What’s the mission of any school district? Most parents seem to agree that it’s academics. Schools should prepare students academically for postsecondary life – whether it’s college, a trade, a career, the military or some other endeavor.

Alas, many public schools don’t focus on college or career readiness, and their mission statements don’t say they have to. Instead, other, more nebulous goals are their stated priorities, such as turning students into global citizens, “challenging” them, helping them develop “supportive relationships,” and having them engage in “relevant, real-life applications.”

“Equity” and “social justice” also are emphasized in many districts. Some districts have created new departments, applied for federal grants or hired $100,000+ personnel – supposedly to foster equity and social justice. But what’s behind the terminology?

Actual equity and social justice entail providing ALL students with the academic skills they need to lead a productive postsecondary life. But in public education, the terms tend to be ambiguous and politically laden, focusing instead on perceived unfairness. In the typical social-justice curriculum, America frequently is portrayed as the bad guy.

At the Fifth Annual Northwest Conference on Teaching for Social Justice, academics were not the theme. Instead, teachers learned how to encourage and train students to become activists. They challenged what they perceive to be America’s history of power, white privilege and oppression; supported myriad alternative lifestyles; discussed issues of race, gender, class and undocumented status; challenged “ableism” (discrimination by the able-bodied and able-minded); and learned how “oppression affects the lives of students marginalized by race, class, language, gender, and sexual orientation.”

There are schools purely devoted to issues of social injustice, such as the Social Justice High School in Chicago: “Project based and problem based learning that addresses real world issues through the lenses of race, gender, culture, economic equity, peace, justice, and the environment will be the catalyst for developing our curriculum.”

There is the White Privilege Conference, an ironic concept considering that many dedicated education advocates are Caucasian. (Actually, what I’ve seen over six years of advocacy looks more like Union-Administrator-Media Privilege. Maybe we could have a conference on that.)

There is Teachers for Social Justice, where teachers learn about “adultism” (i.e. adults who “use their position of power to affect the youth”); about integrating LGBTQ content into the curriculum; and about challenging gender norms with first-graders.

There is Welcoming Schools, “an LGBT-inclusive approach to addressing family diversity, gender stereotyping and bullying and name-calling in K-5 learning environments.” Did you notice that it’s directed at kindergartners?

Look into your district’s sex-ed program. These programs used to focus on preventing teen pregnancy. Now, see what the little ones are learning about sex, abortion, contraception and homosexuality. Students aren’t being taught long division, but they’re learning about alternative lifestyles. Last year, one 4th grader watched a district sex-education video and subsequently made a related joke to a friend – as young boys will do. This boy was disciplined, his parents were notified, a letter was sent home, and the entire class heard about his “bullying.”

Nowhere in this social-justice agenda do I see anyone standing up for the military and veterans, who have suffered much discrimination and prejudice. Or for police. Or for firefighters. Or for anyone who died in service of the country. Or for the four Americans who were murdered on Sept. 11, 2012, in Libya (although I suspect schools are OK with standing up for the Libyans).

The social-justice agenda is not about equity or justice. It’s about complaining, accusing, rebelling, changing society and forcing extreme progressive viewpoints on captive children. And how tolerant is this community to dissenting viewpoints? Not very. It questions traditional American values, faults American history, paints parents as old-school and unknowledgeable and views Americans as prejudiced and selfish. Even young students are fed a diet of progressivism, weighty and depressing socio-political issues, a cynical view of their ancestors, and antagonism toward conservative thought. They’re taught to reform, transform and “fundamentally change” America, with little appreciation for what America does for the world; its role in keeping the world relatively stable; its superlative generosity to other countries; the sacrifices made by its Armed Forces; and how its system of government made it rare and great.

Some programs show students how inequity and social injustice span the globe, with slavery, sex trafficking and brutality. The students – still just children – are to take ownership of this brutal, unfair world and try to change it. (No wonder so many students become anxious or depressed.)

How will districts know when they’ve achieved their social-justice goals? (Never.) When can the programs be disbanded? (Never.) Do the programs result in well-educated students? (Frequently not.) The programs just grow ever larger, sucking up dollars and destroying learning time.

It won’t be long before children will be unable to escape this depressing, politically biased agenda. It drives the Barack Obama/Arne Duncan/United Nations education plan. This plan is ensconced in the Common Core initiatives, now federally mandated (in contravention of the U.S. Code (20 USC 3403).

The social-justice agenda apparently does not demand sufficient student academics. As the Edu Mob hustles after agenda-based grants and programs, I see no urgency regarding student academics or the truth. The Mob seems content to side-step the students’ misery as it accepts promotions, takes home $100,000+ salaries, and trots out fake numbers showing imaginary improvement.

