(August 5) A “this-can’t-be-real” lawsuit filed this week provides more evidence that many school bureaucracies and education unions together are waging warfare, malevolently so, against the very families they are supposed to serve.
Branches of the National Education Association have sued to block a Rhode Island mother and, technically at least, making her an actual defendant in the case, from securing basic information about school curricula from the South Kingstown School District.
In broad terms, the NEA’s lawsuit is nothing more than a repulsive bullying tactic — a strategic lawsuit against public participation or SLAPP. But the bigger, underlying theme is the power-mad arrogance and ethical purblindness that dominate public school systems, serving as barriers to educational excellence and as facial challenges to parental authority.
Stories of tyrannical school boards, even if not quite as outlandish, have been flooding in from across the country in recent months. There was the Louisiana school board that insisted on suspending a child because a Zoom camera caught sight of a BB gun in his room. There was the Pennsylvania school board chief who ordered police to remove an Iranian immigrant complaining about critical race theory. There were injuries and arrests when a Virginia school board shut down a meeting rather than listen to multiple complaints about “equity training.” And there have been many, many more.
Still, this Rhode Island situation may be in a class by itself. Nicole Solas, whose daughter would be entering kindergarten, asked for a copy of the kindergarten curriculum, specifically asking if it would include “politically charged materials, including those influenced by Critical Race Theory and gender theory.” The school stonewalled. Solas filed public information requests for more information, and the whole thing mushroomed. Eventually, the school sent her a bill for $74,000 to comply with a records request that the Goldwater Institute had filed on her behalf.
To read an entire account of all the jockeying is to become increasingly infuriated at the school officials and the union that is running interference for them…. [The full column is at this link.]
