liveaction--2019-11-30--Massachusetts parents push back against Planned Parenthood sex ed

(The Daily Signal) Worcester, the second largest city in solidly blue Massachusetts, was the scene of a sex ed showdown between Planned Parenthood and concerned parents and church leaders. Last February, more than 75 of those parents and church leaders stood up alongside the Massachusetts Family Institute to outnumber pro-Planned Parenthood voices at a meeting of a local school committee.  The parents, church leaders, and Massachusetts Family Institute officials were there to pose a question: What would Planned Parenthood gain from teaching students about safe sex that would reduce both pregnancies and abortion? How would that benefit a business that relies heavily on income from abortion?  Planned Parenthood didn’t just want to redefine abstinence, it wanted to introduce comprehensive sex education, including curriculum on sexual orientation and gender identity.  Planned Parenthood advocates argued that their curriculum qualified as age-appropriate, medically accurate, and evidence-based. But when read aloud, as I did at the meeting, the content of the curriculum is found to be clearly neither age-appropriate nor medically accurate.  Congress is moving to impeach the president. But will their plan to remove him from office succeed? Find out more now >>  To further expose what is going on in Massachusetts schools, we interviewed a young man who recently had been exposed to this curriculum. In this brief video (viewer discretion advised) pasted below, he explains what students are being taught and how sexual behavior and abortion are being completely normalized.  The Massachusetts Family Institute is working with local churches to introduce positive curriculum alternatives to Planned Parenthood’s version because many parents want their children to be taught to value abstinence and marriage. The organization is working with several churches in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to convince local school officials to adopt curriculum that is truly age-appropriate, medically accurate, and evidence-based.  Our organization believes there is a Biblical mandate to protect the minds of young people from being polluted and seeks to build on its success in Lawrence by replicating this strategy all over the state.  READ: Planned Parenthood’s brand of sex ed isn’t slowing the spread of STDs  Over the past three years, the Massachusetts Family Institute has spoken at about 125 different churches across the state. Churches are starting to see that their Biblical mandate, as Martin Luther King Jr. explained, is to be the conscience of the state and never its slave. Relationships between local churches, parents, and pro-family groups are strategic.  Ultimately, in Worcester, the school committee voted to not allow the “Making Proud Choices” curriculum from Planned Parenthood into the schools.  We succeeded in defeating Planned Parenthood and protecting the minds and hearts of our young people in Worcester. But parents, community leaders, and pro-family advocates can team up anywhere to strengthen the family, life, and liberty.  Editor’s Note: This article was published at The Daily Signal and is reprinted here with permission.  “Like” Live Action News on Facebook for more pro-life news and commentary!


mail--2019-01-04--Parents sue over districts policy to arm teachers at school

Parents sue over district's policy to arm teachers at school

The district in Tamaqua, a coal-mining region about 90 miles (145 kilometers) from Philadelphia, serves more than 2,100 students in three schools and is believed to be the first school system in Pennsylvania to let teachers carry weapons.  Tamaqua school board members "endangered their community" when they approved a "manifestly illegal" policy to give weapons to teachers and other school employees, according to a lawsuit filed by three parents and a grandparent.  "A teacher's role is to teach," Holly Koscak, one of the plaintiffs, said Friday at a news conference. "We should not be putting those extra roles on a teacher when it's out of their scope." She said her daughter, a sophomore, is "very anxious" about having armed teachers in school.  The teachers union had already filed suit to overturn the policy. Teachers are allowed to carry weapons in several states, including Texas, Missouri and Ohio, and a number of other states are considering similar measures in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre last February.  The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, says its members "overwhelmingly reject" proposals to have them carry guns in school. Using the hashtag "ArmMeWith," some teachers have taken to Twitter to express their opposition.  In Florida, the panel investigating the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School recommended that teachers who volunteer and undergo extensive background checks and training be allowed to carry concealed guns on campus. The state teachers union and PTA oppose it.  In Lee County, Virginia, a school district is trying to persuade skeptical state officials to allow it to become the state's first county to arm teachers and staff. The district says it cannot afford to hire more than a few resource officers to protect 11 schools.  Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said law enforcement officers are likely to be better trained for situations in which they might have to shoot a student or look for a shooter. But he said districts that do not have the money for a school resource officer face a difficult choice.  "I realize there are poor rural districts throughout this country," Canady said, citing schools that cannot afford a resource officer without federal or state help. "I don't know that I'm in a position to say, well, you shouldn't have anyone armed."  In Tamaqua, the firearms policy approved in September says that teachers and other employees can volunteer to carry concealed, district-issued guns after training. The policy also establishes guidelines for the use of force.  "The rationale for the policy is to prevent the apocalypse," school board member Nicholas Boyle said. "When we have a shooter in the building, how are we going to stop that shooter from killing more and more and more people? We have to have an armed presence there."  Citing operational security, the district will not say whether an armed force is already present in the schools. But Boyle said that "the litigation is not stopping the policy." He said the number of volunteers who signed up for gun training has exceeded his goal of at least a dozen.  Pennsylvania education officials said they are not aware of any other district with a policy of arming teachers. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, is opposed to the idea. "The Wolf administration has maintained that school districts may only authorize trained school police officers and school resource officers to carry firearms around students in our schools, should the school professionals feel they need it," education department spokeswoman Nicole Reigelman said.  Boyle said the district has received no blowback from the state so far.  Associated Press Writer Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York, contributed to this story.


mercurynews--2019-04-08--Parents protest plan to give Bullis Charter School a Los Altos School District campus

As part of the national debate over the growth of charter schools, parents in Los Altos want to gut a deal that could mark an end to a decade of court battles between the Los Altos School District and Bullis Charter School.  Nearly 100 parents and students gathered outside of Egan Junior High School Monday morning with dozens of signs that read “save our neighborhood schools”, “our schools, our community” and “reform Prop 39”.  They were protesting a tentative agreement that was announced last week to give the Egan Junior High School facility to Bullis Charter School and relocate hundreds of the Egan students to a brand new facility expected to be built near a shopping center in about four years. The district and charter school have until the end of the month to finalize the agreement and will be taking public input right up to the deadline.  Egan, which enrolls about 650 students, is one of two junior high schools in the Los Altos School District and has been a staple in the community for the last 50 years.  Bullis is a public school chartered by the Santa Clara County Board of Education, and the Los Altos School District is required to provide it with facilities under California’s Proposition 39. Since Bullis opened in 2003, the two sides have struggled to agree on what the charter school’s facilities should consist of.  While statewide enrollment in non-charter schools has decreased over the last five years, charter school enrollment has increased from 9.2 percent to 10.6 percent of the state’s public school population, according to data from the California Department of Education.  Monday’s protest was just one example of the strong opposition to the expansion of charter schools across California — an issue at the heart of both the recent teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland.  Charter school critics argue that the schools drain resources from traditional public schools and create challenges — such as the facilities debate in Los Altos — for school districts.  The agreement between the Los Altos School District and Bullis Charter School would span 10 years and give Bullis the Egan Junior High campus to house all of its students, including those currently sharing a building at Blach Intermediate School in Los Altos. It would also restrict the charter school’s enrollment from exceeding 1,111 students.  Egan’s students, who currently share the campus with Bullis, would be moved to a brand new building about half a mile away at the San Antonio shopping center in Mountain View.  Although the agreement could put an end to a decade of lawsuits, some parents say the deal also could lead to an exodus of families leaving the district.  Amber MacDonald, a parent of one current student and another future student in the district, said that parents are upset with the planned location of the new school — next to a shopping center instead of in a residential neighborhood — and that the board doesn’t seem to be supporting the community.  “No one wants to see their school get taken over by a school you have to apply to get into and 50 percent of kids don’t get in,” MacDonald said.”… And you don’t really want to put all your time, money and effort into a district and a board that doesn’t support you.”  A Change.org petition to stop the district from moving Egan Junior High students from their current location has racked up more than 5,000 signatures.  Peipei Yu, a parent of two students in the district, said the agreement points to a need for education reform in California.  “Ultimately charter schools are a mechanism to the privatization of all schools in the U.S., and this agreement is another piece of that agenda,” Yu said Monday.  “If the laws allow for these behaviors, then the laws need to change.”  Joe Hurd, chairman of the Bullis Charter School Board of Directors, acknowledged that the agreement was never going to make everyone happy.  “There was a lot of give and take on both sides,” Hurd said Friday. “…But after 15 years of back and forth, I think this solution is the best outcome for both the students and the community.”  Both the school boards will hear their first dose of public input at separate meetings Monday night. And the district’s board is not stopping there.  Board members also will attend 15 PTA meetings over the next three weeks at schools across the district, hold three days of office hours and receive input at one more board meeting on April 26.  Jessica Speiser, president of the Los Altos school board, said she has already received a flood of calls and emails from community members since the agreement was announced last week.  “We have a very engaged community,” Speiser said Friday. “That’s why we’re going to every campus to be there to hear concerns and answer questions.”


