The National School Boards Association asked for the Biden administration to use the label "domestic terrorist" and have the FBI employ the Patriot Act to investigate parents/citizens/taxpayers who protest at school board meetings—typically because of mask mandates or Critical Race Theory. There’s a sleight-of-hand going on there. They claim, “We want to stop the death threats, threats to family members, and other harassment and acts of intimidation.” Did you notice it? They’re not asking for an investigation into just those who make the rare threat of violence, but those who protest or do anything else they might subjectively call “harassment” or “intimidation.” That could easily include calling them out at a school board meeting, or campaigning against them online or elsewhere, or threatening to sue the district for its failures. Parents can be so intimidating that way (place sarcasm emoji here).
Examples of the heinous acts they’re worried about include
someone filming himself while calling the school board, and another man calling
a school board “Marxist.” These rate up there with planting bombs, do they?
So, at the risk of getting labeled a domestic terrorist (been there since the Obama administration stretched that label), I’m going to talk smack against our local school board again. I think it might be useful to people in other districts as well.
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| The Berry Center, where Tuesday's CFISD Candidate Forum will be held The image is a screenshot from the October 11, 2021 school board meeting video. |
A couple of weeks ago I came across a paid ad post on Facebook
for the three incumbent members running again for school board. In this post they address Critical Race Theory in a way that they’ve been standardizing for
months in hopes that people will buy it. This is the local school board, Cypress-Fairbanks
Independent School District (CFISD). I’ve been joining in campaigning against these incumbents,
and CRT is one of the reasons—maybe the biggest reason this year.
This explanation of theirs is a repeat of what I have heard
them say in school board meetings. They tut-tut at us, as if we’re stupid,
while they give this explanation of “nothing to see here,” in the face of
parents, students, and even some teachers saying otherwise.
What they seem to be missing—or hoping that everyone misses—is that CRT is an ideology, not a curriculum. As an ideology, it can creep into curriculum, and even into daily habits, practices, and speech. And taxpayers and parents don’t want their students indoctrinated with this ideology.
So I’m going to do an exercise here. I’m going to take what they say about Critical Race Theory and replace it with Christianity, which we think we understand as an ideology, a religion, and see if we can get a better understanding of what’s taking place. The picture is a screenshot of their Facebook post. And below that, I’ve used red letters to show what I’ve replaced.
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| Facebook post found here |
Christianity is an academic study, in philosophy departments, at the undergraduate and
graduate levels that explores the role of the tenets of
the Christian religion in today’s world and the possible ways it has
become part of our social fabric. Academics argue the United States has
institutionalized a religion-based caste system.
Our Texas Legislature has banned the teaching of Christianity
in public schools. CFISD schools do not teach Christianity.
We agree that Christianity should not be taught
in CFISD schools.
Some parents
and community members believe that any discussion of religion,
forgiveness, doing good to others, kindness, or being no respecter of persons are
examples of teaching Christianity. That is
simply not true.
Creating
opportunity for all and student success drives every decision we make. We
believe that our community wants every child to succeed and wants us to provide
the necessary resources each child needs. For example, a blind child needs
different resources to read than a sighted child. The term being no respecter of persons[i] means we provide
the resources needed to assist each child to reach the academic goal. Teaching
children to read is our district’s job. It is also our obligation to provide
the proper tools for each individual child.
We do not think
acknowledging diverse needs and using different strategies and techniques to
assist students in accomplishing academic goals hurts any other student or is
divisive or harmful. If you are a parent of multiple children, you understand
how meeting the needs of each of your children requires different approaches
and tactics. Our goal remains to graduate every student prepared to move into
the workforce, to seek further education at post-secondary institutions and/or
to serve our country in the military.
OK. So what do we learn from this exercise? Well, calling
Christianity just a class offered at the college level is disingenuous, to say
the least. Every time you mention that it’s wrong to murder, or steal, or lie,
or it’s right to treat others as you would like to be treated—that would be
inculcating Christianity.
Imagine (and it takes some powerful imagining) if
Christianity—and its values, which have been endemic in our culture since our
founding—were something that parents didn’t want, but that school board
members thought would be best for the children. Should the school board impose
it on the children anyway? It would be a challenge not to implement
something that the board believes in and swims in; they might not even be aware
that they’re doing it.
So, look at our position 5 incumbent, John Ogletree. I’ve
mentioned him before. He’s a racist. But the general culture
doesn’t call people like him racist—because he’s black. In his view of the
world, all whites are white supremacists—including our kindergarteners. He is
aligned with the ideology of Critical Race Theory. In that theory, whites
should be debased, shamed, and oppressed to make up for the centuries in which
whites have been the majority in our society. He also happens to call himself a Christian pastor. But when he sees scriptures like “no respecter of persons,”
his mind seems to justify, “See! You whites have been on top too long, and you
don’t belong there, so you need to debase yourselves and let others rule over
you.” That’s not what the scripture actually means; in fact, in means the
opposite of that. But because of that CRT lens he’s looking through, it’s the
only way he sees it.
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| Elias Davis speaking at CFISD board meeting October 11, 2021, screenshot from here |
In years past I was very proud to say that my daughter was a
student in this district. As parents, our number one priority is to provide our
kids with the best education that tax dollars can buy. We are entrusting our
educators and this board to also have the education of our kids as their number
one priority. Somewhere along the way, the best interests of all of our kids
has shifted. And now the board and educators’ agenda seem to have become
priority.
I have listened to the district’s mission statements, but we’re
not preparing global leaders if we’re teaching one group of kids that another
group of kids are inherently racist, and that the first group of kids have a
built-in excuse to be underachievers because they are victims and/or oppressed.
