Tuesday night (March 19, 2024) there was a Nixa School Board Candidate Forum. It was hosted by the Nixa Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) and the Nixa Teachers Association (NTA). Held in the Media Center, the forum was well attended.
The sponsors had selected questions and given them to the candidates ahead of the forum. Therefore, the candidates' answers were about as vanilla as they could get. They were canned. They were rehearsed. I'm not blaming the candidates. Who wouldn't want to be spared inconvenient questions, or questions that one had no answer for? Who would want to be confronted by an upset parent or voter?
The forum was what is called controlled programming. You, the voter, have no voice (unless you managed to get a submitted question chosen and even then you couldn't talk). If you arrived at the meeting early enough to meet and shake hands with the candidates, you might have been able to ask them a question. Or, if you lingered afterwards you might have gotten a question in.
But the formal process of a citizen squaring off in public with a declared candidate, a citizen positioned as an equal able to query and expect answers from the person who is asking for their vote, was missing.
In general, these forums are how the System checks off boxes. Public meeting? Check. Candidate forum? Check. Voter information? Check. Public duty? Check.
It's all for show.
How much is really learned about the candidates? Having sat through a couple of these types of events, the candidates pretty much said the same things as at the other times. The forum last night was recorded. Whether it was live-streamed or will be released online I don't know. If it was live-streamed or released, I would've saved the time and energy of being a mere spectator needed to fill the audience.
I had questions. They weren't the questions in the prearranged forum. They were tough questions I wanted to ask two of the candidates.
A question for current school board president/candidate Josh Roberts: "You mentioned that the school district is currently consulting with a psychologist to decide whether to provide an on-campus psychologist to teachers. Can you tell me what has changed in the last decade or so that would warrant teachers needing a psychologist on campus?"
A question for school board candidate Megan Deal: "Can you give your opinion of trauma-based education?" And a followup, "Would you agree that parents should be provided an opt-out form if they decide they don't want their children participating in any type of data collection via surveys, questionnaires or evaluations that refers to their child's feelings or beliefs or attitudes, especially those relating to sexual behavior, orientation, or gender identity?"
Civic participation in the election process is so important that events like the PTO/NTA forum ultimately prove unhelpful. What has happened to debates, and open forums, where voters can get a real idea of the candidates' suitability for public office? To preempt questions from the citizens and give candidates the questions ahead of time is a disservice to the community when there is no other avenues for public discourse.
We are being controlled by a managerial class of government workers and their associates who may not even be aware that the processes they implement are not in the spirit or letter of a free exchange of ideas. Citizens deserve to be able to interview the candidates in order to determine which one best deserves their vote.
I would ask the Nixa PTO and NTA to change their format during the next election and allow a period of time for the citizens to actually participate in the forum. Allow questions that might bring up uncomfortable subjects such as Social Emotional Learning and Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and how those agenda--implemented from both the federal and state level in our local schools--are causing behavioral issues in students.
Instead of calling for more social workers and psychologists and more government programs, perhaps a truly open forum would allow citizens to engage on a level that would actually bring both enlightenment and change to our school boards and ultimately benefit the students and staff.
I'm inserting this video of an interview of Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, to give you an idea of how important ideas are not being shared with our candidates, or others in the audience. It's fascinating, and our community needs to know that there is a very different narrative to the one we are exposed to by the System, which is always and only a call for more programs and more staff:
One last point. We the People of Christian County is the only group I know of (please tell me if you know of others), that had local school board candidates come to speak...and take unvetted questions from the citizens. I would say a couple of the candidates were probably sweating by the time they got out of there, but they came and took questions. Thanks to Josh Roberts and Megan Deal of Nixa, and to Jason Shaffer in Ozark and Edmund Unger in Sparta. And a big thanks to We the People of Christian County.
Do you ever wonder why it takes up to $100,000 to run for an unpaid school board position for the Springfield Public Schools? Do you wonder why violence in schools is on the rise? Why levels of anxiety among students is so high?
Why are academic scores flat or falling? Why is teacher retention a big problem for school districts? Why do school districts keep asking for more bond money for more capital projects when they don't maintain the buildings they have?
