October 2024 — Ed Reporter Monthly Email Edition

Recent developments in the public-school district of Chicago could be described as a perfect storm; an extremely bad situation in which many bad things are converging at the same time. The circumstances might collectively serve as a glaring example of the abject failure of U.S. public education.

At the center of the debacle is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the antics of which Education Reporter briefly reported in August as the union battled the city for a bloated $50 billion contract. Still in negotiations, one of the main sticking points is the union’s opposition to district efforts to close schools that are almost completely devoid of students.

Last month, the independent nonprofit company, Wirepoints, reported that the Chicago Public School system (CPS) “is in dire financial straits, yet [the] Chicago Teachers Union blocks closing of near-empty, failing schools.” At the time, then-CPS CEO Pedro Martinez was under heavy fire from the CTU for “reportedly developing a list of at least 100 schools that could be closed and/or consolidated due to low utilization rates.” Although Martinez denied that he wanted to close any schools, he and the entire school board has since resigned, clearing the way for an entirely new board that was just appointed by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Johnson has repeatedly declined to admit he supported the removal of the CEO, but the Chicago Tribune reported that these resignations “stem from an ongoing campaign by Johnson to oust schools chief Martinez, one that is taking place amid stalled contract talks with the Chicago Teachers Union and has placed immense pressure on the seven-member school board to carry out the CTU-aligned mayor’s orders.”

The Tribune further stated that the mayor’s opposition to Martinez was in part fueled by the CEO’s “refusal to take out a $300 million high interest loan as well as assume a $175 million pension payment for nonteacher CPS employees.” The board supported Martinez on those matters, despite the mayor’s insistence that the loan was needed when additional dollars were not forthcoming from the state.

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called replacement of the board “The Chicago School Board Coup,” and characterized Martinez’s opposition to “exorbitant short-term borrowing” as a “display of sanity” for which the CPS CEO became “persona non grata at City Hall.”

The Center Square reported that, when asked about Mayor Johnson “possibly taking out a high-interest loan to fill CPS’ $500 million budget deficit”, [Illinois] Gov. J.B. Pritzker said: “Borrowing to pay for operating expenses in a business, in government, etc. is not a great idea, unless you know how you’re going to pay for that.” Pritzker claimed education is one of his highest priorities but noted, “there is only so much money the state can spend on Chicago Public Schools.”

The CPS allegedly spends $18,000 per pupil per year, but Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the total is more like $30,000, even though few students can read or do math at grade level. “The biggest problem is the system doesn’t work,” Dabrowski said.

Many parents and citizens appear to agree. A recent survey by the national nonpartisan research group, Public Agenda, showed that Chicago residents “think the biggest problem in the city’s public schools is that students are not learning enough academically,” and that “the system’s main goal should be to prepare students for college.”

The study also found that Chicagoans believe “politicians and educational leaders are focused on petty political battles instead of what is best for students,” and few believe the CPS budget is being effectively administered. It appears most parents and citizens are not buying the CTU propaganda, nor are they sympathetic to Mayor Johnson’s politically motivated machinations.

Union demands

In opposing Martinez, the CTU declared in a social media post quoted by the Daily Caller that the CEO is “a huge barrier to our collective success,” and calling for him to step down. The fact that Mayor Johnson failed to support Martinez despite his occasional attempts to inject sanity into management of the city’s schools is no surprise — the CTU backed Johnson for mayor over former mayor Lori Lightfoot in the last election cycle. In dismissing Martinez, CTU stated:

• We need someone who can steer CPS toward equity, growth, and opportunity — not back to the harmful decisions of the past. Our students and communities deserve a leader who will invest in the future of public education and prioritize Black and Brown neighborhoods, not leave them behind. We believe it’s time for CEO Martinez to step aside for someone who will seize this historic opportunity to transform our schools.

But such time-worn agitprop is viewed as a joke by many parents and observers. As Wirepoints reported, the real reason for the need to close schools is the 26 percent reduction in public school enrollment over two decades, “overwhelmingly driven by a 50 percent drop in black attendance — down by about 115,000.” Wirepoints found that declining enrollment “was a key factor that led to the closure of 50 Chicago schools back in 2013.” With enrollment continuing to shrink and the number of over half-empty schools doubling in 10 years, closures and consolidations just make sense. But the CTU disapproves because, says Wirepoints, “that would reduce its membership and its power.”

