Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Republicans and Democrats Agree: High Schools Should Teach ‘Controversial’ Issues

"How critical race theory became today’s defining culture-war issue
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Sex Educators Are Not ‘Grooming’ Your Kids—but Conservatives Want to Incite Fear Anyway"

By Sarah Schwartz — October 12, 2022

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As Republican legislators have passed measures restricting how teachers can discuss race, gender, and sexuality in the classroom, many have repeated the same argument—that parents don’t want these topics discussed in schools.
P - But a sweeping new survey finds that Americans’ views are actually more nuanced. Most Americans think high school students should learn about a range of “controversial” social and political issues in the classroom—although they’re not as sure that younger children should do the same. And while there’s agreement among Republicans and Democrats on some topics, there are sharp political divides on others, especially LGBTQ issues.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/republicans-and-democrats-agree-high-schools-should-teach-controversial-issues/2022/10

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Parents Differ Sharply by Party Over What Their K-12 Children Should Learn in School
But majorities of both Republican and Democratic parents are satisfied with the quality of their children’s education
By Juliana Menasce Horowitz
October 26, 2022
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/10/26/parents-differ-sharply-by-party-over-what-their-k-12-children-should-learn-in-school/

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Stanford-led study highlights the importance of letting kids take the lead

Research led by Stanford education professor Jelena Obradovic finds that too much parental involvement when children are focused on an activity can undermine behavioral development.

By Krysten Crawford
March 11, 2021

Parents today often look for teachable moments – and opportunities abound. When reading a book with a child, for example, it might mean discussing story plots with him. If she isn’t allowed to play a videogame, it means explaining why.

There’s good reason for this: Research has shown that engaged parenting helps children build cognitive and emotional skills.

Too much parental direction, however, can sometimes be counterproductive, according to a new study led by Jelena Obradovic, an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, published March 11 in the Journal of Family Psychology.

https://news.stanford.edu/2021/03/11/study-reveals-impact-much-parental-involvement/

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He Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires (and Spreads Them to Florida)

Christopher Rufo helped make critical race theory a conservative rallying cry. Now he sees L.G.B.T.Q. issues as an even more potent line of attack.


Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and writer, has helped inspire Republican messaging and bills on hot-button issues. Chona Kasinger for The New York Times

By Trip Gabriel
April 24, 2022

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Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which bars teaching in workplaces and schools that anyone is inherently biased or privileged because of race or sex.

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Critics of Mr. Rufo, and of the broader right-wing push on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, say the attacks represent a new era of moral panic, one with echoes of slanders from decades ago that gay teachers were a threat to children. Some champions of Florida’s law, including Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s press secretary, have labeled their opponents “groomers” — adults who want to sexually pursue children.

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Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said conservatives had falsely and intentionally linked child sex predators with opponents of the Florida law. Mr. Rufo, he said, had provided fuel for their arguments.

“This is the stock-in-trade of Rufo’s brand of activism — creating these very negative brands and then associating things that might have much more popular support with those brands to put people on the defensive,” Dr. Moynihan said. “That’s the through line you see between the C.R.T. stuff and the current ‘groomer’ effort.”

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After Mr. Rufo released the Disney employee videos, he shared mug shots on Twitter of Disney workers who had been charged in child sexual abuse cases over the years, based in part on CNN reporting from 2014.

He failed to note, in an article he wrote about the arrests for City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, that none of the cases in the CNN report involved children at Disney’s parks. Nor did he include Disney’s response to CNN that the arrests were “one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the 300,000 people we have employed during this time period.”

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Charlie Sykes, a founder of The Bulwark, a political site for anti-Trump conservatives, said Mr. Rufo’s association with the Manhattan Institute provided “intellectual cover” for flawed and inflammatory work.

“It gives him this veneer of being a conservative scholar,” Mr. Sykes said. “He basically says, ‘Anything you don’t like about race becomes C.R.T.’ Now, all of your anxieties about sexuality or gender become grooming.”

[Insert: Just like conservative abuse of "woke." Anything they don't like about anything Dems say
or do is denigrated and dismissed by saying it's woke. The dismissal is easy. It's extremely lazy. ]

[...]

Critical race theory — and a broader “parents’ rights” movement — helped drive Republican victories in school board elections and the Virginia governor’s race last year. Seventeen states have passed laws or issued orders to restrict critical race theory or limit how public-school teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to Education Week.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/us/politics/christopher-rufo-crt-lgbtq-florida.html