppression inform policies and practices.”
Medical schools are enthusiastically falling in line. Examples abound. In 2021, the Anti-Racism Task Force at Columbia and the Diversity Task Force at Indiana University, joined by the University of Texas and other medical schools, endorsed the recommended AAMC “competencies.” “Health equity” concepts have become a prominent component of medical education.
The University of North Carolina is one of many schools that not only teach “social justice” and “anti-racism,” but use medical school applications to ensure compliance with principles of diversity in race, gender, and sexual orientation. Applicants who demonstrate reluctance toward the DEI agenda are weeded out in the application process. Oregon Health and Science University faculty are among those evaluated on their “DEI, anti-racism, and social justice core competencies” in performance appraisals.
The University of Arizona is on board too, with some additional twists. All faculty and staff are required to complete six hours of DEI training and complete one Implicit Association Test annually (in spite of its dubious relevance). Each of 17 clinical departments is required to hold three DEI credit-eligible events per year. All departments also have designated “diversity champions” to oversee compliance and round up laggards.
This is bad, very bad news for medical education, future doctors, and patients. Even before DEI was a thing, the quality of medical instruction had been in decline. Incoming students are less qualified and fail rates on board exams are climbing, partly because some students from groups that have been historically underserved are either allowed to skip the Medical College Admissions Test or are admitted with lower scores than those required from white and Asian applicants.
But instead of beefing up instruction in anatomy, physiology, and other disciplines that might come in handy when actually practicing medicine, medical schools are spending instructional time on such matters as white privilege and anti-racism, including Critical Race Theory (CRT).
CRT includes the notion that white people are inherently prejudiced against people of color and that there really is nothing they can do but acknowledge their defect, apologize, and grant compensating privileges to people of contrasting skin color, who by definition are incapable of bigotry. Dissenters from this new orthodoxy can be accused of “micro-aggressions” and “repressive practices” with ominous repercussions for their careers.
This intellectual intolerance also extends to those skeptical of “gender affirming care” for adolescents. This new practice provides permanent medical and surgical alterations to gender-confused school children for the rest of their lives so they can pretend to be the gender they choose when a teen. What could go wrong?
Several countries, including the U.K., Sweden, and France are now pulling back from relying on the judgments of impressionable adolescents for such drastic remediation, but dissenters in the U.S. are still punished.
Medical educators who teach students that racism and mutilation are okay when officially approved should humbly recall the history of their own profession. Modern medicine has been of immeasurable benefit to mankind. But when evidence-based science is ignored and authority replaces free inquiry, bad things happen.
Bleeding and purging, eugenics, thalidomide, lobotomies, and nonsterile wound probing are among the historical results. It is the duty of the medical profession to protect us from such horrors, not promote them.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
by Kurt Rohrs | Sep 21, 2022 | Opinion
By Kurt Rohrs |
Right now, there’s a growing conflict between whether our schools should be focused primarily on academic instruction or social instruction.
Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), stated recently that teachers must assume the role of “Social Justice Warriors” in classrooms across the country. The National Education Association (NEA), another very large teachers’ union, urged the U.S. Justice Department to label concerned parents as “Domestic Terrorists” in an attempt to silence their objections. It’s clear that these teachers’ unions simply want to dismiss parents as being unworthy of advocating for their own children.
But parents need to be involved in the education of their children now more than ever.
Just look at what’s going on with Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman. She was recently sued for advertising links to chat rooms where minors discuss sex and gender with adults present and without parents necessarily knowing.
Then, there’s Chandler Education Association Union President Katie Nash, who is on video at a Chandler Unified School District Board (CUSD) meeting actively promoting the teaching of White Supremacy Theory, the 1619 Project, and “Anti-Racism” programs typically derived from Critical Race Theory (CRT).
What does any of this have to do with academic instruction? Nothing.
But it’s being pushed in our schools, and while it can be tempting to blame teachers for this, we need to be careful. Most teachers should be considered as dedicated and trustworthy professionals. Instead, this is a failure of union leadership and their minions who have lost interest in academic education in favor of a growing obsession with political power. What has been the result? Declining academic scores across the country.
Of course, all of this is in direct contradiction with Arizona statute, which clearly defines these social activities as fundamental rights reserved to parents to be directed by them in the home. But these teachers’ unions don’t seem to care. They’d rather do whatever it takes to usurp these parental rights—even if it means lower academic scores.
Is Academic Proficiency Now a Secondary Consideration?
