My new American Hero.Sonja Shaw, President of Chino Valley Board of Education
Affirmative action Ass is shown the door. California Has No Right to Stop Parental Notification on Transgenderism. We did a article on this last week, but I missed this tweet.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1682242871330754562
My new American hero school board President Sonja Shaw told Breitbart News on Sunday that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the State of California were trying to intimidate parents across the state on transgender policy.
Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) sent the board a letter in which he said: “In addition to infringing upon student privacy, forced “outing” of students to their parents is very likely to result in significant emotional, mental, and even physical harm and subject students to discriminatory harassment.” And Shaw’s response.
“They go into ed[ucational] codes and things like that, which are laws, but then there’s that area where it’s ‘guidelines’ … and guidelines, we both know, are not laws. We keep showing them, and telling them, ‘Show us the law that we’re breaking?’ … They can’t do that. That’s why they’re upset.” The state had sent Thurmond to the school board meeting to intimidate the board and the parents — and to send a broader message, Shaw said.
Flag of hate. (Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Researchers horrified, decry rise of ‘fascism’ as students send mocking responses to woke survey.
Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushbackindicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”
In an articlefor the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields.
The team claimed 50 of 349 responses to their questionnaire on the topic contained “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.” Labeling them “malicious respondents,” they adapted their project to examine how the joke responses “relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts — namely, the rise of online fascism.”
The result was the paper titled, “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences.”
(Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)
The paper broke the responses down into themes like demographics, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, “anti-trans, anti-queer,” racism, antisemitism and “online hate subculture references.” Several answers contained profanity and other offensive and obscene language and many referenced memes.
According to the article, when the “malicious” subjects were asked to fill out demographic data, “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.” In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be “illiterate” to lamenting “My country is run by communists,” or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to “the inability to come to terms with biological reality.”
One respondent claimed to identify as a gift card as their gender. Under racial and ethnic identities they said, “I’m an ethnic gift card,” and for disability the answer was “I don’t have enough gift cards.”
Other responses to questions about identity rejected the researchers’ project entirely, with answers such as “My skin color is not important,” “Come on man, these questions are stupid. Everyone is a grab bag of genetics from all over the world,” and “What else do you want to know? What I ate for breakfast. [T]his question is unnecessary.”
“Online memes associated with white nationalist and fascist movements were present throughout the data, alongside memes and content referencing gaming and ‘nerd’ culture,” the researchers further claimed.
The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.” The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.
A protester voices support for the promotion of transgender ideology in schools during a pro-transgender march in October 2022.(Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
The scholars concluded the “malicious responses” indicate that fascism has become a common ideology in engineering and computer science academia. They suggested the counter responseshouldbe“social justice STEM education” that includes “perspectives on online hate radicalization and center anti-colonial, intersectional solidarity organizing as its opposition.”
The researchers appeared surprised that their own findings had been “ultimately rejected” by many academic journals, leaving them with the impression that their research decrying so-called fascism in academia is viewed by some as “irrelevant to engineering education, if not alarmist.”
They claimed their research methods used “antifascist and trans/queer methodologies to transform the raw data” and “make effective interventions and transformations to our programs and institutions.” They described “Anti-fascism” in particular as a framework that connects “contemporary fascist movements to the foundation of the U.S. as a racial project,” noting elsewhere that “White supremacy” remains ubiquitous in the U.S.
Saying the solution for the rise of fascism is to change education itself, the team wrote, “The university at its most ideal can be envisioned as ‘a central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to educate for critical consciousness’ using ‘a pedagogy of liberation.'”
It was suggested the plight of transgender citizens be used as a teachable example of “experiences with power and oppression — and that categories such as race, gender, and sexuality have roots in European colonial logics shared by fascist movements.”
Engineering in particular, they argued, is a critical field to teach their far-left ideology because such graduates “frequently work in fields such as fossil fuels, defense, construction, and technology upon graduation, and could be taught about these field’s relationships with national and global racial capitalism and ongoing apartheid in Palestine, as an example.”
Alexander Hall is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Alexander.hall@fox.com.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
Glenn Youngkin Education Guidance Puts Parents Back in Control.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has directed public schools to help parents shield their children from transgender advocacy.
The new guidelines require all state-funded schools to abide by the names and pronouns listed on students’ official birth records unless parents submit a written request asking otherwise, according to a report by msn.com.
Additionally, schools are mandated to ensure that students participate in the athletic program and use facilities — such as restrooms and locker rooms — that correspond with their biological sex.