In an October 4 update posted on its website, Wirepoints warned that nothing transformational is likely to occur as a result of the current infighting between CPS and the CTU. “[T]he outcome won’t change what matters most,” they wrote, “that Chicago’s children can’t read…. Reading proficiency levels for graduating students remains stuck at near 10 percent.”

Chronic absenteeism

Another major problem cited by various news sources and impacting schools nationwide is absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism has been rampant in general since the pandemic, “but in Chicago it’s worse,” wrote senior vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute, Hilary Gowins, in an op-ed published last spring on the organization’s website. “That hurts students’ futures and the city’s wellbeing.”

Gowins’ editorial included a chart showing CPS leading the way in chronic absenteeism among the five largest school districts in the country. Both the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Miami-Dade County School District had nine percent less absenteeism than the CPS, with Clark County, Nevada and the New York City School District registering two percent and four percent less respectively.

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) says the problem of absenteeism “isn’t the students, it’s the schools.” FEE reported in July about a coalition of strange bedfellows that was formed to address the issue, including the American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust, and Attendance Works, a nonprofit group focused on combatting absenteeism.

FEE reported that the coalition’s plan to cut absenteeism involves implementing “a variety of initiatives, including home visits and similar interventions,” with the goal of reducing absentee rates “to pre-pandemic levels, or around 13 percent, by 2029.”

FEE senior fellow and spokesperson, Kerry McDonald, wrote: “Beyond the creepiness of random home visits by school-related personnel, the trouble with proposed chronic absenteeism fixes is that they miss the point. Many students don’t want to be at their school.” She added that even with state laws requiring kids to attend school and most parents fearing prison if they don’t force their kids to go, “many students are staying home rather than going to school, [which should be an indication that] schools are the problem.”

McDonald pointed out that “cracking down on chronic absenteeism by adding more layers of coercion ignores the reality that today’s mass schooling models are highly undesirable.” She urges parents to invest in alternative schooling options such as the many microschools operating throughout the country, particularly those who live in states where school choice programs allow education dollars to follow the students.

Unfortunately for many families trapped in the CPS, creative schooling options funded by school choice are not available, unless parents have the wherewithal to pay for them. The organization EdChoice notes that while Illinois does have magnet schools, the “intra district open enrollment policy that allows some parents to transfer to traditional public schools within their district” is limited. Charter schools also operate in Illinois, but charter schools often have long wait lists and not all are improvements over traditional public schools.

Meanwhile, the chaotic saga in Chicago continues. According to Chicago News | WTTW, Mayor Johnson’s newly appointed CPS board members include “former local school council chair Frank Niles Thomas, the Rev. Mitchell L. Ikenna Johnson, Southeast Environmental Task Force Executive Director Olga Bautista, Michilla “Kyla” Blaise, who serves as chief of staff for 16th District Cook County Commissioner Frank Aguilar, West Side community activist Mary Gardner, and former CPS teacher and Chicago Teachers Union member Deborah Pope.”

Whether or not this drastic overhaul bodes well for Chicago parents and students remains to be seen. WTTW observed that, at his press conference announcing the new appointees, “Johnson appeared defiant and combative during what was at times a contentious announcement event….” He also declined to allow his appointees to answer media questions. Instead, “he took aim at critics of his leadership, both among the City Council and media in attendance.”

At least in the short term, it appears business as usual will prevail in Chicago, with little-used, failing schools costing the city millions in operating dollars it cannot afford. The CTU will continue to push for higher member salaries, the hiring of more administrators and other personnel, and for keeping all schools open regardless of bodies to fill them. And many students will continue to stay out of school, perpetuating the cycle of tragedy and failure for yet another generation.

Last month’s Education Reporter, as well as Stanley Kurtz’s revealing essay in the August issue, highlighted the dangerous impact Democrat vice presidential candidate and current Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz has had on education in his state. But there is much more to the candidate’s regular-guy persona than meets the eye, and astute observers wonder what it might mean for education nationally if the Harris-Walz ticket prevails in November.

