Schools Are Not Families

We’ve already slipped down the slippery slope. How did it happen? A little at a time, and then quickly.

Americans have always been a pretty literate people. Back at the time of the founding, when the Federalist Papers were editorials written in newspapers, the regular farmer or shopkeeper would read them thoroughly, and discuss them with their neighbors. Any ideas you had about widespread illiteracy in that period of time is mostly erroneous.

Almost everyone was homeschooled—which meant women were literate as well, in case you were wondering. Beyond the home, neighborhoods would pool resources and hire a teacher. When a child got a bit older, he’d go into the family business or find an apprenticeship. Homeschooling is a pattern for educating the next generation for some six thousand years.

Public schools were invented in the industrial age, patterned after factories, to remove from the streets uncared-for children of poor factory workers.

Then John Dewey got involved, with the intent of using public schooling as a way to indoctrinate the next generation.

As M.D. Aeschliman put it, in a review[i] of the book John Dewey and Decline of American Education,

Eschewing our existing institutions and what he called the “idolatry of the US Constitution,” Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of “the Great Community,...” Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of [Walt] Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism.

Dewey’s acolytes have been doing it ever since.

If you think free public schooling is your right, remember that “free” things from government are not free; they cost you tax money, your freedom, and sometimes even higher costs.

So, what is it schools are indoctrinating students with? The names keep changing. But the general idea is that kids should not trust their parents; they should not believe in the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization; they should not believe in God; and they should not think for themselves.

Not all teachers buy into this indoctrination plan. Many are not only well-meaning; they are good people who will teach good and useful things regardless of what higher ups tell them.

Many others want to just teach their subject matter and help kids, but they’re tied up in way too many requirements from decisionmakers above them—including in particular the teachers’ unions.

Many teachers—and nearly all today—have gone through indoctrination themselves and may not recognize what should not be inculcated into our children. The language has been corrupted in a way that it takes a clear thinker to slog through—and clear thinking hasn’t been taught in K-12 or universities for quite a while.

Those of you who are older—say, 55+—you might be thinking public schools were good enough for you, so they ought to be good enough for students today. You’d be wrong. Can a student get a decent public school education today? Yes, but not without a bunch of unwanted baggage along the way. So it depends on how much the family counters those things successfully at home—while the schools are subtly undermining trust in parents.

If you need to put so much time and energy into countering the bad influence of school, why not just do the schooling yourself? It’s not rocket science. Before the historically recent invention of public schools, practically everyone learned to read and do basic math at home. Nearly every parent felt capable.

In fact, children are designed to learn in a family setting—so much better than in a factory setting. Children learning at their own rate, among children who are at completely different learning levels, and learning each thing until they’ve mastered it before going on to the next concept, enjoying much one-on-one attention from a parent who loves them and cares about their education—that is ideal for practically every child. When a school looks at ways to improve actual learning for a child, they talk about smaller class sizes, tutoring for those not keeping up, and other ways to mitigate the shortcomings of the factory institution.

If it were only a matter of public schools not doing as well as a family, at least as a society we could talk about tradeoffs, especially for families that can’t afford to dedicate a parent to schooling the kids at home. Unfortunately, this is the least of the problems of public schools.

They haven’t been trying to replicate the teaching style of families. They have been trying to replace families.

Sometimes it sounds like they’re doing this with good reason. Shouldn’t schools teach children good behavior while they have them all those hours? Certainly they should socialize in a way that kids learn not to bully, or not to make fun of kids who are different. But this has metastasized way beyond what we want: good manners and being kind and respectful.

Have you heard the term Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?

A friend here in Texas passed along an attempt at defining it last November. The original post was written by someone named Emily Swanson, whom I know nothing about, but I gather she is from Utah, in the Jordan School District area (the neighboring district to where I grew up and went to school). She says this: 

The SEL standard is set by an organization called Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The CASEL framework (pictured below) is clear. Classrooms—Schools—Families and Caregivers—then Communities—make up a child’s experience, in that order, according to their chart. The curriculum is designed to follow this pattern.