Parents are reportedly allowed to “opt-out” if they want their child to have access to a separate facility, such as a single-user restroom.
Notably, the guidelines also prohibit schools from hiding information about students from their parents. For example, schools are now forbidden from allowing teachers to conceal a student’s gender confusion from their parents.
“All children in Virginia deserve to have a parent engaged in their life and to be treated with dignity and respect,” Gov. Youngkin said in a statement.
“The [Virginia Department of Education’s] updated model policies reaffirm my administration’s continued commitment to ensure that every parent is involved in conversations regarding their child’s education, upbringing, and care,” the governor added.
Some school districts in Virginia, however, are threatening not to follow the law.
Richmond and Alexandria, for example, have reportedly vowed not to adhere to the guidance, maintaining that they will “continue the previously adopted policy and practice respecting individual rights and protecting students from discrimination due to gender expression, gender identity, sexual harassment, and transgender status.”
Last year, Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said they expect school districts to comply.
“It’s the law, and so I don’t really have a lot of patience for folks that see a law and don’t comply with it,” Youngkin affirmed in September.
“Protecting parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions for their children is in the Virginia code, and I fully expect that each one of the school divisions should comply,” the governor added.
Kayla Hill, a senior at Great Oaks Career Campus at Diamond Oakes, graduated in June and took a job with Johnson Construction in her hometown of Cincinnati.
(Salena Zito)
The Great Correction, between choosing a trade or higher education, is in motion.
CINCINNATI, Ohio —It is just days before Kayla Hill is graduating from one of the four sprawling facilities that make up the Great Oaks Career Campuses — and the Pendleton neighborhood native has a broad smile on her face as she puts the finishing touches on the pitch of a roof which she is working on in her carpentry class.
The day after graduation, the 17-year-old said she already had a well-paying job waiting for her at Johnson Construction Company. “I was always drawn to carpentry watching my dad fix things around the house, so I followed him around and started asking him questions all of the time,” she said, adding, “When I found out I could go to school for this and get a job if I applied myself, I was so happy to be able to do what I love and get paid for it.”
Several classrooms away, sparks are flying as both Emma Ashcraft and Brianna Anderson, wearing their welding helmets, put the final touches on the individual projects they have been working on for their final in their welding class. Both are seniors and both took up welding in their pursuit of very different careers.
Kayla Hill, a senior at Great Oaks Career Campus at Diamond Oakes, graduated in June and took a job with Johnson Construction in her hometown of Cincinnati.
(Salena Zito)
Anderson is set on working with her hands. “I am lined up with a pipe fitting job, and with that career choice I will travel the United States, and to be honest, I cannot wait to get my life started,” she said.
Ashcraft said she has known since she was in middle school what she wanted to do. Still, it was when she saw what Anderson was doing, making airplane parts, that she said she knew learning how to weld would only enhance her goals.
“I have been interested in aerospace engineering since seventh grade, when I came here and saw that Brianna was welding airplane parts and helicopter parts, I wanted to learn that skill so I could be the one who designed those things,” she said.
Anderson is heading off to the University of Cincinnati this fall for aerospace engineering. She said the experiences here will give her an edge in application: “I came in here not knowing anything about welding, and now I was able to build a whole model of a helicopter.”
Hill, Ashcraft, and Anderson were just three of the scores of students I met here at the Diamond branch of the Great Oaks Career Campuses that provides hands-on, practical learning for high school students beginning in 10th grade. More than 36 public school districts feed into the four campuses located in Hamilton and Warren counties, with students having over 30 career options that range from graphic arts to surgical technician to advanced manufacturing.
Brianna Anderson (left) and Emma Ashcraft are taking their welding skills in different directions; one is seeking a degree in aerospace engineering the other is off to be a pipefitter.
(Salena Zito)
If you want to be a plumber, auto mechanic, carpenter, hairdresser, or welder, this school will help you reach that goal. In fact, students who attend Great Oaks will earn professional credentials by the time they graduate from high school, with many of them walking into fields that start in the six figures.
Eight years ago, everyone from guidance counselors to parents was pushing students into higher education choices and neglecting to at least give them the option to look at a trade school or a community college, often because there was a stigma attached to vocational trades.
Our culture did a pretty good job of reflecting dismissiveness and misconceptions about the trades — offering few role models or success stories as examples of achieving the American dream by using one’s hands for a living.
One of the few people who have elevated the working man and woman in the past 20 years has been Mike Rowe, whose Dirty Jobs TV show began when his mother called him and suggested it’d be great if his 90-year-old grandfather would see him actually “doing something on television that actually looked like work.”
