Education Briefs
According to multiple sources, including the The College Fix, a second ruling by a federal judge on June 17 has blocked in six more states President Biden’s attempt to rewrite Title IX by adding gender identity. Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky’s Northern Division penned his decision by opening with the obvious fact that “there
are two sexes.” This ruling covers the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. The plaintiffs in the case include the Christian Educators Association International and a 15-year-old girl identified by the initials A.C., who was intimidated and harassed while being forced to share a locker room with a male identifying as a female. In a previous case, a federal district court in Louisiana issued the first preliminary injunction against the Title IX rewrite covering the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) brought that suit, Rapides Parish School Board v United States Department of Education, arguing before the court that: “The Biden administration’s radical redefinition of ‘sex’ will upend the equal opportunities that women and girls have enjoyed for 50 years under Title IX and will threaten their safety and privacy at every level. The court was right to halt the administration’s illegal efforts to rewrite Title IX while this critical lawsuit continues.... We are pleased the court ruled to uphold safety and privacy while this lawsuit continues.” The new Title IX rule, scheduled to go into effect on August 1st, will now be blocked in at least 10 states with lawsuits progressing in many more.
The Colorado Education Association (CEA) passed a resolution at its assembly last year declaring that “capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.” Fox News reported that the final version of the resolution states: “Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.” An earlier draft allegedly included somewhat softer language calling for a dismantling of capitalism to be replaced with a “new equitable economic system,” 
whatever that was intended to mean. The CEA represents more than 39,000 education employees in Colorado, and appears to be in lockstep with its NEA, its parent organization. NEA President Becky Pringle has declared that “education justice must be about racial justice, it must be about social justice, it must be about climate justice. It must be about all of those things.... For our students to be able to come to school ready to learn every day.... We can never think of education as an isolated system because everything connects to our students’ ability to learn...,” which sounds to many parents and observers that children are only learning far-left political ideology. One commenter to the Fox report noted: “The children are being destroyed by Marxist adults.” Another wrote: “Straight from Marx & Engels’ Communist Manifesto. As with all things liberal, the opposite is true. Communism has been tried and always fails. Capitalism has created the greatest standard of living on earth (including China’s, which uses wealth for evil). The CEA is ignorant!” In a related story, Fox reported on teachers sounding the alarm about “staff shortages, [student] behavioral problems, and social issues wreaking havoc on the education system.” While the activist unions push their radical agenda, some of the best teachers are dropping out and moving on to found micro schools and other educational options that allow them to teach actual academics.
Texas appears poised to enact a substantive school choice program in 2025. The Tampa Free Press reported that Governor Greg Abbott announced he now 
has enough votes in the Texas legislature to pass a school choice bill given the Republican primary election results in March and a subsequent runoff election on May 28. In the March primary, “six representatives who voted against school choice in last year’s special session were defeated,” and in the May runoff election, “three other anti-school-choice representatives lost their seats.” Additionally, five more representatives who oppose school choice “wisely opted not to seek reelection,” while five pro-school-choice candidates won the races for those open seats. According to the New York Post, the Texas Senate passed Senate Bill 1, known as the Texas Education Freedom Act, “which would provide parents with an $8,000 education savings account per child to allocate to the educational provider of their choice,” but the House never voted on its version of the bill. Governor Abbott and his allies set to work exposing the GOP reps who voted against school choice and supported candidates whom they said “would put the families of their constituents first.” Their strategy was likely successful. As the Tampa Free Press wrote: “Governor Greg Abbott went to war with Texas RINOs over school choice and appears to have won.” According to supporters: “Texas is now ready to make history in 2025 by granting all of the more than 5.5 million students statewide — which comprises 10% of all K-12 students in the country — with educational freedom.”
A former Missouri state representative posted the following analysis on Facebook of why America is experiencing its current crisis in education and the culture in general; or, as the original author, Rev. T.B. McLeod put it in 1904, “the common destiny of all things godless.” As McLeod eloquently and prophetically wrote: “There can be no true religion without a lofty morality, and no more can there be a lofty morality without true religion. Christianity being thus essential to the highest national virtue, then the man who would aid in the exclusion from the schoolrooms of our land that means of instruction which gives light to the mind, rectitude to the conscience, and power to the will needs to be labored with if he is 
ignorant or, if not ignorant, ought to be resisted as the enemy of free government and of the human race. It is the duty of the state not simply to tolerate or sanction, but to make religious instruction one of the prime factors in its system of popular education. If a sound morality is an essential condition of national safety and prosperity and if the sublime teaching and temper of Christianity essential to the development of the finest virtues in social and public life, then the policy which dissociates religion from education, which puts secular knowledge above morality and religion, which rules in geology and rules out Genesis, rules in science and rules out the Bible, which rules in evolution and rules out God, rules in Herbert Spencer, rules out Jesus Christ, is suicidal policy which, if persisted in, must eventually provoke the common destiny of all things godless. As a nation we cannot hope to escape the dire consequences of the present policy. Things may go on for a time in a somewhat orderly fashion. Our contemporaries may not feel it much. It may take some time to make a full-blooded atheist out of a scion of twenty generations of Christians. Our schools may go on for a time, though their origin be disavowed. But sooner or later their character will be stamped with irreligion and irreligion when complete will bring forth death.” (Thanks to Mr. W. E. Freeland for permission to use the 1904 files of the Taney County Republican.)
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