Do you ever wonder why out-of-town people founded a "nonpartisan" United Springfield PAC in order to get their preferred candidates elected?
Millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. And more than that, a pernicious agenda that pushes gender ideology, DEI, SEL and CT is working hard to maintain the control grid that usurps parental rights and local school control.
You know something is wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. Here is your opportunity to get answers and solutions.
Our children and their teachers deserve to be able to learn and teach in a safe environment.
To most parents the International Baccalaureate program is a
highly-respected organization that seeks to educate the brightest
students with a world-class education, readying them for higher
education and broader career opportunities. That perception
could not be further from the truth.
The IB program is an
organization that provides students with an education in Globalism
and Marxism through a SEL (Social Emotional Learning) system that delivers indoctrination to every student
enrolled. Just like many of the woke non-profit educational
organizations that “serve” the government schools, the IB program
is indoctrinating students (and their teachers) in a political system
that is anathema to the values of our Republic.
James Lindsay describes SEL as, "...composed of psychological and social work–based interventions on
children performed by teachers and other non-professionals (in
psychology and social work) in uncontrolled, non-therapeutic spaces in
order to teach them “right” and “wrong” answers to socially and
emotionally relevant circumstances. Some, such as your humble
encyclopedist, have suggested that the intentional implementation of
Social-Emotional Learning in schools should be a felony and involve the
relevant administrators going to prison. Some states in the United
States, such as North Carolina, seemed to preemptively anticipate this
potential issue with the implementation of SEL and proactively granted
immunity to teachers and school faculty administering SEL against
charges of practicing psychology on children without a license."
HISTORY OF THE IB PROGRAM
According to the IB organization’s website,
the seeds of the IB program began in 1962 with the founding of the
Atlantic College, one of the first educational institutions with an
international curriculum. Founded by German educator, Kurt Hahn, the
college as originally conceived was meant to bring understanding and
cooperation among students in order to overcome Cold War hostilities
among nations.
According to an article
on Wikipedia, “Drawn from all nations, the students would be
selected purely on merit and potential, regardless of race, religion,
nationality and background.”
Remember that point,
because if true, the IB program has largely abandoned that
selection process in favor of the racist policies of Diversity,
Equity, and Inclusion.
“KEY INFLUENTIAL EDUCATIONALISTS”
The IB organization names four individuals who were key to helping
form the program’s ideas on curriculum: John Dewey, A.S. Neill,
Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner. Three of the four were psychologists.
Let’s take a look at socialist psychologist John Dewey.
According to author Samuel L. Blumenfeld in a 1985 Imprimis
article¹, “In
1894 [Dewey] became professor of philosophy and
education at the University of Chicago where he created his famous
Laboratory School. The purpose of the school was to see what kind of
curriculum was needed to produce socialists instead of capitalists,
collectivists instead of individualists. Dewey, along with the other
adherents of the new psychology, was convinced that socialism was the
wave of the future and that individualism was passe. But the
individualist system would not fade away on its own as long as it was
sustained by the education American children were getting in their
schools. According to Dewey, “…education is growth under
favorable conditions; the school is the place where those conditions
should be regulated scientifically.” In other words, if we apply
psychology to education, which we have done now for over fifty years,
then the ideal classroom is a psych lab and the pupils within it are
laboratory animals.”
Also, according to Blumenfeld, “Dewey’s joining Cattell
and Thorndike at Columbia brought together the lethal trio who were
literally to wipe out traditional education and kill academic
excellence in America. It would not be accomplished overnight, for an
army of new teachers and superintendents had to be trained and an
army of old teachers and superintendents had to retire or die off.”
John Dewey also felt that literacy was overrated. According to
Blumenfeld, “But it was
Dewey who identified high literacy as the culprit in traditional
education, the sustaining force behind individualism. He wrote in
1898:
My proposition is, that conditions—social,
industrial, and intellectual—have undergone such a radical change,
that the time has come for a thoroughgoing examination of the
emphasis put upon linguistic work in elementary instruction…
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in
early school-life because of the great importance attaching to
literature seems to me a perversion.”²
Dewey and his Progressive colleagues managed to introduce the “whole word”
and “look say” methods of teaching reading, which were originally
used to teach the deaf to read. The widespread implementation of
these methods in public government schools has contributed to the
drastic decline in literacy among our children. And it was done on
purpose by one of the “key influential educationalists” the IB
program touts.