At the time, he was working as a reporter for a television show in San Francisco.
Rowe said the next day, he was in a sewer doing a report shoulder to shoulder with a sewer inspector. The concept of showcasing the everyman who makes our lives better had never been done before and, to everyone’s surprise, including Rowe’s, it became wildly successful.
Why? In part because there were a significant number of people watching at home who saw themselves or their parents in the segments. Remember, only 34% of Americans have a college degree.
For the past 50 years, college and university attendance has been held up as the only path to success by educators and parents alike, especially parents who attended college, so much so that the trade classes were rarely mentioned to students as a post-high school option.
That resistance to giving children an option in vocational education in the 1980s and ’90s came home to roost in the past decades when the inevitable, steep decline of available skilled workers and tradespeople hit home.
But there has been a cultural shift in the past few years that is turning that resistance to trade schools on its head. At least part of that has to do with the out-of-control costs of attending a university and the debt that follows you decades after graduation, but it also has to do with how political college campuses have become.
A new poll from Gallup has found that confidence in higher education has plunged in the past eight years. Enrollments have dropped at the same time that tuition has risen and universities have become stridently politicized in the classrooms.
The June survey showed a mere 36% of Americans have either “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in higher education, which is down from 57% just eight years ago.
Conversely, while nearly every sector of higher education has been hit with enrollment declines, trade school programs are booming, research from the National Student Clearinghouse found.
Construction, culinary, mechanic trade programs, and surgical technician programs all experienced increases in enrollment between spring 2021 and 2022, the study showed, with construction trade programs experiencing the largest enrollment increase at a whopping 19.3 percentage points year over year.
There were also significant increases in mechanic programs and culinary ones, to name just a few.
The ignorance of the education system for decades has been that trade jobs lack relevance in society. However, it seems as though it’s pretty relevant to a homeowner to be able to call a plumber if a toilet is clogged, or if a business is experiencing a backup septic system, or a church basement is flooded.
No trade schools means no plumbers, no plumbers means no ability to fix the complicated systems that keep our homes and businesses functioning. The same goes with an HVAC technician: Who exactly did these decision-makers think would keep your furnace operating in the winter and air conditioning humming in the summer?
Unlikely it was someone with a degree in French literature or women’s studies.
Hill said she is very happy with her choice, “I get to walk out of high school with a skill and start my career. I don’t think enough high students know that is an option and that is a shame.”
Moms for Liberty are home grown American Patriots that scare leftists. Beside doing great Casseroles, ( unlike someone who mixes Ragu with can spaghetti or doesn’t know what Orzo Salad is. ) these gals know how to win elections.
Last year they entered 500 school board races and won over half of them. This year they won almost a third of the races in Wisconsin. Now at times some say some stupid things, but hopefully they learned.
They ran into a situation where in 2022 Facebook shut down 22 of their websites. Based on lies from the NEA. But they contacted Facebook and the next day were back.
Since starting in Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty has set up a national network, today claiming 285 chapters in 45 states.
What do you call an organization made up of 3 million government employees that can’t find even 3 parents per state to agree with their radical agenda?
Indeed, as chronicled in a new report from Education Week, the NEA, which is the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has just wrapped up its annual assembly – and the group’s trajectory is as bleak as it is extreme.
Those of us who support students and parents’ rights have great cause for hope.(iStock)
As EdWeek reports, the NEA lost 115,000 members between 2017 and 2022 and projects losing an additional 24,000 teachers as part of its latest budget (in addition to thousands of other “education support professionals”).
But the truly revealing story is the catastrophic lack of support for the NEA’s radical agenda outside of those financially profiting from its taxpayer shakedowns. In particular, parents have apparently so thoroughly rebuffed the NEA’s extremism that EdWeek reports:
“Another category of membership never fully materialized: In 2019, the NEA opened up a ‘community ally’ category for non-educators, who could be parents or other supporters of its work. The union had expected to enroll 6,300 community allies by this fiscal year – but instead, the number is closer to 150” (emphasis added).
It’s perhaps little wonder that parents would have little stomach for a group explicitly dedicated to promoting critical race theory (CRT), race-based reparations and radical gender ideology – all while it tries to brand parent groups like Moms for Liberty as “threatening” to public schools.
At the same time, even when it comes to its existing base of government employees, the NEA is in panic mode after Govs. Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation blocking the unions from automatically siphoning money out of teachers’ paychecks to pay membership dues this year. “Eliminating payroll-deduction services will have a ‘devastating and immediate’ impact on membership, NEA President Becky Pringle warned delegates,” EdWeek reports.