Here is how this shows up in the Second Step Curriculum [an SEL curriculum used in Utah and popular across the country]: When parents are mentioned, it is only as part of the outer support system or as a negative. All examples of families used are negative and elicit negative emotions in the child. All positive examples are of school teachers or staff and elicit positive emotions in the child. Families are mentioned as possible members of the student’s support system alongside friends and the community (as if friends or the community were going to pay for your child’s music or sports or college). The curriculum is systemically designed to get children to rely on the school and not their families.

SEL diagram, found here

The purpose is to supplant the family. Not supplement family, particularly for children whose home situation is less than ideal, but to undermine functional families.

I had been thinking that SEL was just another thing we had to worry about in schools—in addition to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the LGBT agenda that is sexualizing our kids in perverted ways. Now there’s this too. I thought it was using health programs and school counseling to access kids in private ways without parental knowledge.

But last night on Glenn Beck’s special, he talked about it in a different structural way than I had pictured. SEL is the umbrella used to incorporate CRT and CSE—an acronym new to me, meaning Comprehensive Sexuality Education, in other words both the LGBT agenda and the pro-sexualization we’ve been aware of for a while. (See here and here.) Beck drew a triangle with SEL at the top, connecting all three of these acronyms.

Glenn Beck, "Project Groomer"
screenshot from here

As he explains it, the CDC is involved—the Center for Disease Control. They seem to have “discovered” a thing they call ACE—adverse childhood experiences. (Sick of the acronyms yet?) Beck says, “Every kid can be grouped and categorized for something: racism, oppression, gender, whatever they need.” In other words, they discover a right to intervene with your child. Every child. For their good, they would tell you, if they tell you at all. And they have a sort of slogan: “Whole school; whole community; whole child.” They are using the school to raise the child—in a way that not only denies the parent that right but undermines the parent’s ability to do so.

ACEs are the CDC's excuse to intervene. Some, such as discrimination
or community disruption, could encompass just about everyone.
screenshot from here

So they’ll say, “We’re not teaching CRT,” or “We’re not teaching CSE.” Because they’re just wholistically “caring” for the child.

As Swanson says at the end of her post,

Of course we all want kids to learn the tools of goal setting, personal responsibility and problem solving. We need to reframe it, however, with the family at the core of a child’s life and the school and community supporting the family.

When you let the schools do the “caring,” who’s really doing that? Outside organizations such as CASEL—that’s Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. And who are they collaborating with? Planned Parenthood and the CDC. Add in the Department of Education and teachers’ unions, and you’ve got a pretty huge cabal trying to take ownership of your children and claim you should just step back and let the experts handle it their way.

Parents are waking up. But we haven’t been equipped to even understand the enemy. We’ve been fighting only a part of the enemy.

Glenn Beck showed a statement from Austin ISD (independent school district):

“In Austin ISD we believe that Social Emotional Learning is at the heart of equity-centered systems and structures.” Oh, that’s great.

See, SEL ties it all together. And that’s the driver of the “whole school, whole community, whole child” thing. And they admit it in their own curriculum publications. CRT and CSE are just parts of the pie. So, when we’re fighting one, they’re getting away with everything else. The Social Emotional Learning is how they’re getting it all done. We’ve been fighting an incomplete partial battle, focusing just on CRT or sex ed.

SEL is being implemented in Austin ISD, in Texas
screenshot from here

How do you fight the whole comprehensive enemy? With everything you’ve got. Sit in your child’s classroom every day if you have to. Be at every school board meeting. Pressure the legislature to outlaw the concepts underlying all of those acronyms: SEL, CRT, CSE, ACE—and add in DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The whole thing, when you connect the dots, is designed to create a transformed society—to create obedient, non-thinking units that can be forced quite willingly to do whatever the tyrants want them to do. Report parents who disagree? Yes. Report friends who have different opinions? Yes. I’m sure you can think up a few more examples after what we’ve seen during the pandemic, especially if you’ve studied 20^th Century totalitarian regimes.

If you thought math classes were safe from the SEL framework, you were mistaken.
screenshot from here

Glenn Beck titled his report “Project Groomer.” The opposition laughs about that use of the word groomer. It’s hard to convince parents that every child’s teacher is a pedophile. But that’s not what the word really means. Yes, there’s a lot of sexualization going on, especially in the CSE corner. You might think of it as slowly boiling the frog.