mercurynews--2019-05-21--Three Bay Area parents pleading guilty this week in college admission scandal

A Napa Valley vintner and two Menlo Park business owners are among eight wealthy parents who are expected to plead guilty this week in the nationwide college admissions bribery scandal.  The parents will enter their guilty pleas in federal court in Boston, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. One father, Agustin Huneeus Jr. of San Francisco, is expected to enter his guilty plea Tuesday afternoon.  The eight parents are accused of hiring college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer to boost their children’s entrance exams or to create fake athletic profiles to help them gain admission to prestigious U.S. colleges as athletic recruits.  The parents are expected to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, the Los Angeles Times reported. They also are among 20 parents and coaches who already have entered guilty pleas in “Operation Varsity Blues” or who will do so in the near future, according to the Times.  Their pleas are presumably part of cooperation deals with prosecutors to avoid lengthy prison sentences. Prosecutors have said in court filings they will recommend prison time and hefty fines for parents in some of the cases — the charges carry up to 20 years. However, the final decision will be left up to a judge.  TV actress Felicity Huffman, for example, may end up serving a relatively light sentence of four to 10 months in prison after accepting a cooperation deal. She pleaded guilty at the Boston courthouse last week, acknowledging she paid Singer $15,000 to boost her daughter’s SAT score. She previously issued a statement apologizing for her actions and for the pain she had caused “the educational community,” her friends and her family, notably her oldest daughter, 18.  Fourteen Bay Area parents have been charged in the scandal. Hillsborough couple, Bruce and Davina Isackson, entered guilty pleas in early May and will be sentenced late July. The three entering guilty pleas this week are:  Agustin Huneeus Jr. of San Francisco   Huneeus, whose family owns Napa’s Quintessa winery and heads the company’s wine portfolio, allegedly paid Singer $50,000 to get his daughter into USC, ostensibly as a water polo player. The money would ultimately go as a bribe to Donna Heinel, USC’s senior associate athletic director, according to the complaint.  Huneeus allegedly learned about Singer’s services from William McGlashan, another parent at Marin Academy, the private prep school in San Rafael their children attend, according to the complaint. McGlashan, of Mill Valle, is the founder of a prominent San Francisco equity firm and also was charged in the scandal. He has pleaded not guilty to allegedly hiring Singer to fake ACT results for his son.  With Huneeus, he and Singer were recorded by investigators talking about how Huneeus’ daughter wasn’t “worthy” to be on the water polo team. At one point Hunees asked: “I just want to confirm. She actually won’t really be part of the water polo team, right?”  :No, no,” Singer said. “She doesn’t have to do anything.”  Huneeus at another point complained that the person who took the SAT exam in place of his daughter earned only 1380 out of a possible 1600. Huneeus asked if his daughter’s score could have been as high as 1550.  But Singer told him that such a high score would probably be noticed, given that her grades apparently didn’t show her to be that academically gifted. “I would have got investigated for sure based on her grades,” Singer said.  Huneeus also “sought reassurance that his $50,000 payment to Heinel would be returned if his daughter was not admitted to USC,” the complaint shows.  Peter Jan Sartorio of Menlo Park   Sartorio, a packaged food entrepreneur, is expected to enter his plea on Wednesday. He allegedly paid $15,000 in cash in June 2017 to have a fraudulent proctor oversee his daughter’s ACT exam and correct her answers.  The test took place at a West Hollywood test center instead of at the daughter’s high school, Singer had contacts with administrators at the center who had agreed to take bribes to allow Singer’s alleged cheating schemes to take place there, according to the complaint.  The complaint alleges that Sartorio’s daughter received a score of 27 out of a possible 36 on the ACT, which placed her in about the 86th percentile. She had not previously taken the ACT.  Prosecutors noted the girl had previously earned scores of 900 and 960 out of a possible 1600 in successive administrations of the PSAT, which placed her between the 42nd and 51st percentile for her grade level.  According to the complaint, Sartorio was recorded on October 25, 2018, listening to Singer explain that his Key Worldwide Foundation was being audited by the Internal Revenue Services. Singer used this educational non-profit to receive payments from parent clients that were disguised as purported donations, the complaint said.  After Singer assured Sartorio he would not mention to the IRS how he had someone take “the test” for his daughter, the two talked about getting “our stories correct,” the complaint said.  Sartorio told Singer that there was no record of such an arrangement, the complaint said: “There is — no — there is no record on my end like a 1040. There is nothing on my end that shows that your company, or anyone else received cash payments.”  Marjorie Klapper of Menlo Park   The jewelry business co-owner is expected to enter her guilty plea Friday. She is accused of paying $15,000 to Singer’s Key foundation in November 2017 after a phony proctor oversaw the ACT exam for her son at the West Hollywood test center.  After Klapper’s son received a score of 30 out of a possible 36, she emailed a copy of the test score to Singer, with the message: “Omg. I guess he’s not testing again.” Singer replied, “Yep he is brilliant.”  Singer also told Klapper he was being audited in a recorded conversation on Oct. 24, 2018. As with other parent clients, Singer told Klapper to make sure she doesn’t say anything about the money she paid going toward someone else taking the ACT for her son.  “You’re gonna say that the — the $15,000 that you paid to our foundation was to help underserved kids,” Singer told her, according to the comlaint. “I just wanted to make sure that our stories were aligned.


motherjones--2019-07-30--Parents Are Giving Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid

Dozens of suburban Chicago families, perhaps many more, have been exploiting a legal loophole to win their children need-based college financial aid and scholarships they would not otherwise receive, court records and interviews show.  Coming months after the national “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, this tactic also appears to involve families attempting to gain an advantage in an increasingly competitive and expensive college admissions system.  Parents are giving up legal custody of their children during their junior or senior year in high school to someone else—a friend, aunt, cousin or grandparent. The guardianship status then allows the students to declare themselves financially independent of their families so they can qualify for federal, state and university aid, a ProPublica Illinois investigation found.  “It’s a scam,” said Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Wealthy families are manipulating the financial aid process to be eligible for financial aid they would not be otherwise eligible for. They are taking away opportunities from families that really need it.”  While ProPublica Illinois uncovered this practice in north suburban Lake County, where almost four dozen such guardianships were filed in the past 18 months, similar petitions have been filed in at least five other counties and the practice may be happening throughout the country. ProPublica Illinois is still investigating.  Borst said he first became suspicious when a high school counselor from an affluent Chicago suburb called him about a year ago to ask why a particular student had been invited to an orientation program for low-income students. Borst checked the student’s financial aid application and saw she had obtained a legal guardian, making her eligible to qualify for financial aid independently.  The University of Illinois has since identified 14 applicants who did the same: three who just completed their freshman year and 11 who plan to enroll this fall, Borst said.  ProPublica Illinois found more than 40 guardianship cases fitting this profile filed between January 2018 and June 2019 in the Chicago suburbs of Lake County alone. The parents involved in these cases include lawyers, a doctor and an assistant schools superintendent, as well as insurance and real estate agents. A number of the children are high-achieving scholars, athletes, and musicians who attend or have been accepted to a range of universities, from large public institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Missouri and Indiana University, to smaller private colleges. Officials at those universities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.  ProPublica Illinois reached parents or guardians in 15 of these cases and none agreed to speak on the record. Some hung up, others declined to comment and some demanded anonymity.  Borst said the university told the three students midway through last school year that their university-based financial aid would be reduced. “We didn’t hear any complaint, and that is also a big red flag,” Borst said. “If they were needy, they would have come in to talk with us.”  The university now asks more questions of students who have recently entered into a guardianship, including whether they have contact with their parents, who they live with and who pays for their health insurance and cellphone bill. The questions have deterred some families from continuing to seek university aid, Borst said.  While the university has discretion over offering institutional aid, it is obligated to distribute the federal and state grants for needy students, known as the Pell Grant and the state Monetary Award Program, or MAP grant in Illinois, Borst said. Combined, they can total about $11,000 a year.  He said the university has alerted the U.S. Department of Education and officials at the Illinois agency that administers state financial aid, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission. An ISAC spokeswoman said the agency has not yet been told about a specific case, but that it would alert the state attorney general and the U.S. Department of Education if necessary. A spokesman at the U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  In Illinois last year, about 82,000 students who were eligible for the MAP grant, up to about $5,000, did not receive it because there wasn’t enough money. The grant is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.  When filling out the application for financial aid, called the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, students have to prove formal separation from their parents to qualify as an independent. One of the few ways to do that is through a legal guardianship change. Students cannot just declare financial independence—even in cases where parents are able to pay but refuse to do so, Borst said.  According to the U.S. Department of Education website, “a student in legal guardianship does not need to report parent information on the FAFSA form because he or she is considered an independent student.” Independent students are evaluated for financial aid based on their own income and resources and not that of their parents.  “It’s not like these families are close or on the tipping point” of being eligible for the aid, Borst said. “I don’t know how big this is, but I hope we can nip this in the bud now. … If it is legal, at what point is it wrong?”  The process starts in the courthouse.  Nearly all the cases identified by ProPublica Illinois were handled by one of two law firms: The Rogers Law Group in Deerfield, which handled most of them, and the Kabbe Law Group in Naperville. The only case filed by a different firm involved the family of Rick Rogers, of the Rogers Law Group.  The petitions filed by Rogers, whose firm specializes in real estate, are very similar, with language saying the guardianship would be in the minors’ “best interest” and typically citing educational reasons.  Many, for example, say: “The Guardian can provide educational and financial support and opportunities to the minor that her parents could not otherwise provide.”  Reached by phone, Rogers declined several times to comment about the families he represented, the process or why he sought a legal guardian for his son.  The Illinois Probate Act, the law that governs guardianship, does not specify circumstances in which guardianship should be denied. According to Illinois law, a court can appoint a guardian if the parents consent, the minor agrees and the court determines it is in the minor’s best interest. Even if a parent is able to care for the child, the court can approve the guardianship if the parents voluntarily relinquish custody of the child.  That is what was happening routinely in the Lake County courthouse until late last month, when Judge Joseph Salvi, who recently began hearing guardianship cases, questioned a petition involving a high school student who lives with his parents in suburban Long Grove. The judge denied guardianship and, in response, the attorney for the guardian, a “close family friend” of the student, wrote a brief arguing why the judge should use his “broad authority” to grant the guardianship.  In the brief, attorney Mari Berlin argued that the student’s parents are finalizing a divorce and can’t afford to support his college education. It said that the family is “working with a Certified College Planner to help him find a way to independently support himself through college, with specific focus on how to afford tuition.”  Berlin wrote in the brief that the student, who dreams of becoming a doctor, would be best served by a guardianship “that would allow him to attain the independent status necessary to achieve his goal.”  Berlin, of the Kabbe Law Group, said the firm has represented families in about a dozen cases in Lake County. She said the firm has filed between 20 and 30 cases in all, with varying success, throughout the Chicago area during the past two years, including in Kane, Will, DuPage, Cook, and McHenry counties.  Berlin said families who are going this route are in a financial position where their income is too high to qualify for financial aid but they still will struggle to pay for college. While this is an atypical use of guardianship, Berlin said, families have a strong legal basis for bringing the cases. The law doesn’t preclude it, she said.  “It’s a solution they have been able to find as college costs go up and they are unable to pay,” she said. “It is in the best interest of the minor, which is the statute’s purpose.”  In typical guardianship cases, an adult is stepping in to care for a child after an unexpected or troubling event: Mothers are homeless, seeking mental health care or working two jobs and can’t care for a child, fathers are in prison, addicted to drugs or deported. One Lake County guardianship case describes a child suffering from “severe physical and emotional abuse” by a parent, while another pleads: “He is a good kid. He is alone. He needs someone to take care of him.”  Those are the types of cases Rebekah Rashidfarokhi usually deals with at Chicago Volunteer Legal Services, a legal aid group that she said handles more than 300 guardianship cases in Cook County annually. While she said she hasn’t seen the so-called college guardianship cases, she said the law is intended to address the life of a child as a minor and who will care for the child on a day-to-day basis, not an “11th-hour petition” right before the teen turns 18.  “That’s not the way guardianship is supposed to be used,” she said. “If someone is trying to do that at the very last minute, it seems that they might be trying to take advantage of the system.”  The children obtaining guardianships for educational “opportunities” have attended some of the area’s most prestigious schools, including Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire and Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook. Others go to high schools in Vernon Hills, Grayslake, Libertyville, and Lake Forest.  A guardian interviewed by ProPublica Illinois said he felt conflicted when some family friends asked him to be their daughter’s guardian. He wanted to help the girl, whose work ethic and grades he admires.  “I did wrestle with this,” said the man, who agreed to speak as long as he was not identified. He said his wife works at a university and “knows it from the other side,” he said. “And her comment was, ‘Is it going to deprive someone else of … financial aid?’ And so that’s the issue. I was told it does not.”  “It’s one of these gray areas, and my heart wanted me to do it for the family,” the man said. “But I also have a conscience. I wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing.”  The man eventually agreed to become the teenager’s guardian, though the guardianship lasted only about a month, until she turned 18. He said that he did not provide financial support for her, and that she did not live in his home.  The man said he asked “a lot” of questions of Rogers, the attorney on the case, and a college consultant named Lora Georgieva with whom the family worked.  Georgieva runs a Lincolnshire-based college consulting company, Destination College, which offers “strategies to lower tuition expenses.” The company’s logo is a graduation cap with dollar bills spilling out of it. In video testimonials, clients praise the company for saving them money.  She is tied to at least several of the families, as well as to Rogers, the attorney, who is also featured in the video.  The description for the company’s “premier” services includes a “College Financial Plan, Using Income and Asset Shifting Strategies to Increase Your Financial and Merit Aid and Lower Out of Pocket Tuition Expenses.”  Reached Monday morning, Georgieva said she was “in the middle of something” and would call later. She then contacted an attorney, Phillip Zisook, who called ProPublica Illinois on her behalf to say she was worried about being depicted in a false light.  Zisook said he would relay ProPublica Illinois’ questions to Georgieva. As of publication time, she had not responded.  Mark Kantrowitz, a leading financial aid expert and publisher and vice president of research for savingforcollege.com, called the guardianship changes “an extreme measure.”  “This is the first time I have heard of something so brazen,” Kantrowitz said. “It’s completely unethical.”


nationalinterest--2019-12-15--Too Cool for School: Why Parents Should Communicate Better With Educators