In a recent issue of National Review, Stanley Kurtz further exposed the radicalism of Macalester College Professor Brian Lozenski, who was appointed by Governor Walz’s education department to write the “ethnic studies” curriculum for K-12 students, and who has been an influential voice in Minnesota education with the approval of Walz.

Kurtz writes:

• Minnesota’s version of ethnic studies, known as “liberated ethnic studies,” is more radical than that of any other state. The scholars and teachers who created liberated ethnic studies are based in California, but even California governor Gavin Newsom has distanced himself from the extremism of their approach. As a proponent of liberated ethnic studies, Lozenski was the founding organizer of Education for Liberation Minnesota, the first and only state-level branch outside of California of the liberated-ethnic-studies movement.

Perhaps even more troubling is the revelation that Lozenski openly “called for the ‘overthrow’ of the United States” in a 2022 YouTube video about his book, My Emancipation Don’t Fit Your Equation: Critical Enactments of Black Education in the US, which has since been taken down. Kurtz found the entire video of interest, but in particular Lozenski’s comments “calling for the overthrow of the United States that can be found from 54:30 to 57:00, during a discussion of the debate over critical race theory (CRT).” Kurtz says the book dovetails with the video, and that it demonstrates Lozenski’s approval of CRT as invented by Derrick Bell and applied to schooling through the work of Gloria Ladson Billings. (See Education Reporter, Brief #3, July 2022.)

During the video discussion, Lozenski chastises CRT’s critics by alleging that their “supremacist education” prevents them from having the “cognitive ability” to understand it. He states:

• The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then … it must be overthrown, right. And so we can’t be like, “Oh no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and divers[ity].” It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent…. You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says The United States needs to be deconstructed, period … and so I think it’s an interesting argument there. And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist.

As Kurtz observes, “Walz has had many warnings and plenty of opportunities to pull back from the extremism of liberated ethnic studies — as Gavin Newsom has pulled back in California. Instead, Walz has continued to delegate power to Lozenski and his supporters, whom he has now charged with designing an ‘implementation framework’ for ethnic studies.” The question to be considered then becomes, will Lozenski play an even larger role in education on the national level in a Harris-Walz administration?

Ditching the Electoral College

Early this month, Walz restated his opposition to the electoral college while campaigning for himself and Harris. The National Review’s David Zimmermann quoted Walz as saying: “I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in.”

The website National Popular Vote.com shows that 17 states and the District of Columbia have enacted what is called the “national Popular Vote Compact,” including the large population states of California, Illinois, and New York. This compact is an agreement among approving states to “guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”

Liberals and progressives have been chomping at the bit for years to abolish the Electoral College. Hilary Clinton called for its demise after losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and in 2019, Elizabeth Warren proposed eliminating the Electoral College and urged moving to a popular vote. But in an October 2011 radio commentary, Phyllis Schlafly clearly and succinctly explained why doing away with the Electoral College is “a major attack against our Constitution by those who want to ‘fundamentally transform’ the United States.”

Phyllis aptly called the scheme “a plot” that has “big money behind it with highly paid lobbyists who go around asking state legislators to enact identical bills requiring their own presidential electors to ignore the winner of their own state’s presidential election and cast all their state’s votes for the presidential candidate they think received the most popular votes nationwide.” Phyllis explained that due to the siphoning off of votes by third-party candidates, “in most elections no candidate receives a popular majority and is elected only because he receives a majority in the Electoral College.” She urged Americans “to rise up and say No to those who are promoting the campaign for the National Popular Vote.” In 2024, Governor Walz will doubtless be a prominent voice saying Yes should he ascend to the role of vice president.

Of unions and library books

Writer and education policy staffer for the Independent Women’s Forum, Neeraja Deshpande, warned in an August Real Clear Wire (wnd.com) article that the NEA’s enthusiastic endorsement of VP nominee Walz, “should be worrisome for Americans who are actually concerned about the state of education in the country: for years, the NEA has put radical politics above children. Unfortunately, so has Tim Walz.”

