So Why Do You Care?

Preemptive legislation is nothing new and we've seen it here in daVille with the recent ordinance outlawing party houses. Not that such a problem exists and even if it did given the city's reluctance to enforce any ordinance, especially quality of life ordinances, it would not and will not make a difference. Perhaps a diversion. Perhaps just political theater. 

It is happening at the state level as well with the proposed bill that would ban promulgation of divisive indoctrination in our schools. Really this should be as simple as requiring that all students read at grade level before any agenda driven programs are introduced. But both sides are engaging in semantic gymnastics. The leftist superintendent who signed an open letter against the bill they characterize as banning CRT. Yet they claim they are not teaching CRT and in fact there are no courses with CRT in the title or even the course description. But this IS a deceit and they know it. After all if they are NOT teaching CRT why do they care if there is a law banning it? They're not going to teach it anyway or are they?

The fact is that the tenets, the principles and the fundamental building blocks of CRT are driving curricula and the teaching of racial division. And this is happening in school systems across this state where an embarrassing number of students cannot read at grade level, lack skill in basic arithmetic and where over 16% don't continue to graduation.

Is there any doubt that public education needs a power-down reset?

Hackademics

How is your student doing? After all you are the parent and until recently everyone agreed it is also your student, though the education industry has leaked their deep seated disagreement with that proposition. This may be have you considering drastic measures. Private schools? Perhaps. Tutoring? Not a bad option, but it makes you wonder if you're encouraging government schools' bad behavior. Or maybe a bandaid on a bullet wound. 

You might be considering drastic, direct action. Taking the bull by the horns. Making learning a family activity and stepping away from a system telling your student what to think rather than how to think. If you follow this path there are lots of resources available, but we at The Other Dunwoody would like to suggest LibreTexts. Here you'll find freely available texts, course support and visualization tools. Of particular interest are the math resources, covering elementary skills, to algebra, calculus, data science, economics and even today's edu-industry trend: finance. But in this case your student will not be driven towards the collectives' group-think but instead will acquire the skills needed to make their own decision about their own finances. 

Embrace hackademics. You may well learn something too.

Personal Finance For Your Kids

For some time there have been efforts to inject Personal Finance into public schools and here's a shocker: it has met with some resistance. Until now the resistance has come from parents who distinguish themselves by actually wanting to raise their children rather than just have a baby and turn the child-rearing over to anyone else. These traditionalists  firmly believe that they, and they alone, are responsible for key aspects of their children's development and this includes things they consider very personal like money and well, personal finance. These naive parents also think they are sending their children to schools to learn, particularly core skills like reading, writing and arithmetic.

Then it went off the rails. 

Eyes were opened with the confluence of a pandemic that forced parents to see what was being served up in their children's school and wokeism (not wokeness, but wokeism), an evil corruption of something good (tolerance) with something very bad (hatred), threatening a complete takeover of school curricula. So in the prevailing context of 2+2=White Supremacy, and the willful innumeracy that entails, what the hell can personal finance even be? 

To put a positive spin on it, personal finance education may be teaching concepts. This isn't just because your child has been mathematically lobotomized by public schools but their teachers have been as well. So instead of learning how to use Quicken (or a ledger) to track a budget or a spreadsheet to determine total interest paid on a loan or compare buying, home or car, to leasing they may encounter buzz-word bingo. They may hear about dollar-cost-averaging. Maybe there will be discussion of investment returns vs inflation. Perhaps various self-funded retirement vehicles. These topics, associated with old-school personal finance, speak to a new taboo: individual responsibility.

So it really isn't likely to even be concepts. If we've learned anything during the pandemic it is that education did not abandon teaching and learning in favor of delivery of social services, but instead it was in favor of indoctrination. This will be no different and personal finance will be just more political proselytizing. Not making personal decisions based on your individual circumstances, but aligning your decisions with their dogma. 

If parents had a better foundation in personal finance themselves they would look at their property tax bill and we would soon be talking about public schools in the past tense.

Hurts When It's Your Turn

There's been a whole lot of misappropriation going on over the last few years but this has been almost exclusively under the control of the left. In media. In politics. In academia. 

Now the worm has turned and the term for the worm is Critical Race Theory. Until recently CRT was the lab research spinning out escapees trying to go viral but also unnoticed and certainly unlabeled. Then it DID go viral and it wasn't just the dogma that escaped but the label itself. That is when they lost control of both the label and its meaning. The combination of "critical," "race" and "theory" was perfect for appropriation by those pushing back against leftist extremism, particularly in schools. You don't have to be a Tiger Mom to get fired up when someone messes with your kid.

The academic branch of the left protests that opponents don't really understand CRT and that CRT is not what is being pushed into classrooms across the country. They're not accustomed to having their expertise and authority questioned and have yet to realize, let alone accept, that they have lost control of what CRT means outside their ivory tower. It now means whatever those pushing back against indoctrination want it to mean. 

Beyond protests of angry parents there is legislative action that explicitly avoids the use of any specific label, particularly CRT? Why? Because if the extreme left regains control of what CRT is and is not they can use this power to neuter any law that explicitly names CRT. Instead, the legislation is crafted to explicitly define prohibited indoctrination without any specific, fungible label. Just because they're not on the left doesn't mean they're stupid.