All Cy-Fair ISD students have equal access to learning and
educational tools. Life is hard. I know it firsthand. But social engineering
and virtue signaling has no place in our school district. If we want to empower
kids, prioritize our STEM programs so that all of our kids will be competitive
global leaders.
Your job is to approve curriculum that we as parents want,
not to implement your personal agendas. If we’re going to make Martin Luther
King’s dream a reality, we must at some point take our thumb off the scale and
stop creating more division. This board seems to have lost its way.
He got a standing ovation by attendees at the meeting, by
the way.
Ogletree has been on the board since 2004. There was at least
one term he was president of the board. He wields a lot of influence with other
board members. Add to that, his “blackness” makes it difficult for anyone to
disagree with him without being labeled racist—because to him anything other
than black supremacy is racist.
So that’s how you get a whole board to sign onto the “Resolution
Condemning Racism” he wrote last fall, calling for an “equity audit” of the
district. [Incidentally, the resolution has quietly disappeared from the CFISD
Board page, now that the school board races are underway. Hmm. I did, however,
include a copy of it here.] Equity, in CRT-speak, means equal outcomes—very different from equality
of opportunity. You get an equity audit to identify areas where you’re not, as
a district, getting equal outcomes. And then you implement programs and
practices—to keep the low performers from being left behind the high performers.
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| Burke P. Miller speaking at the CFISD board meeting October 11, 2021, screenshot from here |
In your "Resolution Condemning Racism," from last September,
which you three signed, among others you opposed “systemic racism” and
“systemic oppression.” Systemic racism is defined as racism written into
America’s laws and institutions. The norms and practices of only white people
are what define American culture. All white people are racist and oppressors of
everybody else. Systemic oppression says all whites have an unfair
advantage because of their white privilege. So, basically, they cheat others
out of opportunities. These two terms are key elements of Critical Race Theory.
[multiple interruptions by General Counsel before allowing
him to finish]
Some members have expressed ideas that are antithetical to a
lot of the regular folks that are in this room. One of the members has five
grandchildren. I have five grandchildren. Do the board members really believe
that these ten children are little racists, mini oppressors, and young cheaters,
just because they’re white? Maybe someone should tell them, and everyone else
as well. It’s time for us to get the word out about what is being taught in the
district.
The board members seem tone deaf about what they’re
doing and saying. Incumbent Don Ryan said it this way in June’s board meeting while assuring us CFISD doesn't teach CRT:
In the school district, ever since I started on the Board in
2000, we’ve talked about educational equity as part of the requirements of No Child
Left Behind. As part of No Child Left Behind, and now, whatever the law is
called now, as a Board we are required to look at our test scores and other
achievement data that is broken down by race and create plans to close any
achievement gaps between groups.
So educational equity means looking at gaps in achievement
according to race and close up those gaps. If that meant better teaching for
the low performers (which he’s implying are of a certain race or races), that would
be one thing—because we want better teaching to match the potential of every
child. But what it tends to mean is programs upon programs for low performers—at
the expense of opportunities for high performers. In other words, No Child Gets
Ahead. And let’s especially make sure no white child gets ahead (one of the
reasons we pulled our kids out of this district to homeschool all those years
ago).
So, when they say, “Creating opportunity for all and student
success drives every decision we make,” [and can we, as an aside, be concerned
about the poor grammar in a sentence like that from our educators?] do they
mean for all, or do they mean especially for black students, and/or
especially for students who have some other intersectionality victimhood score?
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| From CFISD's Bullying Resources pages 6 and 7 |
Does the school board have any evidence that actual racism
is a major problem in our schools? No. They haven’t shown us any, and we’ve
asked, because they’re maligning us, and we deserve to know what that is based
on.
We have parents, teachers, and students saying that racism
isn’t an issue. We live in a diverse area, racially and ethnically, and the
kids have grown up together totally accepting those differences. At one school
board meeting I attended, a father of two black sons (his wife is black, so
they are bi-racial but appear black) who attend one of the few mostly white
schools in the district say they face no day-to-day racial prejudice. It simply
isn’t part of their school experience. That kind of story is common. Evidence
of systemic racism is remarkably absent. 1960s Mississippi—or even 1960s Texas—is
long ago and far away for the kids in our district.
If the school culture encouraged the continuation of
integration and racial acceptance that is natural to these kids, that would be
great. And maybe we could use some more acceptance across economic divides. But
CRT doesn’t do that; it separates by race. It prioritizes by races. It privileges
and deprives based on race—exactly the opposite of what we want.
But, because our current board buys into an ideology that
says the entire system is and always has been bent on depriving blacks—magnificently
unaware that freedom for blacks worldwide stemmed from the spread of the
concepts in our founding documents—they can’t see what is right before them. They
can’t—won’t—hear the people who put them in their position of authority. And
they reject what the parents and other taxpayers want.
Does my divulging the racism of the incumbents on our school
board make me a domestic terrorist? No, it makes me a good citizen.
If you’re in my district, you can read my endorsements of
candidates Natalie Blasingame, Scott Henry, and Luke Scanlon in two parts: Part I and Part II. These candidates just keep getting better.
If you’d like to read their questionnaire responses to the
CCHC (Conservative Coalition of Harris County)—which, by the way, endorsed these
three candidates 12-0—you can find them here. (The questionnaires of all candidates who responded are there, so you can read and compare for yourself.
If you'd like to hear from the candidates, here are some videos of forums we've already held, and info about one more Tuesday night:
o Cypress Texas Tea Party August meeting we heard
speeches from 6 candidates, available on our CTTP Facebook page.
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If you’re in another district, don’t assume your area is
safe. Get informed. Get the incumbents out. Or get your kids out of those
schools.
[ii] I
do not exaggerate about Howard Zinn. A good antidote is Mary Graber’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America,
and her new followup, just out, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.
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