By DAVID BOYLE
Those in the education industry, many local governments, and school boards tell us our schools are under “local control.”
This implies that the local school boards and parents control the policies, curricula, and all elements of operating a school.
But many Alaska school districts surrender this “local control” to Outside organizations.
The recent implementation of transgender and gender identity policies/rules demonstrates this fact. What has been touted as “local” transgender/gender identity policy is exactly what the National Education Association — the teachers’ union — has been pushing nationwide.
Several Alaska school districts have implemented the NEA gender ideology policies nearly word-for-word. These include the Anchorage School District, the Juneau School District, Nome Public Schools, Skagway School District, and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District.
It is remarkable that school boards say they have local control, yet these districts think alike and can write nearly identical policies at the urging of the NEA-National.
Meanwhile, these districts shut down debate and keep parents out of the discussion. They have made clear statements that they know better than parents as to what your children need.
Here are links to those school district policies that show nearly identical policies/rules on transgender/gender identity policies:
Fairbanks North Star Borough School District
The NEA-National has much more say in local policies than parents and citizens. It has partnered with Advocates for Youth to develop standards for sex education. That group has a YouTube site called “Amaze” that has information on “Females and Masturbation”, “Porn: Fact or fiction”, “Gender Roles & Stereotypes”, and many, many others.
You can see for yourself at the Amaze YouTube site.
The NEA has joined with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Gender Spectrum, the ACLU, and the Human Rights Campaign to provide this guide to school districts, “Schools in Transition: A Guide for Supporting Transgender Students in K-12 Schools.”
This is a 68-page document which provides much detail to school districts. It’s too bad the NEA doesn’t provide a comprehensive document on how to teach kids how to read. Apparently, the NEA is too busy to be bothered with actual education. It is more interested in pushing its version of sex education and gender identity.
Why does the NEA have more influence than parents and local citizens on school board policy?
Ask your school board and superintendent why they have implemented the NEA policies.
Remember, the NEA is using members’ dues to provide this information to school districts. Surely, many teachers are uncomfortable with these sex education standards. And many of these teachers don’t know they can opt out of the union and its “woke” policies. Here is how teachers can opt out of their union.
Another Outside organization is leading the charge on which books should be in school libraries. This is the American Library Association, which most school librarians belong to.
Parents are showing up at school board meetings reading excerpts from library books that are not appropriate for young children.
Who has selected the books in the school libraries and who determines the appropriate grade level for some “porn” books? Not the parents nor the local citizens.
It’s the school librarian who belongs to the American Library Association who decides which books are appropriate for young children. These school librarians are merely implementing the doctrine of the ALA and they really don’t care what parents think.
The American Library Association is now led by self-proclaimed lesbian Marxist Emily Drabinski, who pushes anti-capitalist, pro-racist, and climate change rhetoric.
She strongly believes the books many parents want removed from the stacks should remain in the school libraries. The ALA and the NEA are fighting back against parents by accusing them of “book banning,” and referencing Nazi Germany and McCarthyism.
That’s what Leftists do — name calling.
Drabinski believes that our nation is made up of white supremacists, imperialists, and climate change deniers. She has said she will use the libraries to implement her philosophy through collective power.
The ALA is responsible for pushing the racist books, “White Fragility,” and “How to be an Anti-Racist,” into our schools, indoctrinating our children to hate one another.
The federal government is another Outside organization that also controls local schools by threatening to claw back funding if a school district/state does not follow its guidance.
And now the U.S. Department of Education has introduced a change to Title IX, a change that would allow transgenders to participate in girls’ sports.
If this change is approved, a school could not ban transgenders from participating in girls’ sports or it could risk losing tons of federal money. And money is of primary concern to school boards.
Eventually, this will kill girls’ sports, an unintended consequence which would betray the original reason for Title IX.
There are many organizations that have much more influence over local K-12 policies than parents. School boards just bow to these organizations, implement their rules/policies, and ignore parents’ wishes and demands.
That’s because many school board members get teacher union support when running for election. And these NEA-supported candidates usually win. Why would they risk losing an election by going against the NEA policies?
It will take an army of parents and local citizens to fight back against these organizations who want to control our children.
We cannot afford to let legislators, school board members, state officials and school superintendents hide behind the “local control” rock.
Our children are too important to surrender them to the philosophy and values of Outside organizations.
David Boyle is the Must Read Alaska education writer.
What a “pukin” mess the teachers unions and the NEA has made of our educational system.