Back when we talked (here) to a Houston mother, Kelly Litvak, whose daughter had been trafficked into the sex trade, we learned the steps of grooming:

1.          Befriend—to get the target to see the groomer as someone to trust.

2.          Intoxicate—to cause inability to think clearly combined with causing friction at home.

3.          Alienate—to drive a wedge between target and family and their core values.

4.          Isolate—to separate the target from old friends who held their original core values.

5.          Desensitize—to confuse the target’s moral compass, making the previously unthinkable seem common or even normal.

6.          Capitalize—to take the target into control by the groomer, and subject to sex slavery.

Four of the six are being done by schools. You might add in causing an inability to think clearly, step 2, but without the intoxicants. And the actual sex enslavement, step 6, may not be the goal. But control of that child for life is.

That’s a lot of grooming behavior.

If you found that a family friend had been doing these steps with your child, what would you do? Hopefully you would refrain from murder. You would sever ties, and contact the police to get the perpetrator prosecuted.

You wouldn’t say, “Well, a lot of the time this friend is doing good things with my child; and I sure do appreciate him taking the child off my hands while I work.” You wouldn’t let your children be subject to this dangerous, injurious grooming another day.

The quickest solution is to pull your kids out of public schools. If you feel trapped, then you’ll have to do all the hard things.

Get informed. And get active.

My kids are no longer in school (and we pulled them out to homeschool for ten years). But my grandchildren are in public schools. And I am a taxpayer here. So I’m active where I believe I can do something useful.

This week I contacted my school board members asking them to adopt the new TEA model policy for selecting and removing materials from school libraries. This will increase transparency and better respect parental rights, and will require a district librarian to read all materials before they can be accepted, which currently is not always done. (Read a Texas Scorecard article here.) This issue came up in my school district this month at the school board meeting. (I wrote about it here.)

This morning I got notified of a need related to the upcoming Texas Library Association conference (program here).

Certainly some of it could be useful. But here are some of the highlights:

·       Ibram X Kendi: CRT author, teaching kids to be “anti-racists” (i.e., racists, especially against whites)–keynote speaker.

·       Justin Johnson/Alyssa Edwards: drag queen/performer that coaches KIDS–evening keynote/performer.

·       Jenna Sky: former MissGayUSA–featured speaker.

·       Nadine Strossen: past president of the ACLU and advisor on legislative policy.

·       A speaker from the Dallas Foundation, primary funder of the Dallas Morning News Education Lab, which has published no less than four articles critical of parent concerns over sexually obscene content in libraries. Their research was used by an activist teacher in Austin to target independent school board candidates all around the state and citizens organizing through PACs to fight transparency and accountability issues in Texas schools.      

It may be too late, but you can try calling the school board to squelch plans to send librarians from your district to this indoctrination camp—at your expense.

Something new is likely to show up tomorrow.

Swanson mentioned some places to help get yourself educated:

·        Committee for  Children, Second Step resources (to read them yourself)  

·        Parent toolkit to reject CRT, from Heritage Action 

I’ve had a few others on my list:

·        Christopher Rufo has a Critical Race Theory Briefing Book (online resource) here.

·        Christopher Rufo provides The Anti-CRT Parent Guidebook here.

·        Charles Lehman offers this Toolkit for Concerned Parents.

·        Jim Copland offers Model Legislation.

·        Michael Hartney makes the case for moving off-cycle school board elections to on-cycle, in order to empower parents, in this research paper.

·        Heritage Action has launched a site called SaveOurSchools, to help people fight CRT in their local schools.

o   SaveOurSchools provides a list of Critical Race Theory terms that may be used in our schools, here.

·        Whose Children Are They is a full-length documentary shown in area theaters Monday, March 14. Trailer here. Now available here. 

Whose children they are shouldn’t even be a question; they are the parents’ children, and the parents’ responsibility.

Civilization depends on strong, loving families raising their own children. Any institution trying to supplant the family can only lead away from civilization and into savagery. And that is no longer a vague possibility; that is what our children are experiencing at the hands of the indoctrinators—the groomers.

