Education Briefs
California's Oakland Unified School District teachers ditched phonics in 2015, resulting in the total failure of students to learn to read. Now they are reembracing phonics. On August 20, The Daily Wire reported that Oakland schools, which once had one of the most successful reading programs in California because it was phonics-based, lapsed into failure after abandoning it over fears that it smacked of "colonialism," better known today as "white supremacy." To the Oakland teachers, apparently nothing symbolized white supremacy more than teaching all children, including minority and low-income children, to read successfully so they can grow up to achieve the American Dream.
In the interests of social justice then, these teachers convinced the district to switch to "a whole language approach, and student reading rates plummeted." Now, fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Kareem Weaver admits he is "part of a nationwide movement fighting to bring back the phonics-based approach." But as The Daily Wire pointed out, if Weaver and his colleagues had "looked at the data when ditching phonics in the name of social justice, he would have avoided implementing a system that makes children dumber and illiterate. Better yet, had he listened to conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, this entire ordeal would have never happened." The Wire went on to discuss Phyllis' First Reader, its effectiveness and its ease of use. (Click on the image to hear Phyllis' 1995 interview about First Reader.) The real tragedy is how many children have needlessly been lost to illiteracy in the Oakland School District since 2015.
Florida's new plan to recruit veterans could fill 9,500 open teaching positions in the state's public-school system. As Governor Ron DeSantis explained in announcing the initiative: "Our veterans have a wealth of knowledge and experience they can bring to bear in the classroom, and with this innovative approach they will be able to do so for five years with a temporary certification as they work towards their degree."
The Hill reported that to be eligible, veterans must have at least four years of military service with an honorable or medical discharge. They do not need a four-year college degree, but must have earned a minimum of 60 college credits with at least a 2.5 grade point average and must pass a background check. The Florida teachers' unions have decried the plan, charging that it "will not solve the biggest issues educators are facing — low pay and lack of respect." They might have added that many teachers are weary of union bullying and being forced to teach CRT and other woke curricula. The liberal media have also trashed the initiative. Incredibly, after viciously attacking every positive move Governor DeSantis has made, MSNBC's Joy Reid blogged that "taken together, these policies threaten to turn classrooms from centers of healthy education into centers of indoctrination." But it's difficult for her lies to stand in the face of parent uprisings, the overturning of liberal school boards, and the desperate flight of teachers from the public schools — all of which reveal the inconvenient truth.
Kindergartners in Portland, Oregon, will be taught gender identity lessons that "seek to turn the principles of academic queer theory into an identity-formation program for elementary school students." As Christopher Rufo explained in a recent City Journal article: "The premise is simple: privileged white heterosexuals have created an oppressive gender system in order to dominate racial and sexual minorities." 
Activists routinely present as fact the misleading notion that immutable racial or ethnic traits can be compared equally to sexual preferences. But this curriculum takes on an even more sinister tone because it suggests that indigenous peoples had different views of gender — like those of today's woke liberals of course — than did the "white European people who brought their views of gender with them and forced them upon the people already living there." This begs the question of whether there is any real evidence that indigenous peoples believed such lunacy. Rufo reveals that the brainwashing begins in kindergarten "with an anatomy lesson featuring graphic drawings of children's genitalia. The lesson avoids the terms 'boy' and 'girl' in favor of gender-neutral variants..." According to the curriculum, "some girls can have penises and some boys can have vulvas." These lessons grow increasingly intense as grade levels go up, with first and second graders receiving indoctrination in "the key tenets of gender-identity theory." By fifth grade, kids are asked to make commitments that effectively turn them into what Rufo calls "political activists for queer theory and the broader sexual revolution." All we can hope for is that parents will revolt — which cannot come soon enough.
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