In 2012, for one example, Spokane Public Schools congratulated itself over a near-80% pass rate in math for its 10th graders. This pass rate bears no relation to what our 10th graders actually know in math. Just two years prior, our 10th graders posted a 41.7% pass rate in math on a low-level test that required just 56.9% to pass. There had been no substantial change in the district’s math curriculum except to possibly become worse. Who in Spokane publicly questioned this magical improvement?

Spokane isn’t alone with its implausibly high numbers. College remedial rates (such as these from Spokane) suggest that if Washington’s 10th graders were given an actual “at-grade-level” math test, without calculators and controlled for those who received outside instruction, many district pass rates would be in the teens or lower.

How does one obtain equity or social justice without academic skills? Why do districts expect small children to teach math to themselves? Why do adults ignore poor academic outcomes, desperate parents and anxious students? I’m often asked: Why do schools persist in these failing approaches? Why isn’t there enough math or grammar in our schools? Why do materials contain a political agenda? Why don’t we have textbooks? Why can’t I see my child’s math work? Why can’t I help out with math in the schools? Why do teachers say, “Don’t help your children with math; it will only confuse them”?

Now you know why. An inadequate education system = more issues = more need for help = more need for money = more government intervention = more government intrusion = more government control. Much of public education now focuses on: 1) more tax dollars for the Edu Mob, 2) more pro-Edu Mob voters, 3) less transparency or accountability, 4) more power to squish out dissent, 5) more administrative control, 6) heavy promotion of the socio-political agenda, and 7) maintaining (already failed) teaching approaches and curricular materials.

If you read what I read every day, you’d be deeply alarmed. To have what they want, they must have it all. And they’re getting it. Here’s just a tiny snippet of what I’ve seen.

• A Spokane teacher advocating in the classroom for revolution.
• Politics permeating the math curriculum.
• A Chicago school telling parents they are not allowed to send lunches with their children.
• A Texas student being browbeaten for refusing to wear a district microchip.

Parents are purposefully kept at arm’s length from the truth – about the schools, budget, curriculum, agenda, and actual outcomes – because No Truth = No Parent Dissent. Those few of us who dare to ask questions are diverted, mollified, ignored or – if we persist – attacked.

A battle is on for our children, and we have nearly lost. Public schools have been “training” people for a while. Students learn to reject their parents’ influence and guidance (especially if the parents prefer less government), to question traditional American values, to fundamentally reform America in a “progressive” image, and to vote progressive. Even Republicans vote progressive on education. Pushing the social-justice agenda is as easy as stealing from a baby.

Where is all of this taking us? The only place it can. Before, parents taught morals and acceptable behavior, and schools taught academics. Now, schools push a progressive view of acceptable behavior, and parents are forced to fill in the academics. But there aren’t enough of us doing that, and we aren’t powerful enough to overcome the social-justice agenda.

See it for yourself. Google “social justice” and “education” together. See how little the Edu Mob cares about academics or the welfare and future of the country (especially as a democratic republic). See how mocking and antagonistic it is toward dissenters. See its determination to push a globalist agenda and an angry, antagonistic, shrill view of America and its founders and defenders. There will come a point at which a conservative-minded person will not be able to win any leadership seat.

America is a “constitution-based federal Republic, with a strong democratic tradition.” It was founded on the idea of checks and balances – that no entity should have excessive power. A one-party system removes our ability to maintain balance. But many in the media, courts and other groups are politically active for the progressive cause. The U.S. Constitution and the law now are flouted regularly and without media pushback or legal consequence.

In 2010, The New York Times published an uncritical piece that advised President Obama to lead by Executive Order. And he is. What is the difference between a president who leads by Executive Order and a dictator? The Times has continued to discuss Obama’s Executive Orders, but minus the outrage one should expect from the media regarding a president who abuses the administrative process. Imagine if a Republican president behaved similarly. There would be passionate editorials, a push for congressional investigations and calls for impeachment. And rightfully so. But for Obama – near silence. A casual discussion. No big deal.

We’re in a dangerous place. The country now is run by government/media/corporate “partnerships” that are neither open nor accountable to the people. Instead of open government and privacy for the people, we now have secretive government and diminishing privacy for citizens. Mainstream media don’t investigate the government; they investigate dissenters. Our citizen rights under the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are being eroded. Our right to privacy is being minimized through federal “rule-making,” and our personal information is being shared without our knowledge or permission. The whole package looks disturbingly Orwellian.

And yet, the people are increasingly ignorant of what it all means. Who in the next generation of voters will stand up for privacy, the individual, the Constitution, or the rule of law? Most graduates will lack the academics they need to properly run the country; the knowledge or perspective to critically assess what they’re being told; and enough understanding of the U.S. Constitution to know they must stand up for it. They will have energy and motivation, however, to agitate and rebel against their oppressors. (That’s us, in case you’re wondering.)

