COVID Relief Law Shortchanges Americans, Private Schools
The most recent COVID “relief” package or Public Law 117-2, misnamed the “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021,” is packed with pork, most of which does not help needy Americans. For example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (mostly in other parts of the world), of which the multi-billion dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a key partner, will receive at least $3.5 billion. This donation may be admirable if it is actually used to fight disease. Why should such a giveaway be included in a U.S. taxpayer-funded package that’s supposed to help Americans recover from the massive shutdowns that have decimated the economy? And this is just one of many unwarranted globalist earmarks hidden in the $1.9 trillion law.
There’s plenty of pork for abortion funding in the $10 billion going overseas, and as the Family Resource Council reported “$50 million in political kickbacks for groups like Planned Parenthood.” No wonder Senator Mitch McConnell called the bill “a parade of left-wing pet projects that they [Democrats] are ramming through during a pandemic.”
While the bill passed the Senate without a single Republican vote, Democrats were forced to make a few changes to the more odious House version so that it would be palatable to their own centrist members. Senate Republicans offered a number of amendments in an attempt to limit the spending, such as Senator Ted Cruz’s effort to block stimulus payments to illegal aliens. Another would have halted payments to incarcerated individuals. Both of these efforts failed. An amendment submitted by Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) that would have reinstated the Keystone XL pipeline also failed. Biden’s canceling of the pipeline has cost Montana and other states many thousands of jobs. In all, just two Republican amendments made it into the final bill while 29 were defeated.
Spending on Education
When the COVID relief bill initially passed the House, it included $128 billion for public schools, with nothing set aside for private schools. The Senate bill however, did include $2.75 billion for non-government schools, due in large part to grassroots bi-partisan lobbying efforts by groups like the #EdTaxCredit50 & USA Workforce Coalitions. “We have been riding a legislative roll coaster since last summer,” said Maureen Blum, the group’s executive director. “Our quest for an education tax credit evolved into a mission to achieve emergency relief for non-government schools.”
Blum described how the coalitions worked early on with the Trump Administration and had “secured a deal that private schools would get 10 percent of the K-12 funding in the bill. After all, 10 percent of our nation’s children are educated in religious or independent (non-government) schools.” She continued: “The background scenes included numerous meetings, some long and some short, various conference calls and zoom connections at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, from Capitol Hill to The White House.”
Coalition members had to navigate hostile waters when the political balance of power shifted last November, but they remained focused on their priorities, using both proactive and reactive means to stay the course. While they lost the ten percent promised by the Trump Administration, they were able to reinstate some funding in the Senate version of the bill, working with Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to get it done. Blum credited both senators with taking “serious action,” despite her disappointment that the amount was reduced to just under two percent of the funding allocated to K-12 education.
Bittersweet Victory
Blum explained that the $2.75 billion “didn’t even come out of the public school bucket — they allotted more money so we didn’t affect the public school funding.” The money for public schools, she said, “was given with no strings attached,” but the private school funds came with “a condition that it be allocated for schools with ‘significant percentages of low-income students that were affected by the pandemic.’ Of course, there are no definitions of those qualifications so they will ration the money to schools that are deemed to need it rather than just those who apply.” She added: “This is a very sad and dramatic shift from the Trump Administration on the school choice front.”
Nonetheless, the #EdTaxCredit50 & USA Workforce Coalitions, “are very grateful we were able to get the money, but it hurts that our children didn’t get their fair share.” Blum added that Senators Cassidy and Cruz “offered logical amendments” to the public school funding portion of the bill, “but all were voted down along party lines.”
Breaking the Public School Stranglehold
While organizations like #EdTaxCredit50 work tirelessly to expand and improve educational choice, the number of students outside the government schools appears stagnant at just 10 percent, as it has been for half a century. Since the onset of the pandemic, however, increasing numbers of parents have become alienated by the actions of the teachers unions and the failure of the public school system to return students to the classroom. Observers say there has been a slow shift to private schools and homeschooling, and those in favor of school choice are cautiously optimistic.