Further, according to Aliya
Sikandar in
the Journal
of Education and Educational Development,
“Dewey
was largely inspired by Marx’s theory of social struggle and
conflict between classes. Marx’s theory of conflict is that the
society is stratified and layered with different strata and there
is a competition within these different classes. Marx stresses that
social analysis should focus on class structure and relations. Dewey
had an inspiration from Habermas’s thoughts, which are in the
traditions of Kant, and emphasize the role of education to transform
the world into a more humane, just, and egalitarian society.”³
Sikandar writes, “Dewey’s
main concern was a disparity between the experiences of child and the
kind of concepts imposed upon him. He believed that this gap curbs a
child’s natural experiences and abilities, forcing him to follow
the dictates of a formal education. Dewey is equally critical of the
progressive education which imposes concepts, such as the right of
free expression or free activity as these tenets of education also
impose ideas upon a child. Dewey was deeply inspired by the vision of
a liberal free society and realized the pressing need of freedom and
equality, emancipation from social bounds to liberate individual and
society from the structures of power.”⁴
These
and other Progressive and Marxist
ideas have morphed into the systems of delivery we see in today’s
International Baccalaureate program, as well as public schools all
over the nation. Hidden in the form of SEL and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), these same
pernicious ideas have been working to undermine and control the
intellect of students.
In
its slide presentation on the history of the IB, the organization
compares and contrasts traditional and progressive educational
trends. Traditional methods such as memorization are compared to
“critical analysis.” Testing goes from objective IQ
tests to a
“range
of skills testing.” A
didactic or moral-based teaching becomes “constructivism,” in
which
a child develops his/her own moral
understanding
through experiential methods of learning.
Machine-scored tests become criterion-referenced tests.
In
a nutshell, these progressive trends mean that objective testing for
IQ and content
mastery,
a shared curriculum that all students should master, and a moral base
for knowledge is all thrown out the window in the service of
indoctrinating children into a globalist, Marxist world view.
Indeed,
a great deal of the IB program is designed for this end.
Recently, the IB put out a DEI statement to read in part:
“Diversity,
equity and inclusion statement:
We aim to live these values through these commitments:
The IB will embrace diversity,
equity, and inclusion practices in our work—and reflect this
commitment as we develop our policies and procedures—both as an
employer and as an educational organization
We commit to promoting human
rights and the idea of one shared humanity in all our work, both as
an employer and as an educational organization
The IB commits to promoting
justice—social, economic and ecological—in our work, both as an
employer and as an educational organization
Alongside our community, we will
work to help protect the environment and the local ecosystems that
form it
The IB will foster a sense of
agency and enquiry in both the people we work with and the young
people we help to educate
We embrace learner variability so
that our learners are not excluded on the grounds of any of their
characteristics, and so that our stakeholders can develop and thrive
in a culture of equal opportunities for learning, personal growth,
and developing the ability to make positive change
The IB commits to act supportively
and with consideration for young people affected by difficult or
adverse circumstances, their own changing personal histories or
contexts, or other challenges affecting their life as IB students
We will work to promote the
voices, identities, and leadership of marginalized people in our
work, both as an employer and as an educational organization. We
will be transparent in all our policies relating to the people we
work with and as we work with our educational programmes and
resources through a diversity, equity and inclusion lens
We will explore new ways to open
our programmes and our work to new languages, cultures and contexts
The IB commits to being fully focused on the needs of our
staff, IB World Schools and their educators and students, as we
challenge ourselves to become a more diverse, open, inclusive, and
accepting organization, standing against racism, prejudice,
discrimination and marginalization wherever we can. “
It
is clear that a political persuasion is of utmost importance to the IB.
Words like diversity, equity, inclusion, promoting human rights,
justice, protecting the environment, promoting the leadership of
marginalized people, etc., are all the wording of today’s Marxist
lexicon. Cloaked in benign-sounding wording, these concepts mean
something very different to those imposing them on our children. And
unfortunately, many public schools have fallen for the IB program,
including the Ozark School District.