Welcome to the new mission of public education: Social upheaval – an American Spring – fomented by the social-justice crew, supported by the Edu Mob, praised by those who would do America harm, and paid for with our children and our tax dollars.

This great Republic is not yet finished, but it’s looking pretty grim out there.

Laurie H. Rogers has a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and a master’s in interpersonal communication, emphasizing the evaluation of argumentation and logic. In 2001, she founded Safer Child, Inc., a nonprofit child advocacy information resource. In 2007, she narrowed her advocacy to public education, and in 2010, she founded Focus on the Square™, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving American K-12 education.

Laurie is the author of the blog “Betrayed,” located at http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com/. Her book Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about It (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011) is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Besides serving on the executive committee for Where’s the Math?, Laurie has a background in finance, journalism and child advocacy. She has volunteered in schools – tutoring children in literacy and math, and teaching chess, argumentation and knitting. She lives in Spokane with her husband, daughter and two cats.

Contact Laurie Rogers at wlroge@comcast.net.

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“Physician, heal thyself,” never seemed more apt as when, during the course of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference on bias, Jonathan Haidt accused society members of bias against conservatives.

During his presentation, the University of Virginia psychologist — whose research focus is morality and ideology — asked the audience to identify by a show of hands their ideological leanings. Only three raised their hands when Haidt looked to count the conservatives among those attending the lecture. Haidt called it “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” especially in light of the fact that 40% of Americans self-identify as conservative while only 20% call themselves liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

One such explanation, offered by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert to Reason Magazine, hit all the usual stereotypes associated with political leanings by saying that liberals are more likely to enter academia because they embrace new ideas, are willing to work for low pay or are just more intelligent. All these factors might make academia more appealing to liberals while at the same time making it less appealing to conservatives.

An interesting theory, no doubt — yet it serves as an example of guessing zebras when hearing hooves when horses are much more likely. A recent study by two Dutch psychologists, Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, finds a much more logical explanation: that conservatives are, at least to some degree, victims of discrimination in academia when it comes to hiring and publishing. Among those interviewed about their views for the study, the more rigid in their liberal views the interviewees were, the more likely were they to discriminate against their openly conservative colleagues.

The authors of this study surveyed a large number (combined N = 800) of social and personality psychologists and discovered several interesting facts. First, although only 6% described themselves as conservative “overall,” there was more diversity of political opinion on economic issues and foreign policy. Second, respondents significantly underestimated the proportion of conservatives among their colleagues. Third, conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.

This could explain why Haidt got so few takers when he asked conservatives to identify themselves. In addition to there being fewer conservatives in the audience, of those who were, some probably feared backlash from colleagues and negative professional consequences that might come from admitting their political leanings by raising their hand.

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By Kevin Wolfman, M.A.

How “liberal” is college, really?

In his 2009 book One Party Classroom: How Radical Professors At America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine our Democracy, political critic David Horowitz excoriates the American higher education system, claiming that “indoctrination” of college students into radical left-wing ideology is widespread, purposeful, and insidious. “Curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking,” Horowitz writes,  “but to instill doctrines that are ‘politically correct’ … a growing number of activist instructors routinely present their students with only one side of controversial issues in an effort to convert them to a sectarian perspective.”

Kevin Wolfman

Horowitz’s viewpoint is far from uncommon on America’s political right. Indeed, it is all but an article of faith in conservative circles that colleges and universities are actively liberalizing their students to promote the left-wing agendas of activist professors and administrations. Professional studies, however, show that this is incorrect—a forgivable misunderstanding at best, and a purposeful distortion of reality at worst.

Horowitz and his allies are indeed correct in the most basic sense—overall, college education does exert a liberalizing effect. The average college student leaves campus further left on the political spectrum than when he or she arrived. But the actual extent of this movement toward liberalism, and the real forces behind it, are profoundly misunderstood by conservatives and liberals alike. The truth is a bit more complicated, and a lot more interesting.

Before exploring why students’ political attitudes tend to become more liberal, one must first clarify the actual degree of change. Many conservatives believe, like Horowitz, that untold numbers of students are being steered strongly leftward. The data shows that they are quite wrong. Combing through decades of research on the subject of student values, researchers Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini determined in 2005’s How College Affects Students, Volume 2 that the percentage of college students identifying themselves as “liberal” or “far-left” increases by only about 4 percent from freshman to senior year. What’s more, the group of self-identifying conservatives actually increases as well—by well over four percent. While the group of liberals still grows more in absolute terms (since it is larger to begin with), the fact is that both liberals and conservatives see their ranks swell as a byproduct of the college experience. And additional research on political behavior has shown, on both sides the majority of this increase likely results from students who start their college career as moderates and end up “picking a team” at some point between orientation and graduation.