Schools cannot be families; they cannot replace families. And we’d better force them to get out the way of our families—if it is not already too late.

---

[i] “Permanent Revolution” (Review), by M.D. Aeschliman, review of the book John Dewey and Decline of American Education, by Henry T. Edmondson III, National Review, April 24, 2006, pp. 56-58.

Ideas Rising

I haven’t written here for a couple of weeks. I’ve been busy, working on the platform. At our precinct conventions on March 5, a few days after the March 1 Primary Election, one of the things we did was put forth resolutions for the platform. As I explained recently, the wording can have some “whereas” statements, explaining the background reasoning, and then end with a “therefore” statement. The whole thing gets sent in. Sometimes the only thing we get is the statement of an idea, as best as someone could figure out how to spit it out, maybe even just handwritten.

In my senatorial district, over 600 resolutions were submitted. These included a number of duplicates—exactly the same sent in by different precincts. And there were also a number of duplicate ideas—sent in with their own wording, but essentially saying the same thing. And then there were ideas sent in singularly.

Some resolutions contained multiple ideas—ideas that seemed related, to those who sent them in, but that actually identified multiple separate ideas, usually related to the same section of the platform, but not always.

So, we scanned all the resolutions the day of the Precinct Conventions (I helped do that). Then they got categorized and placed in a huge spreadsheet. And that got divided up among the various subcommittees of the Resolutions Committee in my senatorial district. And then the subcommittees placed them near similar ideas in existing platform planks, so we could begin working on wording.

I was on Education and Health & Human Services subcommittees; I led the Education subcommittee. I didn’t realize ahead of time what that was going to entail. It turns out, Education is where there is a whole lot of interest this biennium. Of those 600+ resolutions we received, around 230 of them, so more than 30%, were for Education. I also have been handling the platform document that our resolutions turn into. So, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been working long hours just about every day. Our Senatorial District Conventions in Harris County were held this past Saturday, so my intention is to catch up on sleep now. And then grocery shopping. And maybe then some house cleaning.

The SD7 2022 Resolutions (Platform) Committee;
at the SD7 Convention March 26, 2022. That's me on the right.

There were fifteen on the committee, according to rules, plus a few extras who also worked hard but didn’t get to vote on issues. My Education subcommittee attracted all the women on the Committee. We worked well together. I love them all as friends now. We began each meeting with prayer, and I often felt God’s Spirit confirming to me His approval and help in the work we were doing. I mean that quite literally. That sense that we were working together for God's glory was present in all the committee meetings I was in. What a joy to work with such good people, who also happen to be bright and well-informed, and dedicated to preserving our freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Today, then, I’ll share some of what we—and the people who submitted all those resolutions—came up with. What I’m showing here is what we suggest as changes to the 2020 Republican Party of Texas Platform. We’re not actually causing these changes yet; we’re passing them on up to the state committee. (A little more on that below, near the end.)

If there is a theme, it is that we want our freedoms back. We’re not willing to take tyranny any longer, and we’re trying to find solutions.

In Education, many of the ideas were specific. And oddly they weren’t as strong as what was in the existing platform. They were clearly not asking for a weaker platform; they just were thinking, “What can we do?” and coming up with ideas. So, be assured we didn’t weaken things.

In short, what parents want is to take back their power. The schools have had too much power over our kids, and they have proved untrustworthy.

As you’ve been seeing around the country, people are upset about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools—and, yes, it is being taught, even here in Texas, no matter how many times they say, “No, that’s some theory taught in graduate schools; we don’t teach that.” They are teaching that America is flawed, and our founders were evil; they are not teaching the Constitution, and how the founders identified principles of freedom, overcoming millennia of other traditions. They divide children by race—to compensate for what they’re calling “systemic racism,” even though our children don’t treat each other differently by race—until they’re taught to. Parents don’t want their children to be told, “You’re either an oppressor or a victim, and no matter what you do, that’s what you are because of the skin you’re born with.” This “anti-racism” concept, which is part of CRT, is very racist.