OZARK
SCHOOL DISTRICT AND THE IB
At
the Sept.
21, 2023 Ozark School Board meeting, the IB program (a part of
the school since 2012), was evaluated. The presenters, Ozark High School Principal Dr. Jeremy
Brownfield and IB coordinator Stacie Moran, spoke in favor of the program. The slide presentation can be found here.
Video prompted to the IB presentation:
The
slide
presentation, as clever as it was in attempting to downplay the
actual IB cost versus AP cost (in purely financial terms), could not
hide the taxpayer dollar waste as compared to the Advanced
Placement program. What wasn’t readily seen in the slides is
that the IB program for 2024 will cost taxpayers $228,246.80 for a
total of 74 students (the majority of whom will not be in the diploma
program). The diploma program currently has a total of 28 students,
both seniors and juniors. Dividing the total cost by the number of
students comes out to $3,084.42 for the IB program, while the AP
program calculation is a total of $871.64 per student.
What
Dr. Brownfield did in his calculations was to compare total “student
seats” (how many classes were taken by each student), instead of
program cost per student. And when one compares the policies of
colleges regarding both the AP and IB programs (see slide 12 of the
presentation), the cost to taxpayers cannot justify the IB program.
The ROI (return on investment) is not there.
Slide 12 of OSD IB Presentation
Later
in the presentation, the call is for expanding the IB program to the
Middle
Years Program, hiring additional staff and training. The purely
financial aspects of the IB program should see it dropped by the
Ozark School District. However, the political indoctrination alone
should be the stake in the heart of the IB program.
IB
STUDENTS SPEAK AT TOWN HALL
At
an Ozark School District Town Hall meeting on December 7, 2023, a
student in the IB program got up to speak. It starts out well. The
student describes her involvement at school and asks a great question
of the school board: What is the best form of education? Board member
Patty Quessenberry launches right into the progressive view of
student-directed education. She pays lip service to a “baseline,”
but then affirms that what interests the student is the most
important avenue of learning.
Next, board member Guy Callaway says
nearly the same thing. He mentions that his niece had been in the IB
program. Board member Christina Tonsing requests input from the
students about the
Academies program (read about them here,)
and shares that educational trends tend to come and go.
Then
Don
Currence, the mayor of Ozark, speaks
about some controversial opinions
that had been shared on a
Ozark community Facebook
page. Another
IB student gets up to speak. She wants more money for the arts. She’s
already spoken to Principal Dr. Jeremy
Brownfield, but she “wants more
details.” Partnerships with local arts organizations is mentioned
as a possible solution. School board member Amber Bryant shares that
a cost analysis is being done.
It’s
wonderful up to this point. But at the
40-minute mark one of the two
IB students gets up again to ask
about the
Ozark community page
on Facebook previously mentioned by Mayor Currence.
She wants to get rid of it. She wants to censor free speech in order to protect her teachers and fellow students. Later at
44 minutes in, a woman gets up and
suggests teaching
“media literacy,” which is a form of censorship masked as
educating
students how to discern mis- and disinformation.
WHAT
IS MEDIA LITERACY?
John
D. Sailor of the National
Association of Scholars describes
it this way: “But what,
exactly, is this pedagogy? The Critical Media Literacy Guide, a book
by UCLA professors Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, offers a broad and
influential summary. Kellner and Share cite Marx’s observation that
“in every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling
class” to argue that media literacy should be taught through the
lens of power and identity groups. Critical media literacy seeks to
undermine what it sees as the dominant institutions of Western
capitalist society—or, to use the academic jargon, to foster
“counter-hegemonic alternatives.”⁵
In
the video, which I urge you to watch from the prompt onward, then
Interim-Superintendent Lori Wilson,
and Curriculum
Superintendent
Craig Carson both admit that media literacy is being taught to very
young students up through high
school.
Towards
the end of the meeting, one of the IB students asks a question
regarding helping recent immigrants from Ukraine and Russia by
“growing” curriculum to make it “less of a culture shock.”