Deshpande reiterated what has already become public about Minnesota education under Walz’s governorship, that students have lost ground academically in a significant way. She wrote:

• Indeed, when Walz took office as governor of Minnesota in 2019, 59.2% of Minnesota students were proficient in reading and 55% were proficient in math. Four years later, in 2023, those numbers fell to 49.9% and 45.5%, respectively. Over that same time period under Walz, Minnesota’s chronic absenteeism rate more than doubled, from 14% to 30%. In 2018, before Walz took office, Minnesota’s schools were ranked 5th in the nation; five years later, in 2024, they are ranked 17th. With such disastrous numbers, one would expect Walz to focus on getting back to the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic.

But the Walz agenda has proven to have more to do with radical politics than education. Deshpande pointed out that instead of focusing on academics — although Walz did approve a bill mandating “evidence-based reading methods” in 2023 — he “has spent much of his time in office fear-mongering about so-called conservative book bans, which have been debunked repeatedly.”

The Minnesota legislature in May passed legislation, signed into law by Walz, that essentially prohibits any restrictions on any books or other materials in a school library “based solely on the viewpoint, content, message, idea, or opinion conveyed.” In practice, Deshpande explained, “this means teachers and librarians in Minnesota can expose children to explicit books without accountability.”

She concludes, and many conservatives agree, that “Minnesota’s radical curriculum and education policy failures are a direct reflection of Walz’s priorities and judgments. If he is elected alongside Kamala Harris in November, Minnesota’s educational problems will be sure to spread across the nation.”

In January 2023, protesters rallied outside the NCAA convention in Phoenix in support of women’s sports and against allowing transgender men to compete with biological women. The headliner was former University of Kentucky swimming star Riley Gaines, who lost the NCAA medal many believed was rightfully hers when she was forced to compete against male swimmer Lia Thomas. She was joined by dozens of fellow female athletes, coaches, and parents.

Speakers at the rally included swimmer Paula Scanlan, who noted that there are many women and girls who have lost opportunities to biological males competing in the women’s division. “Every time Thomas competed,” Scanlan said, “a female swimmer lost a lane in the pool. When we tried to voice our concerns to the athletic department, we were told that Lia’s swimming on the team was ‘a non-negotiable,’ that they were simply following NCAA guidelines.”

After besting his female competitors, including Gaines, who was expected to take top honors in the event, Thomas claimed: “Trans people don’t transition for athletics, we transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves…. Transitioning to get an advantage is not something that ever factors into our decisions.” But many observers found his claims laughable when photos of the tall, strapping, masculine-appearing Thomas — who had previously lost in competitive swimming against fellow male athletes — showed up in the media next to his diminutive, obviously female competitors.

During the rally, Gaines presented a petition signed by 70,000 people, including over 500 Olympians, opposing the incursion of biological male athletes into women’s sports, which Gaines said “is happening in just about every sport at every level in every state. That’s why we’re here. Any way we can be useful to the conversation, to share our concerns, to share the real effects and the impacts we have seen as female athletes, we are here and we are willing to be invited to the table.”

While progress has been slow, there are signs the tide may be turning and that voices in support of women’s sports are being heard. For example, President Biden’s rewrite of Title IX earlier this year to allow transgender athletes to play on women’s sports teams has not been a roaring success. According to Education Week (edweek.org), the new rule “has drawn at least eight lawsuits,” with “26 states” having signed on to the litigation, effectively placing the rule “on hold.”

Ed Week reported that additionally, “one school district, two students, and five conservative advocacy organizations have signed onto the legal challenges. All eight of the lawsuits filed resulted in injunctions” … which temporarily “block the rule while the cases play out in court.”

The rule technically became effective August 1, 2024, but on August 16, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 “to reject a Biden administration emergency request to enforce portions of that new rule that includes protection from discrimination for transgender students under Title IX.”

Transgender fallout in volleyball

So far this fall, three women’s college volleyball teams have forfeited games with San Jose State University, which includes a biologically male player. On September 27, the Daily Mail Online reported that Boise State University announced it would forfeit its volleyball match with San Jose “without offering a specific reason.”

According to the online news platform, OutKick.com, so far this season in the Mountain West Conference, Southern Utah State, Boise State, and the University of Wyoming have each forfeited games with San Jose, “as safety concerns for female student athletes arise in the women’s collegiate volleyball space.”