Text messages, email alerts, open houses, fundraising appeals, robocalls – parents know the drill. They are inundated with requests from children’s schools.  These missives aren’t really asking for engagement. Rather they can be viewed as ways for educators to tell parents what they should do to support their students or the school. These experiences can inadvertently communicate that schools alone know what’s best for children – and parents should listen and follow directions, a dynamic especially present in schools serving working-class communities of color.  As scholars and parents, my colleagues and I research the intersection of families, schools and racial inequities. We have learned new ways for schools and families to work together to help realize children’s potential. And the answer isn’t fundraising, checking the latest school app or listening to robo-calls.  Research tells us that families play a critically important role in the educational success of their children. We also know from research that schools typically expect parents and families of color to conform to the values and behaviors of white, middle-class parents.  The hitch is that families of color don’t always participate in the ways schools expect. Histories of distrust and conflict often exist between families of color and schools.  We know, for example, that there are well-documented racial disparities in discipline referrals, in access to high-quality teachers and instruction, and in resources and robust learning opportunities. But when parents raise questions about racial bias and inequities, their questioning, our research and other work has shown, it is rarely well received by educators and school leaders.  Rather than acknowledging these well-documented tensions and revising expectations, educators can interpret behaviors that deviate from their expectations as evidence that there’s something wrong or lacking in families of color. A study by Dr. John Diamond and his colleagues found that when teachers decide parents don’t care or are interfering with their professional authority, they tend to feel less responsible for those students’ learning. These assumptions rely on age-old narratives that implicitly blame families of color – and have negative consequences, especially for Native American, black, Latinx, Pacific Islander and some Asian students.  Catalyzed by a charge from the 2014 White House Symposium on Transformative Family Engagement, we have been working on a different set of approaches to co-design more “just schools” with families. Based on the research of our national network of scholars and family leaders, Family Leadership Design Collaborative, schools and policymakers can approach families differently. They can:  1. Start with families’ and communities’ priorities, not the school’s agenda.  Families and communities need to be the architects of their own futures. That means starting with family stories, experiences, knowledge and cultural practices. That might mean recognizing negative histories with schools before jumping to solutions. For example, in Chicago’s urban Indigenous community, families discussed the trauma of boarding schools and the erasure of Indigenous communities. They also shared their ancestral knowledge and stories of raising children to envision what education would be required to raise “good elders.” Parents in another district shared experiences of positive relationships with teachers but also their frustrations dealing with bullying and racism at the school.  After sharing these experiences, they developed a curriculum for other parents to help them build relationships with each other to address issues of bullying and to support positive racial and cultural identities for their children.  2. Recognize and treat families of color as experts on their own children.  When schools help families build relationships with each other and recognize their expertise, they can become powerful leaders in school change. In Los Angeles, black and Latinx parent leaders with the organizing group CADRE changed the discipline policies in the district. And yet, based on our research, parents of color still felt blamed and judged in everyday conversations with teachers and principals about discipline – and there had been little change in the pipeline from school to prison, especially for black boys. Now those parent leaders are collaborating with faculty at UCLA to help new teachers reshape everyday conversations to be less about blame and more about enabling parents to share their expertise on their own children.  3. Give families and communities the resources, time and space to envision solutions, not just share their pain.  Listening sessions can be powerful but limiting. Families share their traumas with educators, but school leaders ultimately decide what to do with what they heard. Our research shows how families can be part of designing solutions if they are provided the time, space and resources to do so. For example, in Salt Lake City, a school decision-making body supposedly included parents, but families of color experienced meetings as alienating and exclusionary. We found rather than airing those negative experiences and expecting policymakers to do something, parents, teachers, principals, researchers and district leaders imagined what a productive council would be like and started to enact those changes. They got the legislature to let them use funds for outreach to more diverse families. They created a comic to share with parents whose first language wasn’t English. They are developing a training for educators on the councils to learn how to engage differently. And they envisioned spaces prior to formal council meetings for parents to come together to discuss what their schools need most.  4. Help families and educators learn to facilitate meetings across racial, cultural and other differences.  According to the U.S. Department of Education, most teachers and leaders in the U.S. are white, and a growing majority of students and their families are from communities of color. Collaborating across lines of race, culture and roles requires skillful facilitation. Real tensions emerge between people and ideas in equity work. School and parent leaders need to be able to intervene in tense interactions. That might be as simple as asking educators to slow down, listen more and use fewer acronyms. But imbalances of power often require skilled facilitation, like what to do when one loud voice dominates the conversation or when white parents inadvertently disregard parents of color.  Even parents of color can reinforce these narratives. For instance, one group of immigrant parents in a diversifying suburban district voiced a belief that other immigrant families are focused on meeting their immediate needs and don’t care about their children’s education. The facilitator at this session could have gone with this simplistic explanation that blamed parents for disparate opportunities – a stereotype that empirical research has proven wrong. Instead, the facilitator leaned into the tension and shared her own challenges as a working parent who was often away from her child. Her vulnerability challenged the discourse of blame, and parents began to strategize about how they could better support each other collectively. Such facilitation skills must be learned, and schools and systems need to invest in developing those capacities.  School and district leaders in our study came to see the routine decisions they made in their jobs as critical opportunities for family and community influence. Educational leaders redesigned key decisions that impacted students and families, especially those marginalized by typical processes.  For instance, one principal supervisor in an urban district redesigned the hiring process for a new principal with students, families and teachers in the school. He enlisted a colleague who helped families discuss the broken trust they felt with the district due to prior decisions, then they collectively designed their own questions for principal candidates. They held separate student, family and teacher interview panels, then proposed their top choice (which was unanimous, in this case). The district hired that principal, and several families wrote letters to the school board about how the process helped repair their broken trust with the district.  These and other actions laid out in our full policy memo can recast families and communities as essential collaborators in fostering equitable schools and educational systems.  [ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]  Ann M. Ishimaru, Associate Professor, University of Washington; Megan Bang, Professor of Learning Sciences and Psychology, Northwestern University, and Michelle Valladares, Associate Director of the National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado Boulder  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ann M. Ishimaru, Megan Bang, Michelle Valladares


newsbusters--2019-08-17--Bozell Graham Column Parental Nightmares in Public Schools

Bozell & Graham Column: Parental Nightmares in Public Schools

Public schools are reopening for business across America, meaning it’s time to get  back to reading, writing, arithmetic….and revolution.  As usual in matters such as these, California is leading the way.  On the first day of classes at Denair Middle School near Modesto science teacher Luis Davila Alvarado handed out worksheets from a transgender advocacy group titled “The Gender Unicorn” asking students about their “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and their sexual and emotional attractions.  These are children. And yet the teacher did not ask permission to hand this out. Most parents were outraged. The school estimated about 50 children received the worksheet. It turns out Alvarado was educating the children about his own life. He declared he rejects the term “Mr.” and prefers to be addressed with the newfangled “Mx.,” pronounced “Mix.” A school official quickly put a stop to it, but the damage was done.  In California, waiting until middle school for this boatload of propaganda is actually inappropriate! In May, the California Board of Education established a set of guidelines insisting schools should begin discussing “gender identity” in kindergarten. “While students may not fully understand the concepts of gender expression and identity,” the guidelines insist, “some children in kindergarten and even younger have identified as transgender or understand they have a gender identity that is different from their sex assigned at birth.” Schools apparently must leap to address the “harm of negative gender stereotypes.”  Public schools aren’t just undermining parents with the curriculum. When children “decide” they “might” be transgender,  parents better not object or else they will be treated as a threat to their own children’s well-being.  On August 12, USA Today published a chilling op-ed from Jay Keck, a parent in the Chicago suburbs, about how his autistic teenaged daughter – who “showed no signs” of being unhappy with her gender -- suddenly decided in 2016 that she was male and wanted to be addressed with male pronouns.  She first “came out” at school, and the school immediately addressed her with male pronouns and provided access to a gender-neutral bathroom. When Keck and his wife found out, they insisted the school address their daughter by her legal name – and they were ignored. They met with an assistant superintendent, who asserted the school had to “follow the law” – a non-binding directive from the Obama administration which was repealed by Team Trump.  According to Keck, surprise, surprise:  the ACLU has sent threatening letters to schools telling them that “students have the constitutional right to share or withhold information about their sexual orientation or gender identity from their parents, teachers, and other parties.”  Then the real nightmare kicked in. Put yourself in the position of the Keck family.  Keck said his daughter told him that the school social worker was advising her about halfway houses. “The social worker confirmed this when I scheduled a meeting with him to discuss it. This felt like a horrifying attempt to encourage our daughter to run away from home.”  When Keck had his daughter evaluated by a psychologist approved by the school district, he said “it was very clear that our daughter’s sudden transgender identity was driven by her underlying mental health conditions, but would only share his thoughts off the record, because he feared the potential backlash.” When his daughter graduated high school, parental wishes that her birth name would be announced were again ignored.  This growing gender-bending orthodoxy is what Pope Benedict called the “dictatorship of relativism,” or, if you prefer, “the tyranny of tolerance.” Dissent – even from parents – is being condemned  as bigotry, cruelty, and hate speech.  This will not stop until the nuclear family is destroyed. Or until parents stand up as one and declare a commitment to destroy this movement.


newspunch--2019-04-09--Parents Threaten To Withdraw Hundreds Of Children From Second UK School Over LGBT Lessons

Parents Threaten To Withdraw Hundreds Of Children From Second UK School Over LGBT+ Lessons

A second UK primary school is facing daily protests from parents who oppose LGBT + lessons for their five to eleven year old children.  Angry families are threatening to withdraw around 400 children from another Birmingham primary school saying they are too young to learn about about lesbian, gay and transgender relationships. Parents also want the headteacher to resign.  The Independent reports: Parkfield Community School, another primary school in Birmingham, suspended its “No Outsiders” programme, which uses story books to teach about same-sex couples, after hundreds of parents reportedly withdrew their children from class amid weekly protests.  A petition is due to be handed into Anderton Park Primary on Wednesday calling on headteacher Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson to resign and for the LGBT+ inclusive education to be suspended.  Protesting parents will then meet on Thursday to decide whether to withdraw their children.  Mr Afsar told The Independent: “If our letter or petition is not listened to then we will go forward with a mass withdrawal of the school. At least 400 students [would be withdrawn]. Unfortunately the headteacher is putting us into a bracket of homophobia and she is not wanting to talk. She is not helping the situation at all.”  Speaking last month, Ms Hewitt-Clarkson, who has been subjected to chants calling for her to resign, said teachers and parents have called the police repeatedly after feeling harassed by the daily protests during school pickup.  Staff have been given a phone number for a counselling service in the school in the wake of the protests, which have left children in tears and staff feeling “incredibly intimidated”, the head said.  Parents across the country have been leafleting against the government’s decision to make relationships education compulsory in primary schools and relationships and sex education compulsory at secondary schools in England from September 2020.  The curriculum guidance, which a large majority of MPs backed last month, encourages primary schools to teach children about different families, including same-sex parents.  Under the reforms, parents will not be allowed to withdraw their children from relationships classes and from the age of 15, students can opt into sex education regardless of their parents’ wishes.  The headteachers’ union NAHT is to write to school leaders making clear they have a legal duty to teach about same-sex families in primary schools and about sex education in secondary schools.  But the union will urge them to do this sensitively and to involve parents in discussions to explain lessons.  Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT, said: “Schools have a duty to eliminate discrimination. The Equality Act places an obligation on schools to talk to pupils about the differences between themselves and their peers.


newyorker--2019-03-13--An Investigative Journalist on How Parents Buy College Admissions