Perhaps
the globalist perspective taught in the IB curriculum is what prompted the remarks
in favor of
censoring free speech on Facebook (hardly known as a bastion of free
speech anyway), and concern for recent immigrants’ cultural
sensibilities.
THE
UNESCO CONNECTION
Also during the meeting Ozark School Board Member Christina Tonsing asked about UNESCO (the
United Nations Educational
Scientific and Cultural Organization), which has been historically associated with the IB program. According
to J. P. Singh in “United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: Creating
norms
for a complex
world,”
“Auguste
Comte’s (1798–1857) “Religion of Humanity” ascribed to
science the basis of society and global solidarity that would replace
God as its ordering principle. Comte’s positivist theory of
humanity reflected science to be not just a source for Enlightenment
ideas of progress, but also to be its spiritual core. Comte provides
a precursor to the ideas of scientific humanism that became popular
in the 1930s. Julian Huxley, UNESCO’sfirst
director- general (1946–48),
tried to provide a similar manifesto in his pamphlet UNESCO: Its
Purpose and Its Philosophy:
“Thus
the general philosophy of UNESCO should, it seems, be a scientific
world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background.”8
The
thrust of Huxley’s
ideas was toward human perfection rooted in natural selection,
evolution, and one dangerously close to eugenics.”⁶
Kimberly
Ells writes about UNESCO in her article “The endgame of
Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape
all children to meet the needs of a global society.” Ells says,
“[A]ccording to the global
purveyor of SEL standards, 27 states so far have adopted K-12 SEL
competencies, and all 50 states have adopted SEL competencies for
pre-K students. But where is this massive push for SEL coming from,
and what are the motives behind it? The answer to this question is becoming clear: The United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
is a primary force behind the SEL movement worldwide.”⁷
Later in the
article, Ells asserts that UNESCO is ultimately concerned with making
global citizens who, “In short, proponents of the sustainable
development goals and SEL want to instill “pluralistic thinking”
in your child in the name of global peace. They want children to be
taught to value the “collective good” over individual liberties,
rights, and property despite the fact that the freest, most
prosperous nations in the world are founded on individual liberties,
rights, and property.”⁸
WHAT CAN WE DO?
This is the crux of
the matter with organizations like the International Baccalaureate
program and UNESCO. They are not in unity with the laws, values, and
culture of the United States of America. In fact, through deception
and clever wording, these organizations and many like them have been
subverting our educational institutions for decades.
The hour is quite
late. These organizations have not just a toehold, but a stranglehold
on our institutions. Parents and taxpayers should insist that
programs like the IB be dropped from the curriculum at the Ozark
School District. Teachers should be retrained if needed.
That Harvard's plagiarist President Claudine Gay was forced to resign in order to stop the credibility bleed at the university, is great news for local government schools. What happens at the university level percolates down to the K-12 educational institutions, as well as business.
DIE, or DEI has been implemented in our local Christian County Schools. Administrators and school boards should expect to be held accountable for its implementation. It's one reason why there is chaos in our schools, whether it is how testing is done, how students are disciplined, how they are taught to feel about themselves and others, and so on.
On X, Bill Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square, wrote a post about it. He said in part, "But as we all know, our higher education system (HES) is critically important as it can affect and influence the minds of our younger generations, thereby profoundly impacting the lives of all of us.
The HES can affect what’s taught to toddlers and what is taught in elementary and high schools, as ed schools train the next generation of teachers and superintendents, and design the curricula they teach.
The HES can convince a generation that some of us are oppressors, and others are the oppressed, and provide justifications for what kinds and what degree of violence and terrorism are appropriate tools to address this perceived oppression.
The HES can affect our medical establishments and the ethics of medicine, e.g., some of our most controversial procedures and medicines, and the advisability of their use on children, and so on. You get the point, I am sure."
In the short video below, Ayaan Hirsi Ali also discusses how Diversity Inclusion, and Equity can affect local schools, and how important it is that this pernicious agenda be destroyed. The Harvard Black Swan Event is also our opportunity to divest our local schools of DIE. Watch:
A must read by James Lindsay at his New Discourses site. Lindsay lays out how the DIE (or DEI) industry manipulates our goodwill to push dangerous agendas into our schools and businesses.