Moral of the story, not enough parents care. If they did, they would make sure their child performs up to par. Too many parents are too busy to help their kids when they fall behind because they are too busy working or watching TV or surfing social media on their Id-phones. It’s sad but this is what the world has come to. Teachers have been talking about this for decades. They can only do so much. And when they do call out parents for not caring and participating in their children’s education as they should, parents go after teachers. Just like certain politicians today . . . there is a LOT of parental projection going on. DISCIPLINE, WORK ETHIC and MORALITY . . . they all BEGIN and END at home. There is no substitute for STUDY, STUDY, STUDY.
Dear NEA member, STOP trying to pass the buck and own up to your own failings FIRST. Your rant has nothing to do with David Boyle’s pointed criticism of NEA bullying school boards and sponsoring the destruction of America. BTW, parents who meet your criteria for being engaged parents have already pulled their kids from public schools.
I agree with David, though there is more to this story than just the NEA.
Substitute indoctrination everywhere it says education.
Substitute government school everywhere it says public school.
Drop the “l” – they no longer have any attachment to “public”.
A large percentage of parents can’t even control themselves, as evidenced by millions of delusional beliefs in unfounded big lie voting and vaccination conspiracies. Ipso factos, the rot begins at the very core.
That’s what Trumptians do — name calling. The list is endless.
Make Anchorage Great Again!
Trump lives rent free in your head.
You must be desperate for him to get re elected to continue to give your life meaning.
I admit I did get a good laugh with a progressive being “outraged” at name calling.
He can’t afford my rent. How much $$$ have you sent to his re-election scam”? Pardon me, I mean, how much money have you sent to his get-out-of-jail free scam?
As a landlord I collect rent from liberals like you and I already have all the money I need so most of it I just send to Trump to help him. It makes Libs mad when they learn they’re directly helping his campaign with every check, and that makes me happy. It’s a win-win.
You seem to be a one trick pony, SeenThisB4.
Everything is about Trump.
Nothing is about anything else.
Seems the ‘delusional’ aspect of your posts is/are self-owned, no?
Not sure which of the Assembly members you are just yet, but your specific verbiage will eventually reveal said identity, within comparative written and oral communitive style, to be sure.
Let us see…. Christopher, Meg, and Felix all like to inject themselves within the public sphere at a fairly ‘constant’ pace, though Kameron likes to chip in once in a while as well, and we cannot forget about Forrest even if ‘he’ has moved on from the local cult that is the Anchorage politburo.
Most, if not all of your posts involve a level of self-righteous snarkiness concentrated upon a certain individual that lives rent-free in your addled mind whittles the choices down a bit, simply because Meg is too full of anger and self-hatred to even understand what snarkiness is, and to be perfectly honest, Felix is not intelligent nor self-aware enough to present a sufficient level of snarkiness so as to present the consistent level of moronic defensive obtuseness that your posts contain.
That leaves, within my own mind, Christopher and Forrest. Both are strong candidates to be sure, but as unlikable as Forrest is, even he is not at the level of prima donna glory that is Christopher Constant, whose level of a lack of self-awareness exceeds not only his own persona, but his true lack of intellect as well.
So, Chrissy, care to acknowledge your identity?
Or, better yet, if I am wrong, identify yourself as whomever you are, using your real name, and stand by your buffoonish posts, rather than posting under a cowardly pseudonym.
Spot on Randy, I think you’ve saved me the trouble of repeating what you just explained.
Not sure why these fools waste their time trying to discount a factual representation of the truth behind ASD’s policies but ADN seems like a better place for them to spew their hate and namecalling except that would fall on deaf ears as nobody with common sense would waste time with that kitty litter material. The Assembly members know who is calling out their bulls**t so either they or their toy soldiers make a halfa**ed effort to defend their screwed up agenda. Their day will come just not soon enough.
“Everything is about Trump.” Seems that’s what his apprentice followers believe and want.
Thinking I’m an assembly person. Just hilarious. Your imagination, like Trump’s, has the better of you.
“Self-righteous snarkiness” . . . Trump is the snarkiness self-projector this country has ever seen. I’m sorry, but he’s got you and I topped.
“Living rent free in your head” is kind of lame, because its impossible to pay for rent with one’s thoughts. At least that is what I was taught in school. You shouldn’t confuse emotions with thoughts. That’s what Trump does.
SeenThisB4, you DO realize, do you not, that within your OWN words, and moronic stilted response, that you just PROVED my point within no possible argument against it?
You have brought a limp spaghetti noodle to a gun fight, expecting to win somehow, within your nonsensical, nonrealistic, and firmly delusional stance that you are winning said argument.
I almost feel sorry for you.
Almost.
Just as I would ‘almost’ feel sorry for an individual that continually hurls fresh eggs at a brick wall, expecting the eggs to somehow pierce said wall, as they beg for more eggs.