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice charged fifty people in the largest college-admissions scandal in recent memory. According to the indictments, dozens of rich and well-connected parents, including two television stars, participated in a criminal scheme run by William Singer, the founder of a college preparatory and counselling business. Singer allegedly helped his clients to insure their children’s admission to selective colleges by bribing university staff and coaches to misrepresent their children as athletes or by recruiting administrators and proctors to help falsify their children’s scores on admissions tests. The schools targeted included Yale, Stanford, U.S.C., U.C.L.A., and more; the uproar over the story, and the lengths that the government claims the parents went to, suggest that college admissions, especially at élite schools, continue to be a topic of immense interest and angst.  To discuss the scandal, I spoke by phone with Daniel Golden, the author of the 2006 book “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” Currently a senior editor at ProPublica, Golden showed how the wealthiest parents, including Jared Kushner’s, have wheeled and dealed their way into gaining admission for their children, often via large gifts to their university of choice. My conversation with Golden about today’s blockbuster story and its larger meaning, which has been edited for clarity and length, is below.  How does this scandal change, if it does change, your understanding of the larger issue that your book addresses?  I think that it’s kind of a logical outgrowth of the scandal that my book exposed. What my book showed was that the rich and famous exploit the college-admissions system by using private college counsellors who serve as conduits for donations, by benefitting from the various admissions preferences, like the preference for athletes, because there are so many patrician sports in which their kids participate, like crew or sailing or fencing or equestrian events. In this case, they take it to the extreme, through pretense. Normally, students from rich families benefit from athletic preference because they actually row crew or sail or fence, which is a preference in itself, because those sports are not played at most inner-city high schools. But here the kids did not even engage in those activities. Instead, it was a sham.  Similarly, the private college counsellor here went beyond all the bounds of accepted behavior, if we can believe the allegations. He didn’t just facilitate the admission by hinting to college officials that the family might be inclined to be philanthropic if the kid was accepted. Instead, he appears to have flat-out bribed test administrators and college coaches and the like. They pushed, to the fullest extent, an unfair system that has been in place for a long time. It’s the fantasy, extreme version of an endemic problem.  When you say that it’s been in place for a long time, does that mean since American colleges were founded, or was there a golden era when this stuff was not going on?  I don’t think there was ever a golden era. College admissions has evolved over the years. Initially, back before there were standardized-test scores, and when élite schools, like Harvard, mostly recruited from their own areas, they just straightforwardly preferred candidates from wealthy, well-established families. But then there were various efforts towards meritocracy, like standardized tests, and the system we have now. And there was also entry by high-achieving groups, like Jews, that the colleges didn’t want to let in, in perhaps the numbers that they deserved.  So, in response to the pressure for meritocracy, this crazy-quilt complicated system developed, which appears, on the surface, to be merit-based but actually includes quite a few hidden boosts for the wealthy. And that system has been in place for some decades. But it’s post-World War II.  Do you have reason to think that this sort of thing we saw with the indictments today has been going on for a long time, and, if it is increasing, why might it be increasing?  I don’t know if this kind of criminal activity is widespread. There are widespread practices that are unfair and benefit the wealthy. One of the puzzles of this case is: Why did these families bother to go to this extreme? Why did they pay so much money to fake their kids having athletic preference, or have somebody else take their tests? Why didn’t they simply contribute a lot of money to the university? Maybe their kids were so far underqualified that they couldn’t get in no matter how much was donated. Or, possibly, it was less expensive for them to pay these kinds of bribes. But there are so many advantages anyway, and giving money usually meets such a receptive audience, that it is a little puzzling why they would have to engage in this kind of criminal activity.  Colleges obviously still rely a lot on legacy admissions. Are they relying on it less than a decade or two ago, and might this lessening be causing legacy admissions or the rich and famous to be more desperate to get their kids in by any means necessary?  Actually, regarding legacy admissions, what’s happened in the last couple decades is two contrasting things. The first is that, yes, the percentage of legacies admitted has declined. It’s less of a guarantee of admission than it used to be. On the other hand, the over-all acceptance rate at these élite schools has declined even more. So legacy, proportionally, is a bigger advantage than it once was. If you take a typical Ivy League school, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, they might admit two-thirds of legacy applicants. Now they might admit one-third of legacy applicants. But, at the same time, their over-all acceptance rate has probably gone down from between twenty and twenty-five per cent to between five and ten per cent. So, proportionally, being a legacy is even more of an advantage. But, in any particular case, a legacy is less likely to get in than they used to.  Now, the pressures over all are generally working a little bit the other way. They are working for the benefit of donors rather than to their detriment. What’s happened is that other sources of income for universities have stayed level or declined. The percentage of small, grassroots donors—alumni who give a little bit—has declined, and universities are more dependent on big donations, the kind that often carry a kind of admissions tit for tat. Similarly, there hasn’t been big growth in terms of federal funding for research and other sources of income for universities. So universities are actually more dependent on big gifts than ever before, or at least in recent memory, and, as a result, donors are even more in the driver’s seat.  Did you have any other takeaways from the story today?  The other thing that is interesting is that, in my book, I wrote about preferences not just for the rich but for celebrities—how Brown University had gained buzz by admitting the kids of celebrities.  It’s sort of a separate preference. It’s an additional benefit. They might not be hugely rich, but they have a kind of cachet. There might be someone at Goldman Sachs who is worth ten times as much as a television personality. But there is a cachet to having the kid of a television personality. I thought it was interesting, in that regard, that this case involved both the traditionally rich—chief executives and securities investors—and television actresses. My book focussed on those groups as somewhat separate, overlapping but distinct.  Is there anything you think your book got wrong or understated?  I think the general themes were right on point, and I don’t think it’s because I was so brilliant. I think it’s because this was a system that was hidden in plain view and was in front of your nose if only you looked, and also because it was so offensive to most people’s idea of what America is about. The fundamental ethos of America is equal opportunity and upward mobility and everybody gets a chance. The people who perform the best are supposed to rise to the top, and college education is supposed to be the driving force in upward mobility. So the idea that the wealthy can perpetuate their own privileged status through college admissions, that it’s not an equal gateway for everybody but a way to perpetuate American aristocracy, is a real affront to people. And that’s the resonance a case like this has.  The Times’ Ross Douthat had a long Twitter thread about this, in which he wrote, in part, “This is not proof that meritocracy is somehow ‘broken.’ Quite the reverse: It shows that the desire to claim some measured ‘merit’ to legitimize success extends to parents who by merely financial measures don’t need the Ivy stamp to ensure their kids’ success. Like ‘James Gatz’ becoming ‘Jay Gatsby’ in the Main Line/social-register dispensation, a CEO or TV star buying an Ivy admission and even a fake test score for their lackluster scion is the homage that mere money plays to the gods of the resume and the SAT.” What do you think of that?  I think it’s nicely written. And I also think that he is correct in saying that the perceived value of an Ivy League degree goes beyond money. It does have to do with social status and bragging rights and an aristocratic identification. So I think that’s true.  Also, there are a lot of debates about how much an Ivy League degree affects financial gain in future years, and I don’t pretend to know or even understand the math on which those debates are based. All I can say is that some people are extremely desirous of an Ivy League degree. It’s easy for people on the outside to say, “What does it matter if your kid went to the Ivy League or School X?,” but it does seem to matter an awful lot to an awful lot of people. If you look at the hallways of power in our society—the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, places like that—you will find a lot of people with undergraduate or graduate degrees from élite schools.  I also think that, often in our society, the great entrepreneurs, the great originators of success, are not necessarily Ivy League graduates. They may be dropouts like Bill Gates or people who didn’t go to college at all, or went to a school that doesn’t have as high a reputation. But then they often want to cement that status by making their family a permanent part of whatever passes for aristocracy in America, and they often see the Ivy League degree that they didn’t get themselves as the imprimatur for their children or grandchildren. You will often see at these Ivy League the second or third generations of a great business family rather than the first generation.


newyorkpost--2019-12-07--Brooklyn parents upset by second-graders’ naked locker room encounters