In short, the union recognizes that if their members begin feeling the impact of the NEA’s hand in their pocket, the group’s membership rolls may truly begin to spiral downward.
Until then, however, the organization – which has already called for the re-election of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, budgeted over $50 million for political campaigning and lobbying, and is now planning to shovel over $1 million to boost support among its anemic “community ally” (parent) program – will continue to flex its muscle over U.S. elections and the education of millions of American children.
But thanks to grassroots groups like Moms for Liberty and the leadership of governors in Florida, Arkansas and elsewhere, the voices of parents are poised to reverberate far more loudly in the halls of government and the sphere of education than those who demanded endless shutdowns, masks and federal spending during COVID-19.
Indeed, it is clear that for the first time in decades, the public school establishment is on the defensive – with universal school choice sweeping the nation in 2022 and 2023 over the howls of protest from union activists dedicated to keeping students trapped in underperforming government-run schools.
Now, it is imperative that political leaders and champions of parents’ rights continue to press forward, promoting not only school choice, but companion legislation such as full online academic transparency to disclose the course content being pushed on public school students.
Of course, victories for students will not all come overnight, and the list of union absurdities will continue to grow, as the NEA and its allies increasingly twist and abuse the English language to redefine words and concepts to suit their purposes. But if the latest NEA assembly – which, for instance, calls for renaming “right to work” states as “anti-worker” states in all union communications – is any indication of their desperation or their tenuous grasp of truth, then those of us who support students and parents’ rights have great cause for hope.
The NEA’s “community ally” brigade on the other hand, perhaps not so much.
Matt Beienburg is the director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper has vetoed three bills related to transgender issues, one banning sex changes for minors, another keeping biological males out of girls’ sports, and a third that would limit school instruction on gender ideology. Maybe it’s time for impeachment?
Now hopefully with super majority the legislature will override his veto. This isn’t the first time that good legislation has been passed and he’s vetoed it. So just maybe it’s time for a change in NC.
What part of the 14th Amendment and parents rights don’t Progressives understand? We keep on seeing how schools are trying to be educators and parents at the same time. Failing at both.
The Supreme Court has recognized that parents have a 14th Amendment right to the care, custody, and control of their children.
I know that those on the left have issues with the 14th Amendment, but it’s very clear. Recently in Wyoming a judge blocked a school from hiding students’ gender identities from their parents.
“It’s difficult to envision why a school would even claim much less how a school could establish a generalized interest in withholding or concealing from the parents of minor children information fundamental to their identity, personhood, and mental and emotion wellbeing.
More recently, this Court declared in Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997), that the Constitution, and specifically the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, protects the fundamental right of parents to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children.
A student loan was a loan to where you sign off that when it’s due, you pay it back. These loans have been paid off by tens of millions.
The government forcibly locked down hairdressers, family restaurants, and other small businesses, and jeopardized the livelihoods of their employees–as well as their access to employer-provided health care. To address this, Congress worked in a bipartisan way to offer Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to help these businesses and their workers stay afloat. As a result, the program supported 51 million jobs to get through the pandemic across the economy.
Anyone who had a small business could qualify for this. So if say Bill Gates of Microsoft started a small business outside of Microsoft, he would have been eligible for forgiveness. Just like the person who say had a catering hot dog stand outside of their state capitol, same thing.
By contrast, President Biden’s student loan giveaway largely benefits the wealthy, forcing this debt onto lower-income American taxpayers in the form of higher taxes and more inflation.
CUNY Law commencement speaker Fatima Mousa Mohammed sparked intense backlash for attacking police as "fascists" and declaring law as a "manifestation of white supremacy." (Fox News Digital )
I want to thank FOX Digital for this awesome article.
The City University of New York (CUNY) condemned the controversial commencement address from its public law school as “hate speech” Tuesday following intense backlash.
A statement released from CUNY’s Board of Trustees and its chancellor addressed the divisive comments from law school graduate Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who attacked “oppressive” institutions of law and order such as the military, the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. prison system, declaring law is a “manifestation of white supremacy” and called the NYPD “fascist.”
“Free speech is precious, but often messy, and is vital to the foundation of higher education. Hate speech, however, should not be confused with free speech and has no place on our campuses or in our city, our state or our nation,” CUNY wrote.
“The remarks by a student-selected speaker at the CUNY Law School graduation, unfortunately, fall into the category of hate speech as they were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York condemns such hate speech,” the statement continued.”