“We have to break the federal stranglehold on education,” said Ed Martin, president of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles. “This pandemic may come with tragedy, but also it comes with an opportunity to do just that. There’s a growing sense that people may be moving their kids out of the grasp of public education and teachers unions.”
Western Journal-COVID Relief Package-3-10-21; Washington Examiner-Senate $1.9 Trillion COVID-19 Aid Bill-3-6-21; Rollcall.com/2021/03/06/senate-covid-19-relief-bill; Maureen Blum, Executive Director, #EdTaxCredit50; Family Research Council, March 2021
Critical Race Theory: Coming Soon to a School Near You— if not There Already
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is creeping into more and more classrooms, and some school administrators are hiding the indoctrination from parents. A document leaked on Twitter from the Rockwood School District in St. Louis County, MO, one of the largest and most prominent districts in the area, reveals that a grades 6-12 “Literacy Speech Coordinator” gave specific recommendations to teachers on how to conceal objectionable curricula from parents.
Referring to parent complaints about CRT propaganda, the coordinator tells teachers: “Keep teaching! Just don’t make everything visible on Canvas. That doesn’t mean throw out the lesson and find a new one. Just pull the resource off Canvas so parents cannot see it.” (Canvas is a course management system schools use to support online teaching and posting of assignments, etc.)
Reports of CRT curricula in other St. Louis County school districts have surfaced as well, including the Lindbergh and Webster Groves School Districts, the latter having adopted the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice program. One concerned parent in the Lindbergh district reported that her four “ethnically diverse children” have suffered in “identity” seminars. The parent said these lessons “are unnecessarily making her American children feel different and uncomfortable” and that they are experiencing negative feelings “of alienation and separation” due to the indoctrination.
CRT Curricula Around the Country
But these school districts are hardly the only ones teaching CRT. A few additional examples are described below.
The Philadelphia School District released an “Antiracism Declaration” in 2020, which said educators should “no longer be passive or disjointed in their approach” to this issue. A social studies lesson in a fifth-grade classroom asks students “to celebrate ‘black communist’ Angela Davis.” The children simulate “free Angela Davis” rallies, demanding that this former Black Panther activist be released from prison. Davis served 18 months in prison during the early 1970s after being brought up on several charges, including murder. She was acquitted in 1972. A whistleblower in the district publicized a memo that read: “Race is the social construction that set the foundation and built the infrastructure for the United States we know today,” which comes straight from the discredited and controversial 1619 Project. This memo goes on to state: “Racism is the root of all other forms of injustice and provides the nourishment needed for other systems of oppression to thrive. As such, in order to destroy the tree, we cannot simply pick at the leaves or chop away at the trunk, we must destroy the root.”
A new curriculum introduced last summer for fifth-graders in Buffalo, NY supports Black Lives Matter. This curriculum reportedly includes teaching students the BLM “declaration on Black Villages.” One lesson states: “We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, and especially ‘our’ children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.” Destroying the nuclear family has long been a goal of Marxism/communism, and BLM has since removed it from their website, doubtless to avoid appearing quite so overt.
These programs have been introduced in private schools as well. An exclusive private school in Bryn Mawr, PA, asks parents to “decenter whiteness at home” and in their families. Parents are instructed to “[P]ay attention to how your language may perpetuate ‘universal’ standards of beauty, speech, behavior, dress, conflict resolution, etc.” It goes on to decry compliments made to a blue-eyed child that may have offended a brown-eyed child. But is this necessary to address in school? How about teaching the science of eye color?
Fighting Back
A new article on the American Spectator website likens CRT to a terminal cancer and offers a bleak prognosis for overcoming the disease. “Can the cancer of CRT be successfully treated?” asks the author in the final paragraph, noting its advanced stage in America and lamenting that “there’s precious little political will to excise [the tumors].” It’s true that CRT’s tentacles are many and that it works in tandem with other left-wing agendas. But the good news is that parents are becoming more aware of the dangers of CRT and are fighting back.
