Only Hope for Kansas Student Education is a Constitutional Amendment

by Dave Trabert


Kansas students deserve constitutional amendment


On the Courts Allocating Education Spending Levels:

The Gannon v Kansas decision confirms that the only hope for students to get the education they deserve depends upon a constitutional amendment that prohibits the court from setting funding levels, and legislation that holds schools accountable for academic improvement at the building level.

What it Means for Taxpayers:
Rejecting a six-year $818 million funding increase as ‘inadequate’ is preposterous.  On top of the biggest tax increase in state history, Kansans face another inevitable tax increase to fund the $818 million already approved for schools -- and now unelected judges are effectively ordering even more tax hikes.

On the Disconnect Between Higher Spending and Student Achievement: 
We cannot be misled by the faulty premise that higher spending can produce greater results for our students. It’s time to end the decades-long cycle of litigation that has cost taxpayers millions. We must encourage our leaders in the legislature to ask the right questions about education spending; questions that put our students and teachers first.


Calif. School District Forbids Parents to Remove Kids From Graphic Sex Ed Class

by Ben Marquis


California passed a law in 2015 known as the California Healthy Youth Act, part of which expanded and overhauled sexual education classes to include information about homosexuality, gender identity issues and abortion, and which is just now being implemented in schools across the state.

The new sex ed course is intended to help students develop “healthy attitudes” (via state brainwashing - ED) with regard to such issues as “gender (and) sexual orientation” while also informing students about the effectiveness of various contraceptives and spurring an “objective discussion” about “parenting, adoption, and abortion.”

According to LifeSite News, there are some parents who don’t want their children being exposed to everything the curriculum offers.

There’s plenty to object to.

The curriculum includes a study guide about transgender issues and a “sexual health toolkit,” which teaches young students about such things as sex toys and anal intercourse, downplays such quaint notions as “abstinence” and “virginity” and relies heavily upon left-wing organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Advocates for Youth — which are pro-homosexuality and pro-abortion — as resources.

The 2015 law recognized that “parents and guardians have the ultimate responsibility for imparting values regarding human sexuality to their children,” and as such had expressly allowed for parents and guardians to “excuse their children from participation” in the courses as a whole without any sort of penalty.

However, if parents allow their children to take the course at all, they can only keep their children from some aspects, specifically dealing with the physical organs. Otherwise, the children must be exposed to every part of it, including sex toys, anal sex and homosexuality. And parents will be in no position to object.

So, having a kid learn about sexual health means having the kids learn about homexuality and anal sex, too?

That’s the intepretation the Orange County Board of Education — more specifically Orange County Department of Education general counsel Ronald Wenkart — has reached anyway.

That’s because a statement in the law specifically exempts from the parents’ opt-out power “instruction, materials, presentations, or programming that discuss gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation, relationships, or family and do not discuss human reproductive organs and their functions.”

In a memo published in full by the San Juan Capistrano Patch, Wenkart indicated that students could only be excused from the portions of the courses that dealt directly with human reproductive organs, and all other information imparted by the courses was mandatory.

Wenkart did, however, suggest that parents retained the right to “advise their children that they disagree with some or all of the information” put forward in the courses and were permitted to “express their views on these subjects to their children.” Gee, thanks for the permission.

The attorney also cited judicial precedents at the conclusion of his four-page memo that claimed “parents do not have a constitutional right to excuse their children from portions of the school curriculum that they find objectionable.”

Needless to say, there are rumblings of pushback brewing among parents .

According to LifeSite News, Heidi St. John, an author who runs a Facebook site called The Busy Mom, advised that parents in California raise the issue with their local school boards, as well as contact their local political representatives in order to make their displeasure at the decision known.

“These are our children!” she wrote in a Facebook post in April. “They do not belong to the schools.”

This episode is just the latest example of how public schools have become little more than indoctrination centers designed to cram as much of the progressive agenda and beliefs into students’ heads as possible, indoctrination that is increasingly being made mandatory.

This also serves as a glaring example of the notion held by far too many progressive leftists that they know what is best for everybody else, even more so than parents know about their own children, and everyone should just be quiet and accept their great wisdom, even if we wholeheartedly disagree.