The principal of Brooklyn’s PS 169 is in hot water over a swimming program for second-graders that exposes to them more than just the backstroke.  Parents at the Sunset Park School are aghast the tots are taking lessons at a Manhattan fitness center where the children gather in a locker room with the club’s sometimes-naked members, school insiders told The Post.  “Kids were seeing naked adults in the locker room. They don’t close the access to the public. Any member could come in. Adults could come in, change in the locker room while these kids are in the locker room at the same time,” one source said. “Teachers are in the locker room as well. They see the kids naked. The kids see each other naked.”  But principal EuJin Tang — who once made headlines for canceling Christmas at the school — told parents they could not opt out, the insider said.  Furious parents even called 311 to complain, the insider said.  Tang touted the weekly lessons at Asphalt Green in Battery Park City in a June letter to parents saying that in September students would be provided with “more real-world experiences. For example, every second grader will learn how to swim.”  The school has about 1,400 students in grades K-5 and serves mostly immigrant and low-income families. The student population is about 62% Asian and 33% Hispanic and half the kids are English language learners. There are about 300 students in second grade.  Tang held a midday meeting with parents in October and, in a seeming about-face, said the swimming lessons weren’t mandatory. But no notice went out to parents who couldn’t make the meeting, the insider said.  “She wants this program so bad. She doesn’t want them to opt out,” one parent said.  Asphalt Green offers the “Waterproofing” program to children in public and private schools.  “Over the past 25 years, Asphalt Green’s Waterproofing program has provided free and low-cost weekly swimming lessons to tens of thousands of public school students, in an environment that is safe, educational, and fun,” an organization spokesman said.  The organization said it offered the use of private family changing rooms to allay any concerns.  But the PS 169 insider said kids must still wait their turn in the communal locker room where they can see the nude adults.  Tang did not respond to requests for comment.  A DOE spokeswoman said only two families opted out and that “Swim lessons save lives, and this program helps ensure children, regardless of background, have access to them.”  Tang ruffled feathers shortly after arriving at the school in 2014 when she decided to scrap Santa Claus, celebrate the “fall harvest” rather than Thanksgiving and eliminate a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance over the school’s public address system.  The principal, then known as EuJin Jaela Kim, was forced to change her tune after a Post expose.  But she stirred up controversy again in 2016 when she threw away 1,200 almost-new desks and replaced them with tables.


npr--2019-04-22--Most Teachers Dont Teach Climate Change 4 In 5 Parents Wish They Did

Most Teachers Don't Teach Climate Change; 4 In 5 Parents Wish They Did

More than 80% of parents in the U.S. support the teaching of climate change. And that support crosses political divides, according to the results of an exclusive new NPR/Ipsos poll: Whether they have children or not, two-thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats agree that the subject needs to be taught in school.  A separate poll of teachers found that they are even more supportive, in theory — 86% agree that climate change should be taught.  These polls are among the first to gauge public and teacher opinion on how climate change should be taught to the generation that in the coming years will face its intensifying consequences: children.  [**Don't see the graphic above? Click here**](https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/ipsos-climate- teach-20190418/child.html?mode=childlink&utm_source=nprnews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=storyredirect)  And yet, as millions of students around the globe participate in Earth Day events on Monday, our poll also found a disconnect. Although most states have classroom standards that at least mention human-caused climate change, most teachers aren't actually talking about climate change in their classrooms. And fewer than half of parents have discussed the issue with their children.  [**Don't see the graphic above? Click here**](https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/ipsos-climate- responsibility-20190419/child.html?mode=childlink&utm_source=nprnews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=storyredirect)  When it comes to one of the biggest global problems, the default message from older generations to younger ones is silence.  **Parents and the general public**  Laine Fabijanic, a mother of three living in Glenwood Springs, Colo., says her part of the country is feeling the effects of climate change, from an unusually snowless winter last year to scary fires. She and her family recycle and eat organic; they are even installing solar panels on the house.  Still, she says she hasn't talked about the big picture of climate change with her young daughters. "I don't think we've talked much about it at all," she said in an interview. "Probably because it hasn't come up from them."  About 3 in 4 respondents in our nationally representative survey of 1,007 Americans agreed that the climate is changing. That figure is in line with previous results from Ipsos and other polls.  [**Don't see the graphic above? Click here**](https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/ipsos-climate- real-20190418/child.html?mode=childlink&utm_source=nprnews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=storyredirect)  Parents are even more likely than the general public to support teaching students thoroughly about climate change, including its effects on our environment, economy and society. Among parents with children under 18, 84% agree that it should be taught in schools.  A plurality of all parents support starting those lessons as early as elementary school. And though it may be a controversial subject, 65% of those who thought climate change should be taught didn't think parental permission was necessary. Among Republicans, the corresponding figure was 57%.  However, parents like Fabijanic aren't necessarily holding these conversations themselves. Just 45% of parents said they had ever discussed the topic with their own children.  **Teachers support teaching climate change more in theory than in practice**  If they don't hear about it at home, will kids learn about climate change in school? To answer this question, NPR/Ipsos also completed a nationally representative survey of around 500 teachers. These educators were even more likely than the general public to believe in climate change and to support teaching climate change.  In fact, 86% of teachers believe climate change should be taught in schools. In theory.  But in practice, it's more complicated. More than half — 55% — of teachers we surveyed said they do not cover climate change in their own classrooms or even talk to their students about it.  The most common reason given? Nearly two-thirds (65%) said it's outside their subject area.  [**Don't see the graphic above? Click here**](https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/ipsos-climate- why-20190419/child.html?mode=childlink&utm_source=nprnews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=storyredirect)  Let's not forget that teachers are busy, and often underresourced and overworked. When asked to rank the importance of climate change, it fell to near the bottom of a list of priorities for expanding the curriculum, behind science and math, basic literacy and financial education.  **Parents seen as obstacles to teaching climate**  But there are other factors at work, too, in the decision of whether to cover climate change.  For example, almost a third of all teachers say that when it comes to teaching climate change, they worry about parent complaints.  [**Don't see the graphic above? Click here**](https://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/ipsos-climate- prepared-20190419/child.html?mode=childlink&utm_source=nprnews&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=storyredirect)  In our poll, teachers who do not teach the subject were allowed to choose more than one reason. They named many obstacles.    * 17% say they don't have the materials.   * 17% also say they don't know enough about the subject to teach it.   * 4% say their school does not allow the subject to be taught.  Moreover, there also seems to be a divide in terms of resources, attitudes and support between teachers who cover climate change in their classrooms and those who don't.  Mallory Newall of Ipsos said for some teachers, maintaining that it's not their job to teach climate change "may just be a way to rationalize why they're not talking about it."  That's because teachers who do talk about climate change are also more likely to say:    * There should be state laws that require teaching it (70% versus 38% of teachers who don't talk about climate change).   * They have the resources they need to answer students' questions about climate change (77% versus 32%).   * Their students have brought up climate change in the classroom this year (78% versus 14%).   * Their school encourages them to discuss climate change (64% versus 18%).  In our [NPR Ed newsletter](https://www.npr.org/newsletter/ed), we did a callout to teachers to find out more about how they teach climate change. Some teachers we heard from mentioned the divisiveness of the issue and the difficulty in dealing with students whose parents are deniers of climate change.  "There's so much political jargon around climate change that I would either have to dismiss their concerns that they bring up or burn a lot of time talking about something that is outside my content area," said Jack Erickson, a science teacher at Cienega High School in Vail, Ariz., in response to our callout.  **Some teachers get creative in teaching climate change**  On the other hand, about 42% of teachers in our survey said they are indeed finding ways to address climate change in the classroom.  In our callout, we heard from far more than just science teachers. Preschool, English, public speaking, Spanish, statistics, social studies teachers — even home economics teachers and librarians — all are finding ways to approach the topic.  For example, Rebecca Meyer is an eighth-grade English language arts teacher at Bronx Park Middle School in New York City. Meyer's students researched water scarcity and then read a "cli-fi" (or climate-fiction) novel by Mindy McGinnis called _Not a Drop to Drink._  _"_ The main character, Lynn, lives in a version of the U.S. where physical water scarcity is the norm. As we read the novel, kids made connections between what is happening today and the novel," she told NPR. "They were very engaged; they loved it. They learned so much they didn't know."  Debra Freeman teaches family and consumer science — what used to be called home economics — at McDougle Middle School in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her curriculum includes healthy food choices.  "Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health is directly connecting the overconsumption of animal products to our global warming dilemma," she says. "We also touch on the role of food waste (a huge problem in the U.S.) and its effect on climate change. Students in middle school are at a pivotal age for developing a multifaceted lens for thinking, evaluating and problem-solving. I place great hope in them!"  Erin Royer's mixed-age classroom at Steele Elementary School in Denver comprises fourth- and fifth-graders. Does she cover climate change in elementary school? "Hell yes!" she says. "If you teach from a problem-based learning style, students will repeatedly arrive at climate change as the cause and effect of many problems/issues in their world."  Whether the topic is animals, energy, or hurricanes and wildfires, "When they read information, through their research, put out by reliable scientists, they arrive at climate change again and again."  And Lily Sage teaches "really little people" at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education's nature-focused preschool in Philadelphia. "It's a little above their heads, but we talk about Earth changes and ways we can avoid the ones that are causing mass extinctions. Because dinosaurs are accessible to them, that is often the framing for that conversation."  **State school policies mostly include climate change**  Since 2013, 19 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the[ Next Generation Science Standards](https://www.nextgenscience.org/), created by a consortium of states and science authorities to strengthen the teaching of science. The standards instruct teachers to cover the facts of human-caused climate change beginning in middle school. According to an analysis done for NPR Ed by Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, 36 states in total currently recognize human-caused climate change somewhere in their state standards. But, he says, "the fact that human-caused climate change is included in a state's science standards doesn't mean that teachers in that state do teach it," and vice versa.  Moreover, this year alone, there have been numerous bills and resolutions introduced in statehouses that would restrict the teaching of climate change.  In Connecticut, a recent bill would have cut climate change materials from the state's standards. An Iowa bill would have directly repealed the state's use of Next Generation Science Standards.  Others — including in Arizona, Maine, South Dakota and Virginia — would prohibit the teaching of any issue included in a state political party platform, on the grounds of anti-indoctrination. Florida's [bill prescribes ](https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Documents/loaddoc.aspx?FileName=_s0330__.DOCX&DocumentType=Bill&BillNumber=0330&Session=2019)"balanced" teaching for "controversial" science subjects.  While most of these bills were tabled or failed to pass (Florida's is still live), Branch sees them as part of a concerted and continuing effort to block the teaching of mainstream science. For example, some of these bills resemble model legislation created[ years ago](https://www.alec.org/model-policy /environmental-literacy-improvement-act/) by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that brings businesses together with lawmakers to write bills that are often industry-friendly.  **Students are feeling the effects**  As the political debate continues, more and more students don't have to wait to learn about climate impacts in the classroom. That's because they are experiencing them in their daily lives.  High school junior Celeste Palmer holds a burned piece of paper that drifted into her neighborhood during the California Tubbs Fire in 2017. **Olivia Sun/NPR** ****hide caption****  ****toggle caption****  Olivia Sun/NPR  High school junior Celeste Palmer holds a burned piece of paper that drifted into her neighborhood during the California Tubbs Fire in 2017.  Olivia Sun/NPR  NPR Ed found in an analysis that in [just one semester, the fall of 2017](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/12/15/564058043/natural-disasters- and-the-implications-of-missing-so-much-school), for example, 9 million U.S. students across nine states and Puerto Rico missed some amount of school owing to natural disasters — which scientists say are becoming [more frequent and severe because of climate change](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/11/646313648 /climate-change-drives-bigger-wetter-storms-storms-like-florence).  The Schools for Climate Action Summit in Washington, D.C., in March, was instigated by students in Northern California whose communities were ravaged by wildfires. They also brought together students affected by Hurricane Harvey in Houston and by agricultural droughts on tribal lands in New Mexico to lobby at the Capitol.  Celeste Palmer, a high school junior, came to the summit with scraps of burned paper that had drifted into her Santa Rosa, Calif., neighborhood from the Tubbs Fire in 2017. She calls climate change "a generational justice issue for my generation in particular ... because it's affecting us now."