San Jose’s transgender player, Braydon (Blaire) Fleming, is 6 feet 1 inch tall and, according to teammate Brooke Slusser, can spike a volleyball “at upward of 80 miles-per-hour,” faster than she says she has ever seen a woman hit a volleyball. According to a Fox News report, in joining 18 other athletes in suing the NCAA over its current gender identity policies, Slusser said: “The girls [on the opposing teams] were doing everything they could to dodge Fleming’s spikes but still could not fully protect themselves.”

OutKick reports that the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) sent a letter to Mountain West Conference schools calling out the conference for “violating federal law by implementing and enforcing the NCAA transgender eligibility policies.” San Jose State “holds an undefeated 9-0 record” with Fleming on the team competing against women. The letter urges “the Mountain West Conference and schools under the conference to step up and defend women from the potential risks of competing against men and save women’s rights under Title IX.”

Physical dangers

Since males have been allowed to compete in female sports, injuries to women and girls have been widely reported. OutKick writes that in 2022, 17-year-old Payton McNabb, “sustained a devastating head and neck injury while playing against a transgender volleyball player.” The article points out that “regulation net height for women’s college volleyball is 7 feet 4 1/8 inches, while for men’s college volleyball, it is 7 feet 11 5/8 inches.”

The ICONS letter also states that “study after peer-reviewed study has shown clear performance advantages for males in sport pre-puberty. Studies also clearly show that male advantage continues to exist even after attempts to suppress testosterone.” The letter then stressed in bold type that “due to enduring sex-based physical differences between men and women, the only way sport can be safe, fair, and equal for women is to maintain a protected female category that excludes male competitors.”

The letter further broaches the subject of women’s privacy in their locker rooms, with the presence of men leading to “serious mental and emotional damage for women who have suffered through sexual assault. Additionally, cases of trans athletes have involved exposing male genitalia without consent.”

Parents file suit

On September 30, two sets of parents filed suit against the Bow School District in New Hampshire in Fellers-et-al.-v.-Kelley-et-al, for violating their First Amendment right to show support for protecting women’s sports by wearing pink wristbands during their children’s soccer game. The suit accuses school officials with threatening “to have them arrested for trespass” and for conspiring with local police and a soccer referee to have them arrested for wearing the wristbands.

The parents contend that, after the game, they and all those who stood with them in support of girls’ soccer were banned from attending any future games, despite the fact that the protest was a silent one that only involved wearing the wristbands.

The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on the lawsuit, which charges that the Bow School District’s “ban on demonstrations criticizing the decision to allow biological boys to play girls’ soccer—cloaked in the language of ‘disruption’ and ‘harassment’—is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” The parents further assert that “the First Amendment does not allow state-operated schools to become enclaves of totalitarianism.”

The Daily Caller’s article explains that one of the players’ parents, mom Nicole Foote, met with the athletic director days before the soccer game in question “to express concern regarding the potential risks of allowing a biological man to compete in women’s sports, to which the director said the court prevented the school from doing anything.” The director followed up the discussion by sending an email warning that the school would “impose obligations” per its handbook, “on any actions from the sideline,” including any “inappropriate signs, references, or language,” meaning such would not be allowed.

While some individuals wrote “XX” on their wristbands to show support for female athletes, no parents wore them during the first half of the game, according to the Daily Caller. “Besides the wristbands, there were no other indications of parents outwardly protesting, but the athletic director told one parent that he had to take off [his] wristband, to which he argued that First Amendment rights protect the use of the wristbands.”

The message to parents and athletes from K-12 through college level school officials appears to be that, despite the potential harm to female athletes, they must willingly accept without question or opposition any male wishing to play on a girls’ or women’s team. Many observers wonder where the feminists are who battled for Title IX years ago when far fewer women than men were interested in sports. Now, women who do want to play a sport and work hard to be successful, are penalized by zealots placing men in women’s sports and putting women in harm’s way.

(This is the final installment in our series of recommended reading lists for children. This list and all previously published lists will be accessible indefinitely from the main dropdown menu on our website. — Ed.)

Classic children’s books are scarcely to be found in school classrooms and libraries today, so parents must ensure that their kids are reading books that educate, absorb, and entertain in a manner that stimulates curiosity and increases the child’s eagerness to learn about the world.

