Backwards Research Promotes Woke Ideology

It seems that in today’s woke landscape, no one wins, least of all schoolchildren. Liberal ideology has become so entrenched that academic research is no longer based on the time-tested scientific method, which was described in the January 2024 issue of Education Reporter. While the scientific method typically refers to research conducted in the physical world, the same principle should apply when researching concepts such as race, gender, and identity.

But James L. Nuzzo, Ph.D. of Reality’s Last Stand and author of The Nuzzo Letter on Substack, shows how woke researchers “are rigging research methods to support their ideology.” Nuzzo writes that many academic studies “no longer aim to explore open questions, but instead begin with ideological conclusions and then work backwards.” He adds that this procedure is especially used in research “on race, gender, and identity—where scholars increasingly interpret participants’ responses not on their own terms, but through the lens of critical theory or feminist ideology.”

Forced Mental Health Checks for Schoolchildren a Growing Threat

Thanks in part to entrenched social and emotional learning standards in public education, mental health interventions for schoolchildren are nothing new, but the threat of government-mandated mental health checks is even more ominous.

Education Reporter and others have for years documented the intrusion of school-district administrators and counselors into the psyches of America’s public-school students, whether or not the children needed their help or parents wanted it. (See the May 2024, August 2023, and September 2023 issues.) It is unclear whether parents are properly informed of these interventions or even notified that they are taking place.

Outraged Parents Defeat Anti-Homeschooling Bill in Illinois

From the day it passed out of the Illinois state legislature’s Education Policy Committee last March until it died at the end of the legislative session on June 1, H.B. 2827, also known as the Homeschool Act, provoked the ire of parents. The bill would have placed an undue burden of regulation on homeschooling families, including the potential for criminal penalties and imprisonment if they did not fill out burdensome paperwork at the whim of the state.

Ironically, until the advent of the Homeschool Act, Illinois was one of the freest states in the union for homeschoolers. The HSLDA called H.B. 2827 “the most authoritarian bill proposed in the country in the last three decades. In recent memory, no state has even attempted to put automatic criminal penalties on homeschool families who do not file a piece of paperwork, as the original bill stipulated, or automatically refer them to a state attorney for prosecution, as in the amended bill.”

When Information Becomes ‘Persuasion’: School districts use public funds to push bond issues and tax hikes

On March 30, just two days before the April 1, 2025 election in Illinois, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles Executive Director, Kurt Prenzler, received a text message from a friend who lives in the Triad School District in the city of Troy. The message included two photos showing the front and back of a postcard “paid for by the Triad School District” in support of a $99.2 million bond issue that was on the ballot.

The nearly-impossible-to-read fine print asserted that the postcard was “not intended to advocate,” but the information provided was clearly one-sided. After the bond issue passed, a taxpayer filed a lawsuit alleging that the postcard and associated videos were biased, and were indeed advocacy, and therefore electioneering using taxpayer funds in violation of Illinois law. The lawsuit asks the court to enjoin the district from issuing the bonds.