The country’s most powerful and influential union gathered in Minneapolis over the Fourth of July weekend and set off its own brand of fireworks. Some 8,544 delegates to the National Education Association’s annual Convention approved its usual list of extremist resolutions presented by the professionals who run this very political organization.
At least five resolutions manifest the NBA’s impassioned hostility to parents who make private school or homeschool choices. The NBA attacks homeschooling, claiming that it is tolerable only if parents are licensed by the state and use a curricu lum approved by the state education department. The NBA even opposes renting or selling abandoned public schools to a private school.
The NBA passed a strong resolution against what it calls “deleterious pro grams.” Want to guess what that means? No, it’s not violence on television or in the movies. The “deleterious programs” are “privatization, performance contracting, tax credits, vouchers, and evaluations of public schools by private groups.”
The NBA is obsequious in catering to its own very visible NBA Gay and Les bian Caucus. The Convention passed at least 15 resolutions addressing the sexual orientation issue.
The NBA demands “awareness” instruction about diverse sexual orientation “whenever sexuality and/or tolerance of diversity is taught.” This means the NBA wants teaching about homosexuality always to be part of sex education, and uses “diversity” as a code word for gay-lesbian teaching.
The NBA supports “ongoing training programs” to identify and eliminate “sexual orientation stereotyping.” The NBA demands a “Lesbian and Gay History Month as a means of aclmowledging the contributions oflesbians, gays, and bisexuals throughout history.”
The NBA demands that gay-lesbian teaching be part of Family Life education, sex education, and AIDS education. The NBA supports the right of teachers who have tested positive for HIV or have been diagnosed as having AIDS to be retained in the classroom and not transferred.
The NBA even wants public school training of pre-kindergartners to include “diversity-based curricula” with “bias-free screening devices.” Pre-kindergartners in school? Yes, the NBA wants the taxpayers to take on baby-sitting “in the public schools for children from birth through age eight,” culminating in “mandatory kinder garten with compulsory attendance.”
Several resolutions reiterate that the NBA believes that “every child should have direct and confidential access to comprehensive health, social, and psychological programs, services and care.” “Every” means “beginning at the prekindergarten level.” “Direct” means in the classroom. “Confidential” means confidential between the school and the child, not between the parent and child.
“Comprehensive” means complete with non-judgmental teaching and explicit training in alternate lifestyles, incest, AIDS, suicide, and contraceptives. “Psychologi cal” means counseling by school personnel who are not licensed psychologists (of course, without parental lmowledge or consent).
The NEA demands “school-based family planning clinics that will provide intensive counseling” to children. That means contraceptive distribution and refen-als to abortion providers.
The NEA endorses the entire feminist agenda, calling for the elimination of “sexism” from the curriculum, abortion (of course, funded by the taxpayers), “compa rable worth,” federally funded and regulated daycare, and “gender-free career aware ness” (a code slogan for role reversals and censoring out pictures of fulltime home makers).
This year, the NEA rechristened “global education” with the new name “multicultural education,” which it defines as teaching children the “cultural diversity ofU.S. citizenry” and “interdependency in sharing the world’s resources.” “Global” and “interdependent” are code words for teaching children not to be patriotic, “multicultural” means Western Civilization is bad, and “sharing the world’s resources” means U.S. taxpayers should finance the rest of the world.
The NEA is enthusiastic about Environmental Education, which is easier to insert into the cun-iculum than Global or Multicultural. Environmental Ed is a vehicle to promote the ideology of overpopulation, the scarcity of”the earth’s finite re sources,” the problem of endangered species, and interdependence.
The NEA supports socialized medicine (which recognizes “domestic partners” as dependents), statehood for the District of Columbia, gun control, taxpayer benefits to illegal aliens, a national holiday honoring Cesar Chavez, ratification of the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child, and a “substantial increase” in federal spending on public schools. The NEA deplores cun-ent efforts to make English our official lan guage and to cut off taxpayer grants to persons who produce vulgar “art.”
In a new resolution called “Freedom of Religion,” the NBA opposes schools’ scheduling a moment of silence. The NEA even wants the purpose of Thanksgiving to be changed from thanking God to a celebration of “diversity.”
Given this agenda, it’s not surprising that the NBA opposes standardized testing that compares students, teachers, schools or districts with one another. The NEA even opposes “competency testing” for the hiring, evaluation, placement, or promotion of teachers.