The Recommended High School Reading List originally appeared in Education Reporter, October 1990.

Additional Education Reporter suggested reading lists:

• A Child’s Reading List (February 2024)
• The Ultimate Reading List — Classics that Endure (Part 1) (March 2024)
• The Ultimate Reading List — Classics that Endure (Part 2) (April 2024)
• Children Will Love Discovering Lost Classics (May 2024)
• Bennett’s Reading List (Part 1) (June 2024)
• Bennett’s Reading List (Part 2) (July 2024)
• The Best Children’s Classics (Part 1) (August 2024)
• The Best Children’s Classics (Part 2) (September 2024)
• Recommended High School Reading List (October 2024)

NOTE: Most books on this list can be ordered online through booksellers including:

• ThriftBooks
• Amazon.com : vintage books classics
• Project Gutenberg (Free Archive, eBooks only) Choose (EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle))
  > > > > Send to Kindle to upload ebooks to your Kindle device downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

Recommended High School Reading List

Click the image below to open as a (printable) PDF document

Parents living in blue states are urging their kids who attend college in swing states to register and vote in the swing state. The College Fix provided the heads up in an October 15 article by Virginia King, Texas State University student contributor. King exposed a “Georgia Tech Parent and Community Forum” on Facebook where parents from Democrat-majority states are telling their kids to register to vote in Georgia “because their child’s vote would matter more” there. “I’d rather have my daughter vote in a swing state than home in Illinois where her vote won’t have much of an impact,” one group member posted in response to another parent who asked, “Why don’t you get your child registered to vote in their home state?” Yet another said of her daughter: “[I’d] rather have her vote in [a] swing state. Massachusetts is guaranteed blue.” A New York mom posted: “GT students absolutely CAN vote in Georgia — my NY son registered there the minute he got to school three years ago and has been voting in every election ever since.” The College Fix received screenshots of the Facebook postings from a member who questioned “whether the tacit [advice] was appropriate or legal.” Another parent posted that the rule on the secretary of state’s website reads: “Your student is not a legal resident of a GA county if they are out of state so legally is not able to vote in GA,” and included a link to the state’s online voter registration portal. King included in her article the image of a voter registration event flyer available on the Georgia Tech campus alleging that even out-of-state students need only provide “a GA driver’s license or [the] last four digits of [their] SSN.” When contacted, the left-leaning sponsors of the flyer admitted “the process is a little more complicated” for out-of-state students. Georgia Tech is located in Fulton County, which “has served as a hotbed of election integrity concerns for several years.” Neither the Georgia GOP nor the Fulton County GOP responded to The Fix’s request for comment.

A new medical watchdog database shows 14,000 youngsters have undergone sex-change procedures in recent years. National Review reported that the nonprofit medical watchdog group, Do No Harm, has created a database to quantify “the extent to which American children are undergoing gender-transition procedures.” The “groundbreaking” data show that 13,994 minors “received gender-transition treatments, with 5,747 undergoing sex-change surgeries and 8,579 getting hormones and puberty blockers,” during the period from January 2019 through December 2023. Minors under the age of 15 received “the majority of the body-modification procedures.” Do No Harm’s website describes its purpose as protecting healthcare “from the disastrous consequences of identity politics.” Led by chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Do No Harm was previously featured in Education Reporter for exposing the efforts of medical schools to push “the destructive, woke [CRT] agenda” on students.

National Review explained that Do No Harm’s database methodology “matched gender and prescription medical codes to a diagnosis code for gender [dysphoria], the often temporary medical condition where teenagers feel trapped in the wrong body.” The article noted that the database “likely undercounts the true number of trans medical interventions because it excludes ‘gray area’ cases and lacks data from certain health-care providers.” Goldfarb emphasized that his organization has really been meticulous in trying to make sure the data are as clear and accurate as possible. “If anything,” he explains, “we’re showing the lower limits of what’s going on in this whole arena.” Do No Harm’s database has an age range of zero to 17.5 years old and does not disclose any personal details about the patients in order to comply with federal HIPAA laws. The database spotlights medical facilities located “almost entirely in blue states where transgender procedures are entirely legal and gender-transition activists have political support from elected officials.” Look for more information to come in Education Reporter on this disturbing trend.