The curricula are getting attention in state governments as well, with some states working to rein in the instruction through their state legislatures. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced in March that no money would be spent in his state on CRT. “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money,” he said, adding: “Our schools are supposed to give people a foundation of knowledge, not supposed to be indoctrination centers where you’re trying to push specific ideologies.”
In Missouri, House Bill 952, which accurately defines and then bans CRT is moving forward in the legislature. The bill currently states: “No school district, charter school, or personnel or agent of such school district or charter school shall teach, use, or provide for use by any pupil any curriculum implementing Critical Race Theory as part of any curriculum, course materials, or instruction in any course given in such school district or charter school.” Supporters are working to pass this important legislation.
St. Louis Post Dispatch, 4-23-21; Stacy Washington on Twitter; Washington Examiner, 4-25-21; American Spectator-Critical Race Theory Cancer; The Federalist.com 3-1721
Remembering the Work of Dr. Judith Reisman
On April 9, 2021, influential author and researcher Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., passed away just two days before her 86th birthday. Dr. Reisman was a contemporary of Phyllis Schlafly, and they shared a similar philosophy about the destructiveness of the sexual revolution and the introduction of “sex education” in the schools. Phyllis was aware of Reisman’s important work to expose the fraudulent and even criminal sex “research” of Alfred C. Kinsey and its connection to the relaxation of sexual mores around the world.
In her January 1995 Phyllis Schlafly Report, she associated Dr. Reisman’s research with information in a book by E. Michael Jones that proved “The linkage between the private behavior and the public pronouncements of some of the most influential personages of the 20th century.” Phyllis wrote:
Alfred Charles Kinsey made his name as a collector of sex histories. Their unscientific nature was first exposed by his contemporary, Abraham Maslow, because of Kinsey’s “volunteer error,” i.e., he used volunteers, such as prostitutes and prison inmates, who were eager to describe their sex experiences. More recently, the scholar Judith Reisman has published devastating exposés of Kinsey’s methodology. She demonstrated that, since much of Kinsey’s data was based on observing the sexual abuse of children, it must be either bogus science or a report of criminal activity. Kinsey originated the theory that deviance is the engine of social and biological progress. His personal sex history is still concealed from the public, but Jones marshals evidence that Kinsey’s theories are just a rationalization of his own deviance.
After early careers in music video production and academia, Reisman returned to the classroom to earn her Ph.D. in communications from Case Western Reserve University. During that time she noticed the deterioration of morals in entertainment and in society’s view of women, which she eventually ascribed to the impact of Kinsey’s flawed studies. She shifted her focus to research and writing, authoring five books on Kinsey and pornography and co-authoring two others.
Perhaps her most well-known work is titled Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, which was published in 1998. Phyllis Schlafly reviewed this book in the February 1999 issue of Education Reporter. Since the information remains relevant today and the book is still available for purchase, we are reprinting the review below in Dr. Reisman’s honor.
As the reader may imagine, Reisman was relentlessly attacked by liberals and progressives for exposing the truth about Kinsey’s flawed and deviant research. She was accused of “smear tactics” and of being “medieval, Victorian and McCarthyian.” But Reisman’s legacy reflects the incalculable value of her years of dedicated research and her exposure of the truth about Alfred Kinsey. As one of her many supporters, Robert Flores, Esq., Former Administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, United States Department of Justice, said of her: “Judith Reisman has had the courage as a researcher to do the most important thing, keep an open mind and allow the data and the research to influence and guide her work.” The Reisman Institute, which she founded, carries on this work.