Few conservative students ever become liberals during college, and vice versa. Higher education’s political influence may be less one of liberalization and more one ofpolarization, as centrist students gradually drift to one side of the spectrum or the other. Conservatives agitated over the idea of pervasive university radicalism are frothing at the mouth over nothing. Hard, statistical evidence pointing to a widespread “indoctrination” of college students into liberal thought simply does not exist.

As for the supposed dominance of liberal professors in academia, particularly in the social sciences and humanities: When it comes to the impact on students’ politics, the imbalance is misleading. While it is true that the vast majority of professors in these areas are indeed liberal, this well-documented ideological dominance actually has relatively little effect on student attitudes. Studies show that the influence of faculty in shaping students’ political views is modest at best.

Research has identified two alternative factors that do, in fact, exert an overall liberal effect on the political views of students.

The first factor is cognitive development. During college, the average student becomes more appreciative of nuance and complexity, more tolerant of ambiguity, less accepting of ideological dogmatism, and, to quote social scientist Alex Edelstein, “attach[es] more value to intellectual processes.” In other words, students get smarter.  Simplistic arguments and black-white views of the world—the kinds that unfortunately seem to flourish in the Palinated version of modern American conservatism—tend not to appeal to those lucky enough to benefit from years of post-secondary intellectual training.

The second factor is socialization—but not at the hands of activist faculty. The real socializing influence on college campuses, rather, is the peer group. College brings students from all backgrounds together and makes them sleep, work, and socialize alongside each other.  This heterogeneous environment encourages students to re-evaluate the preconceptions and value systems they brought with them to campus as they are confronted on a daily basis with perspectives and knowledge bases different from their own, often for the very first time.

Far from being exposed to a single, “sectarian” worldview, college students gain exposure to a myriad of worldviews, and come to realize that their own perspective is not the sole legitimate one. An experimental study led by Stanford’s Anthony Lising Antonio discovered that college students whose peer groups are racially diverse are more likely to answer questions about their political beliefs by using greater detail, nuance, and intellectual complexity. Their exposure to the viewpoints of diverse peer group members actually compels them to think more deeply about political and social issues, shunning black-and-white “evaluative” reasoning in favor of a more complete “recognition of the trade-offs among [various] perspectives and solutions.”

Many conservatives might disparagingly characterize this socialization process as a drift toward moral relativism.  It is actually a drift toward reality—not necessarily an embrace of liberalism, but a rejection of the half-baked brand of thought championed by the Becks and Bachmanns currently holding sway over the discourse of America’s political right.

The perception of higher education as a leftist breeding ground is baseless. College does not turn conservatives—or moderates and liberals, for that matter—into liberal lemmings. The wild-eyed, straggly-bearded professor who rages about the evils of capitalism and the virtues of command economics and communal living, transforming student bodies into raving leftist hordes in the process, is by and large a myth—perhaps one that is perpetuated to de-legitimize any scholarly inquiry that contradicts long-standing conservative political and religious assumptions. Make no mistake, radical professors do exist. But the minimal amount of influence they have on their students belies the high degree of attention they receive from activists on the other side of the proverbial aisle.

What benign increase in the ranks of liberal students during college that does occur—roughly 4 percent—is not due to “indoctrination” at the hands of tenured socialists and radicals. It is, rather, a result of intellectual maturation combined with a stimulating collegiate social life that shapes and strengthens the values of equality and acceptance. If the lecture halls of America’s universities are “one-party classrooms,” as Horowitz says, maybe it’s because conservatism has forgotten that school is in session.

Kevin is a teacher and holds a Masters degree in political science from the University of California at Davis. He is currently writing a book about the relationship between higher education and political beliefs. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinwolfman.

References

Antonio, Anthony Lising; Chang, Mitchell J.; Hakuta, Kenji; Kenny, David A.; Levin,   Shana; and Milem, Jeffrey F. 2004. “Effects of Racial Diversity on Complex  Thinking in College Students.” Psychological Science 15(8): 507-510.

Dey, Eric L. 1996. “Undergraduate Political Attitudes: An Examination of Peer, Faculty,  and Social Influences.” Research in Higher Education 37(5): 535-554.

Dey, Eric L. 1997. “Undergraduate Political Attitudes: Peer Influence in Changing Social  Contexts.” The Journal of Higher Education 68(4): 398-413.

Edelstein, Alex. 1962. “Since Bennington: Evidence of Change in Student Political  Behavior.” Public Opinion Quarterly 26(4): 564-577.
George, David L., and Medler, Jerry F. “College Faculty as an  Inconsequential Agent of  Political Socialization.” Available online.

Horowitz, David, and Laksin, Jacob. One-Party Classroom: How Radical      Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and      Undermine our Democracy. New York: Crown Forum, 2009.

Newcomb, Theodore M. Personality and Social Change: Attitude Formation in a Student  Community. New York: Dryden, 1943.

Pascarella, E.T., and Terenzini, P.T. How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third  Decade of Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

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