Connected to racism is intersectionality—gaining power according to your various grievance claims. These can be race, sex, sexual orientation, transgenderism. So a black transgender would have more intersectional power than a black woman. A black woman would have more than a Hispanic or Asian woman. A white woman would have more than a white male—who is at the bottom. It’s a power scoring system based on happenstance rather than accomplishment or character—exactly the opposite of MLK’s dream.

And because of the power generated by being homosexual or transgender, that LGBTQ agenda is promoted—even to the very young. And to that, parents are saying, “No! Now you’ve gone too far.”

So that’s what we are seeing. Other issues related to wanting more transparency, and of course more choice. People want the money to follow the child—without government strings attached.

We can go into this another day, about how education isn’t actually a proper role of government. That’s why the federal Department of Education is about nothing but control. It does not help educate, period. But in the states, including here in Texas, the government sees education as its responsibility, in fact it’s main responsibility. That’s unfortunate, because you can’t even bring up choice without major outcry reaching the ears of legislators, accusing them of hating kids, and failing them by threatening to take money away.

That’s a mindset we need to get out of. People “believe” in public schools as if it is a religion. They actually say, “I believe in public schools.” Well, I believe they exist. But I don’t believe they are “the way” to educate the next generation to be productive good citizens. Public schools tend to do that more poorly than every other option. But they suck up all the taxpayer dollars, and hold onto those dollars with clenched fists.

So what did we come up with?

We addressed the CRT issue, probably in multiple places. We kept the existing Basic Standards plank (added Texas history to the list). And then we pointed out that schools are there to provide academic education, not to mold students in some way. Schools are not families; they have no business dealing with things like Social Emotional Learning (SEL is a way of indoctrinating wokeness), mental health evaluations, sex ed, anything related to gender identity, and of course CRT and any other socialist/Marxist ideology. Schools don’t have a say in the care and upbringing of children; that right is retained by the parents. (Red means we added that.) 

134.Basic Standards: The educational system should focus on basic standards, which include, but are not limited to, a curriculum of reading (with an emphasis on phonics); spelling; writing; civics (must pass the US Citizenship and Immigration Services test); the arts; music; literature; mathematics (including personal finance); science; geography; economics; and Texas, United States, and world history. We encourage teaching critical thinking skills, including logic, rhetoric, and analytical sciences within these subjects. We advocate the value of vocational training programs.

134A.  Schools Are Not Families: Schools are hired to provide academic education, while parents retain every right to the child’s care and upbringing. Therefore, we insist on the elimination in school of any Social Emotional Learning (SEL), mental health evaluations, sexuality education, gender-identity ideology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), socialism, Marxism, and other social indoctrination. Schools must be limited to teaching the Basic Standards as listed in the Basic Standards plank. All school districts, individual schools, or charter schools are prohibited from contracting with or making any payment to any third party for material concerning any of the above prohibited topics.

 

We already had a plank saying we want no sex ed taught in schools—at any level—because schools have failed in that assignment abysmally. So the multiple requests to teach abstinence 75% of the time weren’t ignored; they just weren’t added. 100% > 75%. But we strengthened the existing Sexual Education plank an added this new one related to the Obscenity Exemption plank:

145A. No Sexualization of Children: Because the fraudulent research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey has been used to allow children access to harmful, explicit pornographic materials and to be induced into sexual performance, we support repeal of the obscenity exemption [Texas Penal Code 43.24(c)], which allows children access to harmful, explicit, or pornographic materials under the guise of education [see Obscenity Exemption plank above]. We require criminal penalties from a misdemeanor to a felony charge for each count of breaking the law by showing obscene materials to a student. An educator—including teachers, administrators, board members, or personnel, as well as guest speakers—so charged must be immediately suspended, and upon conviction must be dismissed for immoral and unprofessional conduct.

 

We have a disagreement among those who want school choice—because of some fears and some misunderstandings. The typical understanding is that families can choose from four types of schools: public, private, charter, or homeschool. But that limits the possibilities. If we had, say, an education savings account sort of plan, those four options would be available, but so would a mix-and-match version of any or all, plus online programs, plus private lessons and tutoring, plus therapies (for example, equine therapy or speech therapy). If the parents could choose the options, they would be limited only by the amount in the account plus whatever additional they might want to pay. It would work similar to a health savings account: you can use the money in an HSA for any qualifying medical service or product. In an ESA, that would be true of any qualifying educational service or product.