pinknewsuk--2019-05-30--Malicious outsiders lying to Birmingham school protest parents

‘Malicious outsiders’ lying to Birmingham school protest parents

Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  The Birmingham school protests against LGBT-inclusive relationship lessons have been worsened by outside forces lying to parents, according to a mediator.  Human rights lawyer Nazir Afzal was brought in to broker peace between parents and school officials over lessons which taught young children about different types of families, including those with same-sex parents.  Revealing that talks have broken down, Afzal alleged that “outside forces… people who are not parents of pupils at the school” are perpetuating lies to parents, who fear that their children are being taught explicit sex education.  “I have looked at the curriculum and studied the books used. There is nothing remotely sexual in the content. Then I realised something more was at work,” he told BirminghamLive.  “There’s talk of grooming, talk of wanting to ‘take our kids’. It is malicious.”  Parents have been put “under pressure” to join in the Birmingham school protests, Afzal added, explaining that the “vast majority” support the school and want an end to the dispute.  Demonstrations have been taking place outside of Birmingham schools since March, with one—Anderton Park Primary—forced to close early on Friday (May 24) due to safety concerns around a mass gathering.  The event was organised by Shakeel Afsar, a man who does not have children at the school.  On May 22, Afsar told This Morning hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby: “Parents feel that in primary school, we should be teaching our children about humanity, respect for humanity.  “Parents at the school shouldn’t feel like the school is over-promoting one narrative and not the other and we should try to make it transparent.”  Schools across Birmingham have insisted that the lessons simply place LGBT+ people on an equal footing, teaching children about same-sex parents as part of lessons on different families.  “Equality is a real strength of ours, the children talk about it all the time,” Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, headteacher of Anderton Park Primary School, told PinkNews on March 21.  She added that the school’s policy is to underline the Equality Act 2010.  “Part of the Equality Act is race and religion, so [we] can’t discriminate against different religions, so we will say to children: ‘Two ladies can get married, two men can get married, but your mums and dads may have a different view on that because of their religious beliefs… we respect people’s religious beliefs but you need to know that this is British law.’”


prepareforchange--2019-07-24--California Parents Horrified The New Sex Ed

California Parents Horrified: The New Sex Ed

The debate over whether schools should teach sex education to minors has been going on for decades. But now, perhaps more than ever, many parents are horrified by what their children are being taught – especially when parents, despite their religious beliefs, have no say about the teaching materials. In a small California community, parents and clergy were so appalled at the explicit and LGBTQ-inspired lessons, they went undercover to investigate deeper. What they discovered at a Riverside County Comprehensive Health Education meeting so horrified them, they determined to stop the curriculum.  Our Watch President Pastor Tim Thompson said, “We don’t want our children exposed to some of these things they are showing, th(is) pornographic, sexually explicit material. It has no place in the classroom. It’s not right, and it won’t be tolerated.”  Thompson was referring to Positive Prevention Plus, the text for sex ed classes. John Andrews, parent of a student in the Murrieta School District, was sick over the explicit material depicted in the “educational” materials. He said:  “They talk about mutual masturbation. They discuss gender roles, the gender spectrum, and in the support materials … they take it even further. They discuss everything, topics like roleplaying for different genders, blood play, dental dams … fisting is mentioned. I mean, they mention it all. “If I were to show that material to a child, I would be brought up on charges. But somehow our public schools are allowed to teach this to junior high and high school kids.”  The graphics in the instructional guides use cartoon images so detailed that many parents found them inappropriate. Wanting to discover more about what children would be learning, Thompson’s group attended meetings held by the school boards. At one particular meeting in Riverside, a woman went “undercover” and recorded the event. Thompson said he was shocked to discover some of the biggest contributors to the new sex ed curriculum included Planned Parenthood and Cardea Services, which he said is a huge advocate for the LGBT community. Another shocker was that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was on hand to explain how to excuse children from class to get abortions without parents finding out.  “We knew parents had to see for themselves or else they weren’t going to believe it,” Thompson said, referring to the video he posted.  In the video, ACLU Attorney Ruth Dawson can be heard describing how to give students seeking an abortion an excused absence. She explained that the excused absence was necessary to ensure the school would still receive its financial support. However, the schools needed to ensure that the parents would not find out, so they needed to find a way to prevent their phone systems from making automated calls to parents informing them of students’ absenteeism.  Later in the meeting, Dawson explained to the audience the spectrum of gender identity, which is a social construct, not a binary. “We don’t have male/female full-stop. There are people who identify as non-binary. There are people who identify as gender-queer. There are a bunch of genders. Not only are gender identity and gender expression non-binary, but, really, clinical biological sex is not binary either.”  And if that isn’t confusing enough, she added, “Then we have ‘who are you physically attracted to’? Emotional attraction is also separate from physical attraction.”  But wait, there’s more. Dawson described the complex world of identities in talking about LGBT, and she went on to list some of them:  It is “a clear political agenda to destroy the traditional family in America,” said Parental Rights in Education Executive Director Suzanne Gallagher to the Daily Caller.  Mary Rice Hasson, author of “Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It’s Too Late,” attorney, and director of the Catholic Women’s Forum, said that Our Watch’s video was “deadly accurate.”  “Who gave progressive LGBTQ activists, Planned Parenthood, or the ACLU the right to teach other people’s kids about queer identities and explicit sexuality?” Hasson asked. “Especially over the objection of the kids’ own parents?”  Unfortunately, parents’ rights are being usurped by government and schools, and there doesn’t seem to be much hope reclaiming that power any time soon. In the quest for equality and inclusion,  traditional Christian family values are being threatened.  Disclaimer: We at Prepare for Change (PFC) bring you information that is not offered by the mainstream news, and therefore may seem controversial. The opinions, views, statements, and/or information we present are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, espoused, or agreed to by Prepare for Change, its leadership Council, members, those who work with PFC, or those who read its content. However, they are hopefully provocative. Please use discernment! Use logical thinking, your own intuition and your own connection with Source, Spirit and Natural Laws to help you determine what is true and what is not. By sharing information and seeding dialogue, it is our goal to raise consciousness and awareness of higher truths to free us from enslavement of the matrix in this material realm.


