“It's just reality”: Local press distorts school curriculum battles, favors Woke lies

The National Review's Becket Adams reflects on imbalanced reporting in nationwide school board controversies, including the bogus claim that Tennessee restricts Black history instruction (nope, anything goes that isn't racist or divisive). The Bay Area, too, has seen elevated media slant since the last election cycle, and local school board members who don't submit to Woke doctrine often struggle to get their voice heard.

In the war between conservative parents and school administrators over the future of U.S. education, the corporate press clearly has chosen a side.

Major news organizations sided with teachers on Covid-19 school closures, even long after the closures made no sense. They repeatedly give the kid-glove treatment to teachers’ strikes, which have become increasingly unreasonable and self-serving. They helped trumpet the activist-designed nickname “Don’t Say Gay” for Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act (the word “gay” is nowhere to be found in the bill). They also promote a view of homeschooling that is as negative and slanderous as the one pushed by leading school officials.

For the press and the education establishment, the overlap in interests and beliefs is hardly coincidental. And there’s more.

Consider, for example, the following Associated Press headline published last week: “As conservatives target schools, LGBTQ+ kids and students of color feel less safe.” It’s bad enough that the headline alone is stacked with loaded terms, but it gets worse when one digs into what the article says and doesn’t say. That the main thrust of the story matches perfectly what teachers and other activist groups (erroneously) claim about schools’ “bans” is a detail that cannot be missed....

The story goes on: “So when Tennessee began passing legislation that could limit the discussion and teaching of Black history, gender identity and race in the classroom, to Harmony, it felt like a gut punch — as if the adults were signaling this kind of ignorant behavior was acceptable” (emphasis added).

Let’s talk about that legislation.

Tennessee law prohibits schools from receiving public funding if their curricula promote “divisive concepts,” including that “one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex” or that “this state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist,” among other concepts. The state’s definition of “divisive concepts” also includes the promotion of “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people,” as well as “stereotyping” or “scapegoating” on the basis of race or sex.

Remember, this is the law that the AP warns could “limit the discussion and teaching of Black history, gender identity and race.”

This article originally appeared in the National Review. Read the whole thing here.

Read more on curriculum debates in public schools here.

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