But the fear is in the “qualifying.” In general, it would be up to the parents to decide. But it would have to be something related to their child’s education. For example, a museum pass might qualify, but a new skateboard would not. The money simply can’t be used for a nonqualifying purchase.

The fear crowd tends to be homeschoolers or private schoolers worried about intrusion by government into what they’re doing. But they do not have to take any taxpayer money. I believe their fears should not be preventing choices from happening for all the other parents—including homeschooling parents who prefer to be vigilant against government intrusion while exploring multiple options.

Anyway, we rewrote the previous School Options plank to be two planks: Education Mission Includes All Children, which explains why the money should follow the child, rather than be held in the public school monopoly; and Free Market Is Solution to Education, which reminds us that the free market is the way to higher quality at lower costs. Imagine the innovation that would be spurred in the market if parents held the purse strings and intentionally chose the customized combination of materials and approaches that would work best for their child.

141. School Options: Texas families should be empowered to choose from public, private, charter, or homeschool options for their children’s education, using tax credits or exemptions without government restraints or intrusion.

141.Education Mission Includes All Children: The state of Texas has a mission to educate the next generation to become productive good citizens, and it collects taxes for this purpose. Public school is only one tool parents can choose for accomplishing this mission, but public school is not the mission itself. The state must never create roadblocks for families for whom that tool does not meet their goals for their children. Taxing families on top of what they pay out of pocket for another choice does not further the mission. Monies allotted to education must follow the child without government restraints or intrusion.

141A. Free Market Is Solution to Education: We know that the free market leads to higher quality and lower costs. If Texans want higher quality education and would enjoy getting that for lower cost, Texas must incorporate the free market into every aspect of pre-K-12 education. This would lead to greater satisfaction for parents and teachers, could eliminate indoctrination problems, and would lead to generally improved outcomes at lower costs than what we have seen with government monopoly.

 

Beyond education, the big outcry from the public was for freedom from government overreach, and a reassertion of our God-given rights. Two years ago we were writing the 2020 Platform near the beginning of the pandemic. So we had a plank last time about Healthcare Decisions. We extended that with a new Medical Freedom plank, to get rid of those mandates of all kinds that we’ve suffered.

250A. Medical Freedom: We call for an addition to the Texas Bill of Rights that explicitly states that Texans have the natural right to refuse vaccination or other medical treatment. Therefore, the following are expressly forbidden even in an emergency or a pandemic:

a.     Any attempt to mandate, force, or coerce any medical test, procedure, or product, including vaccines or masks.

b.     Any attempt to use a citizen's health, infection recovery, or vaccination status as a condition to maintain or obtain housing or employment or employee benefits, attend school or childcare, or access state services.

c.      Any mandates by public, private, government, or medical entities for treatment, vaccination, vaccine passports, mask requirements, health insurance surcharges, or use of controlled substances of any kind.

d.     Any involuntary isolation or quarantine of anyone not experiencing an active contagious infection.

e.     Any prevention of visitation to the ill when risks are acknowledged and mitigated according to patient and visitor choice.

f.     Any Nuremberg Code violations—including but not limited to the requirement that use of experimental use medications must provide full knowledgeable consent and be free from any form of coercion or inducement.

 

That was in Health & Human Services. In addition, we altered and added a couple of specific planks up in Business, Commerce & Transportation:

58.    Mask Mandates: Government should not be able permitted to force businesses or governmental workers (including election workers and school personnel) to require face coverings.

58A.  Vaccine Mandates: The Republican Party opposes vaccine mandates, opposes any effort to impose such mandates through emergency declaration, legislation, or regulatory action, and supports legislative efforts to allow consumers and patrons to freely conduct business without regard to vaccination status.

 

There are other intrusions into our freedoms as well. I like this addition:

234A. One World: The United States is a sovereign nation founded on the principles of freedom.  We call on the dissolution of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, New World Order, One World Government, The Great Reset, and other groups who have taken on the role of a government entity and act as such to control freedom of thought, speech, religion, and trade.