The Reisman Institute; Dr Judith Reisman.com; The Phyllis Schlafly Report January 1995; Education Reporter February 1999
Education News Briefs
Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson signed a bill to block Planned Parenthood from teaching comprehensive sex education in Arkansas public schools. On April 22, Hutchinson signed into law H.B. 1592, sponsored by Arkansas Representative Mark Lowery (R-Maumelle). Called the Arkansas Student Protection Act, the bill passed the Arkansas legislature on April 7 by a vote of 73 to 18, and was approved in the Senate by an overwhelming margin of 27-5. The new law prohibits Arkansas public schools from entering into any transactions with abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. Schools who violate the law will be required to appear before the state board to explain publicly why the violation happened and to determine “how to prevent the violation of this subchapter and division rules in the future.” The Arkansas Family Council was a key supporter of the bill, noting that “abortion-focused sex ed is responsible for driving up both the abortion and teen pregnancy rates.” In March of this year, Gov. Hutchinson signed another bill prohibiting most abortions in his state, “except to save the mother’s life in the event of a medical emergency.” Other red state governments who do not have similar statutes on the books may do well to investigate these measures for potential replication. LifeNews.com, 4-22-21; Christian Headlines.com, 4-22-21
In April, the NCAA officially announced that it “firmly and unequivocally” supports the inclusion of transgender athletes in competitive collegiate sports and will retaliate against states that attempt to thwart its position. The NCAA affirmed its approval of men competing in women’s sports, which is the core issue, just as a number of state governments are considering banning transgender individuals from competing against biological women. The NCAA cites as justification its policy since 2010 of requiring “testosterone suppression treatment for transgender women to compete in women’s sports.” It’s unclear whether student athletes must present proof of such treatment or if it actually provides a level playing field. The NCAA pledges to pull championship events out of states that oppose its policies, an action that Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota predicted the organization would take when she caved in to the pressure and vetoed a bill passed by her legislature. That bill would have prohibited biological men from competing in women’s sports in South Dakota, an action Noem claimed to support. At the Federal level, H.R. 8932 is unfortunately now stalled. Called the Protect Women’s Sports Act, this bill was introduced in the 116th Congress in December by former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Congressman Markwayne Mullin (R-OK). The Blaze, 4-13-21 www.C-Span.org/congress/bills/116th Congress
Book Review
Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences
Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D., The Institute for Media Education, 1998
Dr. Reisman’s important book exposes in detail the fraudulent and criminal sex “research” conducted by Indiana University zoologist Alfred C. Kinsey. Kinsey’s publication of SexualBehaviorintheHumanMale in 1948 made him the undisputed authority on human sexuality. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female followed in 1953, and the supposedly “scientific” material in these two volumes earned Kinsey the title “father of the American sexual revolution.”
Crimes and Consequences is the culmination of 30 years of research by Dr. Reisman. She documents how Kinsey collected data on “child sexuality” from what he called “scientific observers” who were actually pedophiles. More than 2,000 children (some of them infants) were victims of sexual experimentation in absolute secrecy, and Reisman shows how “this deception was carefully nurtured and maintained by the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, the National Research Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation.”
The book also exposes the fraud in Kinsey’s research involving adults. Most of his adult subjects were prison inmates and sex offenders. When normal interviewees denied engaging in deviant sexual acts, the “researchers” either disregarded the data or only recorded answers that they determined were “truthful.”
While Dr. Reisman’s revelations about the child molestation by the Kinsey Institute are shocking, the widespread consequences of Kinsey’s “research” are just as disturbing. His “far-reaching legal legacy” includes the altering of America’s sex crime and obscenity laws, which opened the door to attacks on traditional marriage and morality.
Kinsey’s “findings” have been proven bogus by honest research, but they are nonetheless the basis for nearly all sex and AIDS education programs in the schools. Reisman shows how a myriad of social ills, including sex crimes, sexually transmitted diseases, illegitimacy, psychological disorders, divorce, and suicide have resulted from Kinsey’s crimes.
Originally reviewed in Education Reporter, February 1999
MALLARD FILLMORE / by Bruce Tinsley