prepareforchange--2019-11-02--In Georgia, Parents Win Battle Over Transgender Bathrooms at School

Jasper, Georgia, isn’t a big town. At last count, it had about 3,800 residents. So it was a big deal when 900 squeezed into the Pickens High School auditorium determined to stop Jasper from becoming the next stop in the march for transgender bathrooms.  For the small community, the time for polite conversation was over.  The residents packed into the special school board meeting were angry. They’d already made accommodations for the two students who identified as another gender, setting up single-person restrooms for anyone who wanted them. The trouble is, these kids weren’t satisfied with that compromise.  In a fiery meeting that pit Superintendent Carlton Wilson against most of the town, moms and dads like Nathan Barfield were furious. Barfield says his two children are being made uncomfortable because a handful of students want access to any bathroom.  “Most people won’t say anything because they fear retaliation,” Barfield fumed. “[But] accommodations have already been made for transgender students. This is nothing but a political stunt to gain attention.”  A raucous applause broke out, punctuated by a series of “Amens!”  “Once you give into this, you’ll open the floodgates,” warned one mom.  In places like the U.K., where this sort of gender free-for-all is commonplace, parents are distraught about the rise in their kids’ anxiety. Some girls are staying home so they don’t have to use the bathrooms with boys. Others are risking bladder infections by not drinking.  Here in the U.S., even liberal parents are calling it a “bathroom crisis.” The Atlantic, not to be confused with a conservative magazine, is the latest to sound the alarm, publishing a long feature from George Packer headlined “When the Culture War Comes for Your Kids.”  Packer tells the story of sending his son to a public school in New York City to expose him to more diversity. There, a single girl in the second grade “had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes.”  Within two years, “almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students,” he writes, adding:  Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away. The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a ‘commonsense solution.’ It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.  In Jasper, the parents were fortunate. They won. Wilson saw the outpouring of opposition and reconsidered.  But despite all the Trump administration has done to put these decisions back in communities’ hands, there will always be a small army of activists who try to slip this indoctrination into your district.  When that moment comes, make sure you’re prepared. Read through Family Research Council’s “A Parent’s Guide to the Transgender Movement in Education” and make sure to watch the powerful stories from people at the Values Voter Summit who’ve suffered at the hands of this agenda.  Disclaimer: We at Prepare for Change (PFC) bring you information that is not offered by the mainstream news, and therefore may seem controversial. The opinions, views, statements, and/or information we present are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, espoused, or agreed to by Prepare for Change, its leadership Council, members, those who work with PFC, or those who read its content. However, they are hopefully provocative. Please use discernment! Use logical thinking, your own intuition and your own connection with Source, Spirit and Natural Laws to help you determine what is true and what is not. By sharing information and seeding dialogue, it is our goal to raise consciousness and awareness of higher truths to free us from enslavement of the matrix in this material realm.


prisonplanet--2019-09-24--Parents shocked as UK schools teach 6-10yo kids to touch their private parts in beds showers

Parents shocked as UK schools teach 6-10yo kids to touch their ‘private parts’ in beds & showers

Parents in Britain are outraged after more than 240 primary schools introduced lessons on “self-stimulation” for children as young as six as part of their sex education program.  A teaching manual, published by the Mail on Sunday, instructs how to teach children aged six to ten about “the rules of self-stimulation.” The lessons are part of the new All About Me program rolled out in more than 240 primary schools in central England’s Warwickshire County. The program, in turn, is designed to be taught in accordance with the compulsory Relationship and Sex Education (RSE), which will be implemented all across the UK next September.  In the section called ‘Touching Myself’, the teachers are advised to tell the youngsters that “lots of people like to tickle or stroke themselves as it might feel nice,” including touching their “private parts.” The children are told that this is “really very normal,” despite the fact that “some people may get cross or say that it is dirty.”  The children are then warned that it is “not polite” to touch themselves in class or other public places, and they should “only” do it when they “are alone, perhaps in the bath or shower or in bed.”  Some parents were shocked by the program, saying that children of such young ages should not be exposed to mature topics like masturbation. “This sexualisation of our children is just totally inappropriate,” Matthew Seymour told the Mail on Sunday.  “They are calling it self-touching and they won’t use the term masturbation, but when you read it that’s exactly what they’re talking about.”  Parents who disagree with this type of sex education took their children from school when it was taught. A number of education experts and teachers criticized the program’s wording for being too vague and not suitable for primary schoolers.  “We never use the word self-stimulation, not in primary school. For us it is not appropriate,” teacher Lynette Smith said.  Even some politicians who support the idea of compulsory sex education are skeptical towards All About Me. Conservative MP David Davies was “furious” over the program.  “These classes go way beyond the guidance the Government is producing and are effectively sexualising very young children,” he said.  Warwickshire County Council, meanwhile, maintains that the lessons simply tell young students how to “distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate touching” and “recognise the difference between public and private behaviours.”  The council’s website says the program helps to develop the skills required for managing “healthy relationships,” builds “self-esteem” and allows the children “to explore personal identity.”  One of the program’s authors, education consultant Jonny Hunt, argued that “however uncomfortable adults may find it, children of all ages will self-stimulate from time to time.”  This article was posted: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 at 5:12 am


prisonplanet--2019-10-08--Parents fume over teacher kneeling during Pledge of Allegiance: ‘Not paid to indoctrinate our studen

Parents fume over teacher kneeling during Pledge of Allegiance: ‘Not paid to indoctrinate our students’  A Vineland, New Jersey teacher is taking a knee during the morning Pledge of Allegiance at a school named after a local war hero, and district leaders are scrambling to figure out what to do about it.  “Like any problematic issue, the district is exploring options to address this situation in fairness to all involved and with utmost concern for the students,” Joseph Rossi, executive director for Vineland Public Schools, told The Daily Journal.  The best option, several at the board meeting argued, is to make it stop.  School board members heard complaints from several folks at last week’s meeting about a teacher kneeling during the daily pledge, though Rossi contends the teacher “has not indicated anything ‘political’ about her views.”  “Teachers are paid to educate our students, they’re not paid to indoctrinate our students,” Vineland resident Ron Maccri told the board. “What this woman is doing would be bad in any school, but because it’s in the (Sgt.) Dominick Pilla School – who gave his life for our military – it’s reprehensible.”  The controversy comes just months after the school board renamed Lincoln Avenue Middle School to honor Pilla, an Army Ranger who died at the age of 19 during a mission in Somalia that inspired the movie “Black Hawk Down.”  Pilla was among 18 Americans killed in the 1993 mission. He was selected by the school board from among 12 nominations for a new school name. The school also reworked its “pillars of character” – the school’s foundation of trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship – into “Pilla’s Pillars” to honor the fallen veteran and the military.  “The military itself falls in line with building character and leadership, and we’re trying to drive that home,” Principal Tammy Monahan told The Press of Atlantic City at the school’s renaming ceremony in April. “I see the students making that connection, and they’re eager to learn.”  Now they’re learning a different kind of lesson, and locals like U.S. Coast Guard veteran Randy London aren’t impressed.  “That type of behavior offends me,” London complained about the kneeling teacher. “I’m not saying anyone needs to agree with everything, but if that is the district’s policy, there should be no teacher … taking a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance.”  District policy 3233 states the Board of Education “recognizes and encourages the right of all citizens, including teaching staff members, to engage in political activity.”  It continues: “The Board prohibits the use of school premises and school time, however, for partisan political purposes.”  Lou Russo, president of the local teachers union, doesn’t seem to think the teacher’s defiance during the pledge is a problem, and he suggested students and others could learn a lot from the educator.  “Students do not have to stand, you can’t force students to stand, we cannot make students leave the room if they refuse,” Russo said. “It would be weird to think that the students in this situation have different or more rights than the employee.”  “My perspective is this is a wonderful learning experience for all of us, particularly for students; we have civil liberties, we have the Constitution and we have First Amendment rights,” he said. “I’m sure in some way, shape, or form, we can speak to her right to free exercise …”  “I hope we use it as a good learning experience whether it’s a political perspective, a social perspective or religious perspective, they are all protected,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity for us all to have a lesson on civics.”  School board vice president Tom Ulrich didn’t seem to think the teacher’s stunt is quite as “great” as Russo suggests. Ulrich noted that he was raised to salute the flag and support America, and said he thinks teachers should stick to the curriculum.  Teachers “should not be imparting their own personal views – political, religious, anything, upon a student,” he said. “If they don’t want to salute the flag and stand up and not pledge the Pledge of Allegiance, that’s one thing.  “But to think to impart their views on impressionable young children, is also, I’ll use your term, reprehensible,” Ulrich said. “It sets a bad tone.”  This article was posted: Tuesday, October 8, 2019 at 4:34 am