FTA:
"Among these manipulations at the very core of these consultancy projects
are three seemingly anodyne and now sacrosanct words: “Diversity,”
“Inclusion,” and “Equity.” These are what they’re selling to us to a
tune of untold billions of dollars a year in return for a society that
gets increasingly dysfunctional as a result, and we have a right to know
why. We have a right to see how we’re being lied to and manipulated by
these three words. We actually do have to understand the terms
“Diversity,” “Inclusion,” and “Equity” in their proper “Critical” meanings—because that’s what they’re really selling—to understand what’s going on. All of these represent political agendas,
not something helpful, useful, moral, or anything remotely close to
what people should think is warm, fuzzy, and worth getting behind.
Speaking corporately, it would be better to set our money on fire than
to spend it on these programs because they don’t just waste money but
will cause increased costs more or less perpetually afterward."
More here. Apparently they have a way to go since they are spotlighting DEI in their December 2023 newsletter, a year later. It took a long while to corrupt the schools, and it will take a while to bring them back to sanity.
NEW: a group of Moms for Liberty backed school board members were sworn in Tuesday
Within 2 hours, they’d fired the superintendent & the district’s lawyer, banned CRT and set up a committee to determine books to ban for “pornographic content”https://t.co/tRcOMub2nD
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is being pushed on our children from young ages. It is not just at the university level.
James Lindsay defines DEI as, "The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry under Woke Marxism is easy to understand. Equity is a rebranding of Socialism: an administered economy that makes outcomes equal. Diversity and Inclusion are tools used to install political officers and to censor and remove dissidents, respectively. In other words, the Woke Marxist DEI industry is a racket designed to install commissars for its ideology."
A good share for normies who watch CNN is Fareed Zakaria, here speaking to the complete unmooring of a moral intellectal tradition in our universities:
America’s top universities should abandon their long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.
Right to Win Ozarks has produced an online resource for citizens who want more information about the issues in our local libraries. It includes background information, resources, and positive steps for bringing change to our library system.
While not an exhaustive resource, the MERRI Book is designed to be an educational tool that allows anyone to access as little or as much information as they want. It is meant to be freely shared and we hope it proves to be a helpful aid.
Been having a back-and-forth with a commenter regarding the terms and meanings of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) on this post. The latest comment:
I
apologize if you feel attacked. I was simply asking a question. It's a
common battle cry of the magas: "no CRT, no DEI". But when I've actually
asked people what those terms mean in relation to education, they don't
know! I understand that it's easy to get swept up in rally cries, but
shouldn't you at least know what you are crying about?
I don't
know why you've mentioned socialism so much. I'm not coming at this from
a political angle. It's important for kids to learn why diversity (in
thought, background, culture....) is important. You know, since we live
in a diverse world. ;)
Equity is simple, everyone should have
what they need in order to succeed. For example, I have an autistic
grandson who gets to take tests in a quieter classroom with less
students. He NEEDS this in order to focus and complete his work.
Inclusion,
again, another simple one. ALL kids deserve to be included! For
example, the city just recently put in an inclusive playground. This
means that even kids with physical disabilities are able to have access.
There's even play equipment specifically designed to encourage parents
to play and interact with their children.
So there it is.
There's the D, E and I "agenda". I am a teacher in the district and I
promise you, this is the only "agenda" we are implementing in the
classroom. There really is nothing nefarious about it.
I don't know Emily Drabinski so I can't ask her."
Since posts are moderated after a few days, I thought I would bring it up to the top, so the discussion can go on without that.
I think the issue here is a teacher does not understand what is behind the DIE agenda. Here is a very short video that gives a snapshot of the agenda behind it.
Perhaps that will give him/her a place to begin understanding what is going on in our schools.
Update:
Here is a visceral video on why DIE must be defeated. Adherents of DIE will say that all children should "see themselves represented" in library books, in the name of diversity and inclusion. This is how they sneak in smut like in the video below. You will be given a million innocent reasons for the DIE agenda, but at the end of the day it's about the demoralization of our children. Warning: GRAPHIC.