As social instruction grows, academic proficiency suffers. Consider a recent CUSD presentation of a “Portrait of a Learner” program, which described several social aspirations for students, yet somehow omitted any reference to academic proficiency. Shouldn’t we expect academics to be the primary focus of something that involves “Learning”? Either that, or you would think it would at least push students toward developing practical job skills training.
This continued lack of focus on academic proficiency is resulting in a continued decline in student test scores across the state. There does not seem to be any comprehensive plan to recover from this.
The most recent shiny new program is called the Whole Child Concept. But it appears to do nothing more than broaden the scope of the Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs already embedded in school curriculum.
Parent Flight
One of the unintended consequences of this movement to focus on social instruction is “Parent Flight” to other educational alternatives such as charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. The recent expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program in Arizona now allows for parents to choose from these alternatives over unsatisfactory district schools.
But as you might expect, teachers’ unions and their political arm, RedforEd, vigorously oppose this legislative expansion, claiming that it defunds schools. But what they won’t tell you is that it clearly does not defund a student’s educational opportunities. Equally important, it enhances a parent’s choice as to where they believe their children would receive the best education.
The program has been so popular that parents already overwhelmed the website in an effort to get out of undesirable district schools. Yet somehow it does not seem to occur to opponents of ESAs that, if they had district schools that were satisfactory to parents, then those parents probably would not even consider moving their kids to another competing educational alternative.
Quasi-Religious Woke Doctrine?
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about the growing social instruction in our schools is that, for years, our nation has been gradually removing religious (mostly Christian) influences from our public schools. In fact, it feels like the First Amendment right to “Freedom of Religion,” which was fundamental to the first European immigrants to this continent, has gradually been reinterpreted by the Left to mean “Freedom from Religion.”
But you can’t help but notice how certain aspects of woke doctrine seem to have become “articles of faith” that cannot be questioned by anyone without facing severe social backlash. It’s clear that Christian doctrine has been suppressed in schools and replaced by Secular Humanism, the belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God, and the more extreme Cultural Marxism, the Neo-Marxist movement seeking to apply critical theory to matters of family composition, gender, race, and cultural identity within Western society.
If teachers’ unions want to apply the “Freedom from Religion” doctrine in public schools, they should also apply a “Freedom from Extremist Political Doctrine” as well. It’s the only way to ensure our schools remain on neutral ground for political ideology, and it leaves social development at home with the child’s parents—where it should be.
Teacher Opt-Out?
Finally, along with our First Amendment rights comes a prohibition on “compelled speech,” which prevents a person from being forced, under threat or duress, to say things they don’t really believe in. But we hear regular reports of teachers being bullied and harassed by other “activist” colleagues to force them to go along with their extreme Leftist political doctrine. Many teachers simply comply because they are concerned about having to work in a hostile environment or having their livelihoods threatened.
This implies that there is some sort of informal “political test” for teachers in our schools. It is often enforced by aggressive colleagues who are usually associated with a teachers’ union. The apparent message is: “comply and be welcome, or dissent and be ostracized.” It is no wonder teachers are under such workplace stress because of these implied threats.
However, there is a recent report of one brave, principled teacher, who, in looking over the daily SEL lesson, simply said, “we are not going to do this today” and put the controversial assignment aside. So, if parents have the right to “opt-out” their children from the presentation of controversial subject matter, that same rule needs to be extended to teachers who do not believe in these social lessons or deem them inappropriate for the children in their class. It’s time to give these teachers an “opt-out” choice as well.
In conclusion, here are a few ways we can start to clean up our public schools:
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- Return the primary focus of schools to academic instruction rather than social instruction.
- Reduce the influence of the politically biased teachers’ unions.
- Protect parents’ rights to direct the social upbringing of their children.
- Prohibit political and social ideologies from being established in schools.
- Protect teachers from being compelled to present controversial materials that they do not believe in.
Kurt Rohrs is a candidate for the Chandler Unified School District Governing Board. You can find out more about his campaign here.
by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Sep 4, 2022 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Public schools are out of control. And it’s going to get worse if we don’t do something about it. Unfortunately, for far too long, school board elections have been some of the most ignored around our state. But whether you have kids in public school, private school, or homeschool—whether your kids are out of school or you don’t have kids at all—this year’s school board election will affect you.
How? Take a look at some of the worst abuses in public school districts in the past year.
A Financial Mess
As a taxpaying citizen, you probably care a lot about where your dollars go. But most school districts don’t share your same concerns. Mesa Public Schools (MPS) is one of them. Back in March, MPS failed to explain where over $32.3 million of their federal emergency funds slated for COVID-related expenditures went—which should’ve resulted in an audit by the State of Arizona.