We find that these things coming at us from multiple directions, so people are trying to list every iteration and prevent any new ones.

Speaking of which, concerns of mine, which I put forth as resolutions that were accepted, were to stop ESG scoring and DEI programs—both by governments and by businesses, which are being recruited to take away our freedoms at the behest of governments when the governments know they can’t get away with that sort of tyranny outright:

21A. Values Scoring: The Republican Party opposes the use by financial institutions, social media companies, businesses, or any level of government, of any social credit system (such as used by the Chinese Communist Party), ESG (Environmental, Social & corporate Governance) scoring system, or similar system or method designed to discriminate against a person’s beliefs, values, medical decisions or lawful behaviors. The use of such systems prevents citizens from exercising their constitutional rights, including the rights of free speech, assembly, and religion, and further prevents citizens from the full enjoyment of the unalienable rights of our Republic. The Republican Party calls for federal and state legislation banning governmental use of such systems and protecting the rights and liberties of citizens from the use of such systems by businesses.

21C. No Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policies: When Diversity means no diversity of thought; when Equity means equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities; and when Inclusion means exclusion of anyone not fitting the DEI orthodoxy; then DEI is an abominable forced bigotry and must be made illegal in public and private businesses, government at all levels, schools and universities, and financial institutions.

 

We had a fairly strong Abolish Abortion plank last time. But we’re strengthening that.

325. Abolish Abortion: Since life begins at conception, we urge the Texas Legislature to enact legislation to abolish abortion by immediately securing through enacting legislation that would immediately secure the rights to life and equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization and by ignoring and refusing and would ignore or refuse to enforce any and all federal statutes, regulations, orders, and court rulings that would deny these rights, and to oppose legislation that discriminates against any preborn children and violates the US Constitution by denying such persons the equal protection of the laws.

 

Of course we’re asking for some additional safeguards for the election system. We added to the existing Fair Election Procedures plank, and added a new plank detailing what would trigger a full forensic audit:

210. Fair Election Procedures: We support the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot in each election once but oppose illegal voting, illegal assistance, or ineligible persons registering. We support:

a.     Vigorous enforcement of all our election laws as written and oppose any laws, lawsuits, and judicial decisions that make voter fraud very difficult to deter, detect, or prosecute.

b.     Voter Photo ID.

c.      Prohibition of Internet voting for public office and any ballot measure.

d.     Sequentially numbered and signed paper ballots to deter counterfeiting.

e.     No private funding of the election process.

210A. Forensic Audit: For races contested by the candidates, Certification must be postponed, and a full forensic audit of preserved paper ballots and voter records must be performed, including a hand recount of paper ballots, if any of the following is detected:

a.   Statistical anomalies and/or impossibilities.

b.   Voter turnout is more than voter registrations.

c.   Missing audit logs.

d.   Dropping signature verifications for mail-in ballots.

e.   Astronomical numbers of error events in vote tabulators.

f.         Extremely low rejection rates for mail in ballots.

g.   Suspiciously high adjudication or participation rates.

h.   Accepting votes that "scanned" faster than the scanner could physically scan.

i.        Any tabulation error, such as "votes exceeds ballots cast", which must be investigated, allowing no override.

j.        Counting ballots after the Election Night Deadline if the resulting numbers significantly change the outcome.

 

We don’t do a lot of asking for programs—more often we ask to get rid of them. But a resolution came in asking for the restoration of an education program for families. Those of you familiar with “The Family: AProclamation to the World” might recognize the call for citizens and governments “to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.” So we were able to echo some of that proclamation in this plank:

240A. Healthy Family Formation: We call upon the Texas Legislature, in conjunction with responsible citizens, to promote measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society. Toward this end we recommend reintroducing a Healthy Family Formation program, providing messages on risk avoidance and abstinence outside of marriage, complete fidelity within marriage, and equipping parents to share in the responsibilities of rearing children in a nurturing atmosphere of love and mutual respect and providing the necessities of life and protection for the family.