In a victory for Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction precluding the University of New Mexico from charging conservative students exorbitant fees to bring speakers or host events on campus. According to Fox News Digital, the Southern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed the complaint last February against UNM officials after the university “attempted to charge students over $5,000 in security fees” for inviting women’s sports activist and former NCAA swimmer, Riley Gaines, to speak on-campus. SLF’s website shows that the litigation was filed on behalf of TPUSA and the Leadership Institute (LI), “a nonprofit organization that aids students with planning and funding events.” SLF explained in its complaint that UNM officials unlawfully required student members of TP-UNM to pay the security fee “even though Ms. Gaines had her own privately funded security.” The university then told the students they would have to pay for staffing the event “with every single officer it had” at a cost of more than $10,000. In a press release following the court’s issuance of the injunction, SLF Executive Director, Kimberly Hermann, stated: “This is a major win in the battle to protect the First Amendment rights of college students, regardless of the viewpoint they express.” While the injunction is preliminary, it nonetheless means the university “cannot collect fees from Turning Point USA (TPUSA) until the case is resolved….” SLF’s website laments that many if not most U.S. colleges and universities fail to allow “true diversity of speech…. Colleges are afraid of the woke mob, so they use all sorts of tactics to scare conservative students into silence, claiming that their views are just too controversial.” UNM has agreed to comply with the court’s order.

Originally published September 26, 2024 , WorldNetDaily, Daily Caller News Foundation (wnd.com). Reprinted by permission.

Minnesota State Library Services, part of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s administration, plans to use public funds to pay for a retreat intended exclusively for “BIPOC” librarians, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF).

The Walz administration describes the event, which [takes] place in October, as “a day of professional development and network-building designed specifically for BIPOC library workers of Minnesota,” according to a registration page. Minnesota will use public funds to cover hotel lodging, meals, and other fees for those attending the program, state documents show.

“BIPOC” stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.”

A sign-up form for the event allows those seeking to attend the program to select from an assortment of races and sexualities to describe themselves but “heterosexual” and “white” are notably missing from the options available.

Nicole Cooke, a professor of library and information science at the University of South Carolina, is booked as a keynote speaker for the event, according to an agenda obtained by the DCNF.

Cooke has argued that it is “tantamount to malpractice” to allow students to enter the workforce without first being educated on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. In 2017, she received a grant to study “racial microaggressions in libraries,” according to a press release.

The professor has a long history of giving presentations on the importance of center racial justice and diversity when managing libraries, according to her personal website. In 2020, she created an “anti-racism resources for all ages” project which includes a number of materials intended to introduce children to the topic.

“Anti-racism” is part of a framework first coined by left-wing academic Ibram X. Kendi that holds [that] anyone not actively resisting what he defines to be racism is a racist. It is impossible to be neutral on the issue of racism, according to Kendi.

Minnesota State Library Services is directed by Tamara Lee who, according to her LinkedIn profile, is “passionate about early literacy and racial equity in libraries” and has expressed support for Kendi’s idea of anti-racism.

Lee co-authored a 2021 piece in Information Today where she argued that “niceness” is a “tool of white supremacy” because she believes it can be used by racists to absolve themselves of wrongdoing. She argued that librarians must take an active role in educating children on racial activism.

“Children are often aware of race long before we think they are,” Lee wrote. “Starting open and honest conversations with them about race early on can prepare them to be anti-racism practitioners their whole lives.”

The state librarian also wrote a paper in 2016 that advocated for making children’s story time “racially diverse, equitable and inclusive.”

Lee is listed as one of the primary points of contact on documents sharing details about the BIPOC exclusive librarian program. She was also involved in planning the event.

Walz is no stranger to using public resources to hold racially segregated events. His Department of Education held “restorative justice” teacher trainings in 2022 that white educators were explicitly barred from attending. The Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs also held trainings intended to alleviate homelessness among veterans but only invited white people to participate if they were willing to serve as a “stakeholder or ally” to non-white and LGBT veterans.

Lee, the Harris campaign, the Minnesota governor’s office, and the Minnesota State Library Service did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.