But Mesa isn’t the only problem…
>>> CONTINUE READING >>>
by Kurt Rohrs | Aug 27, 2022 | Opinion
By Kurt Rohrs |
Recent legislation mandates that public schools offer Mental Health Instruction and Social and Emotional learning (SEL) programs to their curriculum. But the legislation does not specify what those programs should consist of.
However, companion legislation does offer some guidance on SEL instruction by prohibiting instruction typical of Critical Race Theory (CRT) doctrine from being presented in classrooms.
The legislation gives seven specific prohibitions on social instruction: It prohibits teaching that:
1. One race, ethnic group or sex is inherently morally or intellectually superior to another race, ethnic group or sex.
2. An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
3. An individual should be invidiously discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex.
4. An individual’s moral character is determined by the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex.
5. An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race, ethnic group or sex.
6. An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex.
7. Academic achievement, meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race, ethnic group or sex to oppress members of another race, ethnic group or sex.
Parents are concerned that SEL programs may still be used to usher in controversial political and social ideologies concerning race relations (CRT), child sexuality (CSE) and neo-Marxist political doctrine (“Equity” as Wealth Redistribution), which may be buried in the details of certain programs. Parents would probably be far more comfortable if these ideological considerations were carefully scrubbed from SEL curriculum.
It may be far more effective to base SEL programs on agnostic, apolitical concepts that are generally accepted across cultural boundaries and are not agenda driven by activist special interest groups. Programs that focus on good character and positive behaviors, instead of specific identity group grievances and restitution typical of cultural Marxist doctrine, would most likely find far greater support in the community.
Here are several positive social behaviors that are generally accepted across many cultures that we used to present to students and which generated little controversy. Perhaps we never should have gotten away from these fundamental principles of behavior.
TRUSTWORTHINESS
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- Be honest. Don’t deceive, cheat, or steal.
- Have integrity. Do what you say you’ll do.
- Keep your promises.
- Be loyal. Stand by your values.
RESPECT
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- Follow the Golden Rule.
- Be accepting of differences.
- Be courteous to others.
- Deal peacefully with anger, insults, and disagreements.
- Be considerate of others’ feelings.
RESPONSIBILITY
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- Do what you are supposed to do. Try your best.
- Persevere. Keep on trying.
- Be self-disciplined.
- Think before you act. Consider the consequences.
- Be accountable for your words, actions, and attitudes.
FAIRNESS
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- Play by the rules.
- Take turns and share.
- Be open-minded. Listen to others.
- Don’t take advantage of others.
CARING
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- Be kind.
- Be compassionate.
- Express gratitude.
- Forgive others.
CITIZENSHIP
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- Do your share to make your home, school, and community better.
- Cooperate.
- Stay informed. Vote.
- Be a good neighbor.
- Make choices that protect the safety and rights of others.
- Protect the environment.
“Whole Child” Concept
The newest iteration of SEL appears to be the “Whole Child” initiative, which combines the academic education of children and the management of their physical, mental, and emotional well-being. The “Whole Child” initiative is driven primarily by the Association of Supervisors and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in an apparent effort to expand government agency influence into the home life and parenting of children. It is described by the Whole School, Community, and Child (WSCC) model as having 10 components:
- Physical education and physical activity
- Nutrition environment and services
- Health education
- Social and emotional climate
- Physical environment
- Health services
- Counseling, psychological, and social services
- Employee wellness
- Community involvement
- Family engagement
Other collaborators are the Priscilla Chan/Mark Zuckerberg Initiative and Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Both these collaborators’ organizations have been criticized recently for surreptitiously weaving controversial Social Justice doctrine into seemingly innocuous education programs.
Whole Child programs can take on a variety of forms. The Chandler Unified School District’s approach includes several specific, and far less controversial, programs such as:
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- Athletics
- Art Masterpiece
- Mandarin Dual Language
- Academy and Traditional Schools
- Special Needs Programs
- Band and Orchestra
- Spanish Dual Language
- Gifted Programs
- STEM Programs
There seems to be no generally accepted guidelines on SEL programs and the proper balance of academic instruction (the realm of teachers) and social instruction (the realm of parents). Both communities appear to be encroaching upon each other’s “turf” with parents recoiling about intrusive social instruction in the classroom and teachers dismayed about alternative school choice options being exercised by parents because of their discomfort.
It is long past time to resolve these conflicts with clear and distinct boundaries with respect to the education of, and raising of, children. Our children will be the ones who benefit most.
Kurt Rohrs is a candidate for the Chandler Unified School District Governing Board. You can find out more about his campaign here.
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