 

In all, we’re suggesting an additional 41 planks, with changes to many existing planks. The process from here is for us to submit these to the Republican State Platform Committee. So ours get assessed along with suggestions from around the state’s 31 senatorial districts. And the state committee will be comprised of a representative from each of them.

It’s more formal at that level. In subcommittees there is a fairly open exchange of ideas, but when the Committee of the Whole meets, members address the Chairman, not each other, and parliamentary rules are strictly followed.

It looks like I will be editing for the State Platform Committee again this year (3^rd time). It’s an interesting thing to do, and I feel like I’m contributing, using my skills. But at that level I get very little say in how things are worded, and no input on what should be said. So my opportunity to do that was at the senatorial district level. I forget how many times I’ve done this level, but I think I started in 2014; if that is so, then this is my fifth time. As contributions to the party go, this is my wheelhouse.

What new people on our committee commented on was how much respect we show to every resolution that comes in. We’ve always paid attention to each one, but this time we tracked on a spreadsheet what we did related to each resolution, so those who submitted could actually see whether and where their ideas were included.

The system is designed to grow the platform, which explains why it’s so long. I wish that weren’t so. And yet, most of what was in there from last time was worth keeping, at least in some form. We added far more ideas than we took out.

Each of those ideas started out in someone’s head, and they got written down and submitted at the precinct level. We have now handled them at the district level. And they will make their way up to the state level, where they will direct our grassroots work—and the work of our elected officials—for the next two years.

This system is designed to hear what the grassroots are saying. Those are the ideas that are rising up. People are figuratively shouting, “We want our freedoms back!” We want to run our own lives, including our own medical decisions. And we don’t want governments or anyone else telling us how to raise our children, or what we are supposed to believe.

The question now is, will our voices be heard? People with power—the ones who have usurped that power from the people—don’t willingly give it up. But in the end they can only rule by the consent of the governed. And that’s those of us who are speaking up.

 

 

It’s Not a Class; It’s an Ideology

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.

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.

Facebook post found here

 We have heard much discussion in the community about Christianity and Christian values. These are important issues. We appreciate the community’s interest in these issues and the opinions and passions of all.

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.

Elias Davis speaking at CFISD board meeting 
October 11, 2021, screenshot from here

In case you don’t want to take my word for it, at tonight’s school board meeting, a citizen participant Elias Davis, who happens to be black, said this:

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.

Burke P. Miller speaking at the CFISD board meeting
October 11, 2021, screenshot from here

During the public comment section of tonight’s meeting, Burke P. Miller, spoke concerning agenda item 10-A, regarding the election, which the Superintendent was going to speak on during the meeting (public comment must apply to the agenda, something the General Counsel defines so narrowly that speakers are often stopped mid-comment, including Mr. Miller). He addressed the three incumbents running for re-election, and gave us some definitions concerning that resolution they signed:

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? 

From CFISD's Bullying Resources pages 6 and 7

What we’re seeing in the district is the implementation of programs and ideas under the guise of, for example, getting rid of bullying, which might have good elements within, but which allow for this oppressor/oppressed worldview to be inculcated. You can find it in a program called “No Place for Hate.” You can find it in support materials for teachers. You can find it in something called social-emotional learning (SEL). You can find it in videos shared by teachers or clubs. You can find it in history classes that reference anything by the non-scholarly and very biased Howard Zinn[ii], or the ridiculously inaccurate NYT 1619 Project. You might notice it subtly in the emphasis of historical figures to present in the limited time teachers have, de-emphasizing those who made a big contribution and overemphasizing those who might be interesting and black, but who made no real discernible contribution to our founding.

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.

o   Recordings of the candidates' two hours of answering questions for precinct chairs:

§  Opening and Initial Question & Answer Session

§  Responses to Republican Platform and Precinct Chair Q&A

o   Recover America hosted a CFISD Candidate Debate forum Thursday, September 30. A recording is available here.

o   There will be a CFISD Candidate Forum on October 12, 6:30 to 8:00 PM, at the Berry Center, 8877 Barker Cypress Rd, Cypress, Tx 77433.

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.

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[i] Acts 10:34   

[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.