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Cost Functions Should Not be Used to Make Education Spending Decisions

by Kansas Policy Institute


June 1 - Wichita - A cost study recommending a school funding increase upwards of $2 billion survived a peer review by a scholar the Legislature hired; but, another respected school finance scholar says cost studies should not be used to set funding levels.

Benjamin Scafadi, Ph.D., a professor of economics and director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, says, “cost function studies do not provide valid and reliable estimates of the minimum 'cost' of achieving a given outcome.” 

Knowing the Legislature’s WestEd cost study would define the conversation on education spending and impact further judicial proceedings, Kansas Policy Institute partnered to do an independent peer review with Dr. Scafidi.  His findings disprove the notion that spending more money causes student achievement to improve. 

In response to the Kansas Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Gannon V case, the Kansas Legislature recently contracted with a vendor conducting a $285,000 study to analyze the “cost” of educating public school students in grades K-12. The Legislature asked the vendor, WestEd, to “estimate the minimum spending required to produce a given outcome within a given educational environment.” WestEd used a “cost function” approach to estimate the costs of providing students in each public school in Kansas with an adequate education. 

Dave Trabert, president of the Kansas Policy Institute, commented, “These cost studies may be done with the best of intentions, but they fail to provide results that are useful in guiding policy decisions. In practice they only take a partial look at one variable – spending – and ignore all other variables that impact learning.”

Scafadi said, “The estimates vary widely and do not track with historical data on spending and achievement.” The review outlined the reasons why supposed “cost” functions do not provide valid and reliable estimates of the minimum “cost” of achieving a given outcome.

“One glaring problem we found with the WestEd study is that researchers do not have access to data on all external factors that impact the cost of educating students.” Trabert said.

Scafidi’s study for Kansas Policy Institute included in its exhaustive review a complete recommendation of best practices that should be performed to “check carefully for robustness and reliability of results.”

His data determined it unreasonable to conclude that giving the Kansas public school system, as currently constituted, a large boost to spending would significantly improve student outcomes.

“Given the vast sums of taxpayer funds at stake, the Kansas Governor, Legislature, and the State Supreme Court should implement the five best practices, as laid out in my review, to discover the truth about the relationship between spending and valuable student outcomes.” Scafadi concluded.




Editor's Note: Such mathematical games accomplish little more than feed the lawyers who feast on endless court decisions that force the Kansas Legislature to raise taxes violating both the separation of powers and the people's right to determine fiscal policy.

Canada's ATA to Launch Prism an Agenda for Elementary School LGBTQ Indoctrination

by Gerald Weston


As most of you are well aware, our world is in moral meltdown, and hardly a day goes by when we are not slapped in the face with this fact.  Note this title from The Guardian: “French MPs vote to ban abortion websites that intimidate women.”  The article then goes on to say, “The socialist government’s proposal seeks to criminalise any websites that deliberately mislead, intimidate or ‘exert psychological or moral pressure’ on a woman seeking information about terminating a pregnancy, with punishment of up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine.”  Of course, we would fully agree and condemn any attempt to “deliberately mislead” or “intimidate,” but the phrase, “exert psychological or moral pressure” is open to interpretation and troubling.  Will telling the truth about the sanctity of life from a biblical perspective be classified as “moral pressure”?  I think that we can see the dangers this presents to those who dare preach the truth in our “politically correct” world. 

Another country that is taking the lead in abandoning biblical values is Canada.  The government of Alberta earlier this year began a social engineering campaign to indoctrinate the province’s children with an LGBTQ agenda.  As a November 1, 2016 CBC News story points out, the Alberta Teacher’s Association has picked up the baton with PRISM, a manuscript instructing teachers how to propagandize children in their grand social experiment.  “A new toolkit to assist Alberta teachers with LGBTQ discussions is being slammed by critics for suggesting drag shows could be staged in schools and students be addressed as ‘comrades’ rather than boys and girls.  Those are just two of the proposals in a 150-page document from the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA). The ‘Prism Toolkit for Safe and Caring Discussions’ aims to help teachers create classrooms and curriculum that are more LGBTQ inclusive.”