Randy, from your analysis, could SeenthisB4 be Tom Sconce?
Great observation, Joel.
Absolutely.
Oh sweetie, do you even know how to spell “irony?” There you are, calling people names.
..says the dupe who truly believes that China Joe Biden got 81 million votes and is the most popular president in history. SUCKER. 2020 was stolen and 2024 is already being rigged.
You lefties ALWAYS forget about ALL of the ILLEGAL changes that occurred to allow your sacred ballot box stuffing.
Kind of like the assembly. Somebody else’s ideas adopted word for word by well placed trolls who are incapable of independent thought. That’s how they come up with this stuff that makes no sense in Alaska.
Parents lack the courage to take action to remove the ASD School Board. Apathy.
Parents have had multiple opportunities to do so. Elections, specifically not bothering to vote in them, have consequences.
Anchorage has obviously turned into a leftist, big-city s—hole.
Schools in Alaska use to be in the top of the nation and now look where we are. These leaders must be so proud of their work that has gave us substandard education and indoctrination of kids into an area most would never go to or study. The kids can add or spell but they can tell you all about sex, drugs and whiteness. Who’s in charge whoever they are should be escorted out of Alaska. The parents are mainly to blame as they don’t care about their kids education. These kids will be the future of this country and can’t add or spell wow.
Our superintendent with training wheels pulled a fantastic opportunity for inspiration and learning away from one of the lowest performing schools in the nation. Denying time with Dr. Ben Carson to Mt. View elementary is one of the most cynical events I’ve ever been shocked to see.
I agree totally. As a union president I have watched our education system slowly fall apart and fail. Let’s talk about causes. Start with funding, Education has been flat funded for over a decade now, add inflation to that and that means cuts to education every year. Thanks to that our buildings are starting to fall apart, we can’t keep maintenance workers employed because of horrible wages and mismanagement by people in administration’s building their own retirement and bank accounts at the expense of the people in the classroom.
Let’s look at Administration, if you like big government then look at our big school districts and smile. Administration grows because that’s where Principals go when they don’t want to work with kids, so yes. The administration is full of people making insane amounts of money who don’t want to be in the classroom, making room and positions for their friends.
And then look at the school boards, who are supposed to be in control but are ultimately led by the nose by the administration. Voting for massive raise and performance incentives while starving the people actually working with students.
And then NEA? I agree there is way to much ideology in schools! By distracting us with issues that shouldn’t ever be an issue we are missing the real reason for outrage. The neglect by school boards, administration and some teachers for teaching the fundamentals of being an American citizen able to function daily, contribute to our community, have respect for others regardless of their opinions, and love for our country.
I’m not sure I have seen the ASD schools “falling apart” Matter of fact, some of them rival Taj Majals in their appearance. That is to fool the parents and public. Parents see beautiful schools and think,”Wow, there must really be some educating going on in that building”. And money is not the problem. In ASD, the per student funding per its audited AFCR is more than $19,200!. And they still cannot teach a child how to read at grade level. You are correct on there is very expensive administration. Finally, schools are trying to be everything to everybody. That’s because they are failing in their primary mission–teaching the kids how to read, do math, learn civics, etc.
We are ruled by unelected bureaucrats. What happens when you don’t discipline or punish a child? They become spoiled and act as if their actions have no consequences. Not only that, but they become impressionable and able to be influenced.
What happens to the these bureaucrats, is the same thing. There is no accountability, so their backwards deeds go unpunished. They become impressionable as a result.
Where are these crazy ideas and agendas coming from? The authors states various groups outside Alaska are influencing our school districts, which is true, but I would add that those groups are the victim of influence and pressure by the likes of big pharma, big food, the military industrial complex, and media. What those entities need are intellectually weak children who are perpetually poisoned by food, drugs, and media in order to create the next round of servants for the military, or peons for riots and revolutions.
It all started with and promoted by the communist
with a lot of help from the new world order gang.
Make no mistake. Schools are run by Biden and the deep state. Our only hope is to keep your kids home for the next year until we can get president Trump back in office so he can fix everything. If they dispose of him before then, well, I guess we will just have to go back to the better days of educating our kids ourselves.
How can Trump fix everything? He’d be president, not king.
Support who you want, but be realistic.
No but he could disband the education department at the feds level then the states can decide for themselves.
Teachers unions, radical faculty, woke administrators. Overseen by woke school boards.
The parents should, but don’t.
Not to worry, the Party has it all covered in the Plan!
The class clown?
Do not sacrifice your children to the purveyors of Moloch, do not send them to public schools. You will spend all of your free time disinfecting and deprogramming them if you do.
