Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

A Lesson for the Board

free speech, censorship, 1st Amendment

Shawn McBreairty has the right to speak at public school board meetings in Maine.

That may not sound like the most controversial of contentions, but many school boards and even the Justice Department have been treating parents as criminals for publicly objecting when schools 

  1. teach kids to feel racially guilty, 
  2. unlearn the biologically obvious about sex, and in general 
  3. engage in radical indoctrination at the expense of education.

The parents’ sin in such cases is that of nettling board members and others who want a free hand to inflict such policies.

Mr. McBreairty has gotten in hot water with more than one school board in Maine. The recent court ruling that he has the right to speak at board meetings was occasioned by the actions of the RSU 22 school district, which barred McBreairty from its own board meetings.

When he tried to attend one in June, the board used local police to stop him.

The judge in the case, Nancy Torreson, has no sympathy for the board’s antics, characterizing its rationale for trying to muzzle McBreairty as “evolving, ad hoc, and unsupported.”

Judge Torreson concludes that McBreairty’s expression of “school-related concerns at the podium during the public comment period of School Board meetings constitutes speech that is protected under the First Amendment.” Her ruling grants the motion for an order temporarily restraining the school board from stopping McBreairty from attending and speaking at its meetings.

Even if board members disagree with him.

McBreairty and the school board are in America, after all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Squelched in Quebec

Quebec, censorship, free speech, Covid

It’s a Université Laval thing; a Quebec thing: a Canada thing.

These are no places to be if you want to debate questions about pandemics and vaccines now “settled” by government-mandated consensus. Professors Patrick Provost and Nicolas Derome, who both teach at Laval, recently got the message in spades.

Provost, professor of microbiology and immunology, has been suspended for two months without pay for doubting the wisdom of giving COVID-19 vaccines to children. Kids face only a very low risk of serious consequences from the disease and a nonzero risk of being hurt by vaccination.

A newspaper that quoted his thoughts on the data and on free speech has cravenly deleted the offending article, stressing that “we can’t subscribe to” Provost’s views.

Laval also suspended Derome, professor of molecular biology, for expressing doubts about the value of vaccinating kids.

Canada’s authoritarians enjoy no monopoly on smothering academic and other speech. Many governments strive to more diligently repress their citizens. But Canadian officials fancy themselves pioneers in this area, and perhaps they are.

The hazards of squelching discourse about life-and-death matters should be obvious. It’s in our interest that scientists and everybody be able to freely investigate and discuss facts and interpretations without worrying whether an unauthorized assertion will cost the speaker two months of salary.

Or worse.

But some care nothing about logic and evidence — or, apparently, how useful these are to both individuals and to society at large.

It’s not an attitude consistent with . . . Common Sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling government transparency

Parents Kept in the Dark

education, sexual orientation, teachers, parents, children

When does it become irresponsible to send children to a public school? 

Has the line been crossed in Fairfax County, Virginia?

Their school board now prohibits teachers from telling parents when children “change gender” or pretend to change gender. Such decisions may be evidenced by a student’s changing his name or by identifying as a member of the opposite sex or as “nonbinary” on a school’s learning portal.

The district is not inviting teachers to exercise discretion about whether to inform parents. One can imagine cases in which a teacher knows parents to be physically abusive and likely to come down on a kid like a ton of bricks if alerted to such an event.

Rather, the policy stipulates that parents needn’t ever be told about such matters. To the extent teachers obey, parents won’t know unless informed by the children themselves.

If you live in Fairfax County, you could protest.

And you could do other things, such as

  • attend school board meetings to object, as parents attended a Fairfax board meeting to object to the policy of suspending fourth-graders for using the “wrong” pronouns for classmates;
  • join the shadow board that parents have formed to criticize the doings of the Fairfax County board;
  • vote against a school board member or try to recall members — unless a judge decides that your recall petition fails to show “probable cause for removal.”

Or you could just get your kids the heck out of the public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

After Recall, Revival

San Francisco, dumpster fire

Is San Francisco waking up from its dystopian nightmare?

The egalitarians who have pushed the great city into absurdity have suffered another setback.

The earlier victory for sanity was won in a landslide election this February when parents recalled three members of the local school board for doing things like renaming 44 schools to conform to a left-wing agenda, keeping San Francisco schools closed because of outsized fears of the pandemic, and using a lottery system to undermine the magnet school Lowell High.

The lottery ended Lowell’s merit-based admissions, preventing the most qualified students from getting in unless they happened to get a lucky number. A step was thus taken toward reducing all students in the district to the same low academic level. Obviously, kids too behind or lazy to be even good students let alone top students would not suddenly become stellar academicians merely by winning a lottery.

The three board members ousted in February were the only ones then eligible to be recalled. Now the reconstituted board has voted 4-3 against extending the lottery system. The vote restores merit-based admissions.

A victory, but way too narrow. One flipped vote and the district would be back to hobbling the best and brightest.

The three anti-education board members who voted against the best possible future for the best students are Kevine Boggess, Mark Sanchez, and Matt Alexander.

They should be recalled or at least defeated in their next election. Since district parents are on the alert and active, there’s a good chance that this will happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Target: Government Schools

US flag, Christianity, secularism, education

Former Attorney General William Barr gave a rather stark appraisal of the current politico-cultural moment, last Saturday.

Speaking at a Christian conference in Chicago, Bill Barr said that our “whole civilization” is “under sustained attack by increasingly secular forces.”

Certainly, the western tradition in which we live is “Judeo-Christian,” yet the explicitly religious aspect of our civilization is openly mocked and undermined by major progressive institutions. But is the civilization itself under attack?

Well, if you lean left you might say No. 

To others, the “woke” mob that dominatesso many major organizations in America is foursquare against freedom of speech and religion, and by demanding ideological conformity on a number of issues like sexual identity and racial “equity,” seems determined to re-make society from the ground up, and have that work done under mob violence threat as well as corporate compliance and state command.

But especially interesting is what Barr said was the foundation for today’s secular revolutionaries: the public schools. 

“The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr argued, as quoted by The Federalist. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral any more.”

This radical a critique of government schooling is something I used to hear only from libertarians. Barr’s advocacy of school choice is not as cautious as Republicans would advance decades ago. His is an attack on government-run schools as such: the constitutional and existential crisis in American education requires,Barr said, a direct attack upon the government monopoly over the provision of education.

The culture war just ramped up a notch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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education and schooling judiciary

The Choice in School Choice

private school, students, religious

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that state programs which help parents pay for private schooling may not discriminate against parents who want to send their kids to a religious school.

The court relied on its 2020 ruling that state programs subsidizing private schooling “cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

The present case pertains to a Maine program. The court determined that “Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause.”

It adds that a state government’s interest in not establishing a religion “does not justify enactments that exclude some members of the community from an otherwise generally available public benefit because of their religious exercise.”

Maine’s tuition program is for families who live in regions without any secondary public school. Qualifying families can use the subsidy to pay for either public or private schooling in another part of the state. Before 1981, Maine had no problem with students going to religious schools under the program. In that year, the rule changed.

So-called sectarian schools are, of course, often the major and sometimes the only private secondary-school alternative to public schools in an area. According to the Council for American Private Education, 78 percent of all students who attend private schools in the U.S. attend schools that are religiously affiliated.

Proponents of keeping kids trapped in public schools are in an uproar over the court’s decision.

But it only stands to reason that school choice programs must permit choice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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