It is suggested on page 101 of this toolkit that, “Students may want to invite local drag queens to come to the school to teach make-up and hair techniques.”  This is only one of the more outrageous proposals, but it is perhaps the more subtle suggestions that are most dangerous.  “Normalizing content can be more helpful than the token ‘gay’ lesson as it is embedded in our regular practice” (p. 115). No subject is left out.  Everyday language and practice is to be transformed.  Pronouns such as he, she, him, her, himself and herself are to be replaced with: ze, xe, per, zir, xem hir, xyrself, perself, etc.  No my friends, these are not misspellings, but new pronouns being shoved down the throats of unsuspecting and vulnerable children who don’t understand what is being done!

Psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman worked in the health services department at UCLA and witnessed firsthand the activism found in academia.  She explains where this is headed in her powerful book, Unprotected: “Their goal is an androgynous culture, where the differences between male and female are discounted or denied, and the bond between them robbed of singularity” (p. xxi). 

Ontario is another Canadian province in meltdown.  “Up to four people will be able to be recognized as the parents of a child without a court order, if all parties entered into a written pre-conception agreement to be parents of the child together. The birth parent is required to be one of the parties to the agreement” (Ontario Newsroom, Nov. 29, 2016).  This bill also changes the Children’s Law Reform Act and Vital Statistics Act to “use gender-neutral terminology, where possible.”

But it gets worse!  The Grand Marshall for the Ottawa Gay Pride Parade this past year was a gender-confused boy who sees himself as a girl.  As Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, explained to LifeSiteNews, “This unfortunate 10-year-old child is being exploited by adult transgender activists in order to normalize their own mental illness and procure special rights.

Many are blind to what is happening and are falling for the propaganda being pumped out by these activists and supported by a sympathetic news media, but these behaviors are NOT normal.  A gullible public doesn’t realize how carefully crafted propaganda strategies are manipulating its thinking, and anyone who honestly disagrees with them is labeled “homophobic” or “homo-haters”!  Such intimidation tactics are dishonest. The ones who truly hate are those who promote dangerous behaviors.  Since when is it love to encourage someone to live in a nightmarish fantasy world?

One of America’s most respected psychiatrists is Dr. Paul McHugh, who is a University Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  Regarding this subject, he explained in the Wall Street Journal: “The transgendered suffer a disorder of ‘assumption’ like those in other belief disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.”

He also wrote: “Yet policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes” (WSJ, June 12, 2014).

And what are those “grim psychological outcomes”?  Dr. McHugh points out that in a large comprehensive Swedish study, individuals who are 10 years out after going through reassignment surgery to satisfy their sad delusions have a rate of suicide 20 times higher than that of the average population!  So is it hate or is it love to tell people the truth and try to get them needed help?

Yet every kind of unnatural behavior is being promoted among our children and grandchildren.  God tells us through the writings of the Apostle Paul: “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind. . .” (Romans 1:28).  J.B. Phillips translates this verse: “Moreover, since they considered themselves too high and mighty to acknowledge God, he allowed them to become the slaves of their degenerate minds, and to perform unmentionable deeds.”

In the introduction of PRISM, the toolkit for Alberta’s teachers to use in indoctrinating other people’s children, note this bizarre explanation:  “Many acronyms are used, but the most recognizable and common is LGBTQ. While this acronym is useful and has important historical roots, it has been criticized for not being inclusive of all marginalized identities.  A more inclusive version of that acronym is LGBTTTPQQAI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Two-Spirit, Pansexual, Queer, Questioning, Asexual, Aromantic, Ally, Intersex, etc.…); however, this acronym can make conversations about this topic cumbersome. 

The Alberta Teachers’ Association uses Sexual and Gender Minority (SGM) to be inclusive of all identities and ways of being.  You will find this acronym throughout ATA materials. Materials adapted from outside sources may still use the LGBTQ acronyms or variations thereof.  Outside of this resource, you may encounter other acronyms such as MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Gender Identities and Intersex) or QUILTBAG (Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans (Transgender/Transsexual), Bisexual, Asexual, and/or Gay)” (p. 7).

 Can we not see where our world is headed?  Can we not see that these are not normal times and that God’s patience will soon wear out?  Can we not see that disaster lurks right over the horizon and that the storm clouds are building?  Can we not see our need to turn fully to Him?


 


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