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The Online Newspaper of Education Rights

This Edition: September 2024

Ethnic Studies Combines CRT, Decolonization, & the LGBT Agenda

For years, parents and conservative activists have been battling critical race theory (CRT) in educational settings and state legislatures, even as leftists have been busily rebranding it as “ethnic studies,” which ingeniously combines CRT with several other radical left ideologies as part of a “social studies” curriculum.

The Center of the American Experiment’s Senior Policy Fellow, Katherine Kersten, writes in The Federalist that, in 2021, “California became the first state to make an ethnic studies course a high school graduation requirement.” She reports that state education policy officials adopted “a deeply flawed, leftist curriculum after rejecting an initial ‘liberated’ draft as too radical,” which begs the question of just how bad was the original?

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Newsela: Instilling Leftwing Ideology & Electioneering for Democrats in Schools Nationwide

In its February and March 2023 issues, Education Reporter exposed the liberal bias and poor rewriting of mainstream media news articles by the popular platform, Newsela, which is now used in 90 percent of U.S. schools. When it was founded in 2013, Newsela was allegedly intended to foster reading and English Language Arts using mainstream news stories rewritten for students at various grade levels, hence the “ela” in the platform’s title.

However, “media literacy” has become the popular buzz term in education and in our culture, which observers say has little to do with actual literacy and much to do with spreading leftwing propaganda. Never a disseminator of unbiased news stories for the sole purpose of helping students become better readers, Newsela has jumped on the media literacy bandwagon.

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Project 2025: What’s It Really About?

In their zeal to brand former President Donald Trump an “extremist” and “a threat to Democracy,” mainstream media pundits immediately associated his campaign with Project 2025 when it emerged as a potential political football following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Liberal hysteria and handwringing broke out, and Project 2025 became a siren call to support the Democratic presidential ticket in November.

Before he was ousted from the 2024 presidential race, Biden’s campaign charged in early July that “America under Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would resemble the dystopian novel A Handmaid’s Tale,” according to an article by The Daily Signal that was reposted on WorldNetDaily. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.) A plethora of leftwing talking heads and comedians have assailed the project, linking it to Trump and calling it “a secret blueprint” to turn the U.S. into a “fascist state.”

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What Books Should Kids be Reading?

(Eighth in our series of recommended reading lists for children of all ages. We will continue this feature in Education Reporter until all our lists have been republished. — 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.

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Book Review

War Against the Deep State

by Colonel Retired John Mills,
Pierucci Publishing, 2023
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Briefs

  • New microschools are opening this fall, continuing the trend in recent years of parents seeking better education alternatives for their children and teachers abandoning their public-school classrooms to become education entrepreneurs.

  • A Minnesota school superintendent says Democrat governor and vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has had a negative impact on K-12 education in the state.

  • Posting on X (formerly Twitter), conservative author of the Tuttle Twins book series, Connor Boyack, cited a study that shows conservatives are happier than liberals/progressives.
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Be Our Guest:
Contributing Author Essays

There’s Nothing ‘Absurd’ or ‘Dangerous’ about Ending the U.S. Department of Education

Originally published July 22, 2024 in Cato at Liberty Blog. Reprinted by permission.

If you ran a corporation, and a division you did not need suffered massive losses while proving either ineffective or downright incompetent at its job, you would seriously consider dissolving it, right? After all, not only is it not helping, it is an albatross around your neck.

That’s largely what the U.S. Department of Education appears to be for American education. Yet if you propose eliminating it the first reaction from some people is shock and lament: “But it’s about education, so it must be good.” That seems to be the presumption of former Republican Maryland governor, and current Maryland Senate candidate, Larry Hogan, who in this weekend’s Washington Post dismissed the Project 2025 proposal to end the Department. He called it “absurd and dangerous.”

By Neal McCluskey, Director, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute
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Education Related Links

There are only so many topics we can include in each monthly issue of Education Reporter. So, we are providing links to some additional stories we think may be of interest to our readers.

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Contact education@phyllisschlafly.com




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