I think that’s one reason why ASD is not interested in changing (as Fairbanks school board rolled back is social justice agenda being smaller they don’t have the numbers to do it). ASD still meet their quoto enrollment as long its brown families don’t leave. Those brown families are protesting and dissenting (walking out with their feet) they’re complying. I do my encouragement part when I meet brown families at work or churches or businesses and we are talking if there is a parent at home even collecting public assistance I tell them if they going to stay at home they might as well keep their child at home and homeschool through one of the homeschooling programs and they will have a happier child not acting out so much as he does in school cause he doesn’t act out as much at home cause his parents aren’t provoking him.
Who really controls local schools? It’s like asking which rock holds up the mountain. What’s supposed to happen when you find out?
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Who outside the education industry is allowed to know how all the moving parts worked, and keep working, morphing the industry into an illegitimate, impenetrable fourth arm of government, accountable to no one, the very type of dictatorship America’s Founding Fathers wrote our Constitution to prevent?
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Our takeaway is that “control” refers to what the comfortable power-sharing relationship among the triumvirate of school board, school management, and teachers’ unions means for students and parent/taxpayers.
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The triumvirate can exert authoritarian control over local schools arguably because members of each part have no reason to worry about accountability to anyone outside the education industry, least of all parent/taxpayers.
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Could it be members don’t have to worry because they know they’re protected by teachers’ unions, school boards, city governments, dark-money sponsors, political action committees, radical Left non-profit organizations, mainstream news media, the U.S. Education Department, U.S. Justice Department, Alaska’s Education Department, legislators, lobbyists, a State judiciary indifferent to child grooming, officials who control easily corruptible election systems?
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Did we just identify the lot who, directly or indirectly, but firmly, control local schools?
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More to the point, who does -not- control local schools?
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Would they be the poor schlubs who pay for one of America’s most overpriced, worst-performing education industries, but have no voice in how it’s operated?
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Who knows, they might even now be channeling their inner Alinsky, burning the midnight oil figuring out: (a) how the radical Left, such a small minority of America’s population, successfully hijacked local control of schools, (b) how to return the favor by hijacking the radical Left’s tactics to regain local control of schools, and (c) what Plan B is if local schools are figuratively and literally too far gone to be worth retaking.
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Should be interesting to see how Eaglexit sponsors plan to handle the challenge of returning control of local schools to parent/taxpayers.
“CHILD MOLESTERS”
(ASD-Education, ASD-School Board, NEA)
“CHILD MOLESTATION”
(ASD education, ASD-School Board, NEA)
*along with ALL Teacher’s UNIONS…
Anything and anybody that takes government money don’t have control. Government may tolerate how its recipients spend money coming from it, if it can always choose one day how its spent. For example SNAP if those in government ever decided to make SNAP like WIC giving out vouchers regulating what food and how much its recipients can buy then the government can do that than just giving out a check with a certain amount and the person can buy a whole basket of sweets and junk food. Those homeschool vouchers are the same, the government can make every public school (Raven, IDEA, Matsu Chugach) change how parents uses it or the administrators decide how its used.
We hear it’s not good of parents to raise children who’d be dependent on their parents into adulthood. Well it’s not good for businesses, medical, non profits, schools and people be dependent on receiving government money.
Those organizations that are controlling education consist of the very people who attended 17 to 21 years of government school indoctrination, particularly at the university and college levels. The ideas that local parents and local schools are incapable of running and controlling the education of the next generation of constituents is not a new thing. It’s been happening for decades, right under the noses of parents and students that bought into the lie that academic performance will equal college success and higher paying corporate positions. Each group of graduates has since taken the ideologies and philosophies into adulthood, where each is able to perpetuate those same falsehoods in the classrooms. No publicly funded schools have ever taught the next generation how to be self-governed, which is the rock of our Constitutional Republic. Instead, each graduating class is taught how to be governed, how to comply, how to shame and target those who disagree, and how to silence any opposition. Each year these teachings become bolder and bolder until We the People are under a soft-totalitarianism whereby liberty is squelched and freedom is an illusion.
You get what you elect to the School Board.
Have to remember the per pupil spending includes Administration salary and performance incentives, And new schools are great but how many are new, and how many are designed by people who don’t have to maintain them? Then the districts have to do the costly repairs and modification after the first year? And then how many schools have bushes growing on the roof. lol.
And now that I think about it, you may just well be a certain School Board Member, or better yet, the FAILED and UNQUALIFIED Superintendent with the extra T’s that stand for transitory and tragic. Afterall, it WOULD match your lack of education and teaching experience.
Hmmm…so many choices, so many individuals of a complete lack of competence.
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