NEWS

 July 9,2022. One of my goals as Superintendent will be to tighten science standards so students learn about the scientific method and can distinguish real science from false science. This week’s National Review describes the problem: “The problem of irreproducible results is worsened by biased experimenters who torture the evidence until it confesses whatever their ideological commitments demand. … Confirmation bias (favoring results that support one’s desired result and downplaying or discarding those that don’t), lowered standards, and increasingly extreme ideology among social scientists and the political Left more broadly have combined to create a fertile environment for entire academic fields of a questionable nature. These fields, which have earned the pejorative nickname “grievance studies,” examine the world primarily in terms of “identity” and include gender studies, queer studies, whiteness studies, critical race studies, and so forth.” Students need to be taught in science to be able to distinguish studies that properly follow the scientific method and those that don’t.

 July 1, 2022. Thoughts on July 4. My Father, a refugee from Poland, taught me to be patriotic, because he knew the alternatives. My wife, a refugee from Cuba, cries every July 4, because this great country gave her sanctuary. Here is why I have contempt for athletes who disrespect our national anthem. In 1861 Democrats either supported slavery or were indifferent to it. Yet hundreds of thousands fought in the union army. Why? Because at Fort Sumter the Confederates fired on the stars and stripes. Those symbols are important, and when leftists undermine them, they undermine the country. I am committed to an education system in which students are taught our history and why this is such a great country.

 June 16, 2022. For a long time I puzzled over this statement that was taught to students in Tucson about critical race theory: “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundation of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” What in the world could they have against “Enlightenment rationalism?” An article by Douglas Murray in the current National Review, summarizing his book The War on the West, answers this question: “ The judeo-Christian tradition that formed the cornerstone of the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault and denigration. But so does the tradition of secularism and the Enlightenment, which produced a flourishing in politics, the sciences, and the arts. …. At education colleges in America, training seminars tell aspiring teachers that even the term ‘diversity of opinion’ is ‘white supremicist bullsh**".” I am running for Supt of Schools, in part, to help the counterrevolution against this left-wing, totalitarian trend.

 June 8, 2022. Conservative Black professor Carol Swain documents how racism in America has been “overwhelmingly de-systemized.” But critical race theory “now threatens to undo this great work and to drag our country backward towards racial antipathy and separation.” It seeks equal outcomes by race which destroys individual merit. White people are oppressors by definition. “On the other hand, racial and ethnic minorities are described as helpless victims in need of liberation from pervasive and persistent systemic racism. This patronizing account strips minorities of ownership and control over their own lives while attributing to whites seemingly godlike power to create every sort of malady in black homes and communities. CRT thus harms its intended beneficiaries by creating a sense of hopelessness while eroding decades of goodwill…”

 June 4, 2022. I have been reading Black Eye for America, How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House, by Carol Swain, a black professor, and Christopher Schorr. It defines critical race theory: “CRT is far from “antiracism,” the term adopted by its proponents. It is, rather, explicitly racist, demeaning designated “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups alike. CRT condemns people in the former category for the alleged sins of their birth, compelling them in practice, to humiliate themselves in absurd ritualistic fashions. CRT infantilizes and denigrates people in the latter category, describing them as hapless victims of a society that belongs to someone else. Previous (i.e. authentic) champions of racial equality fought to incorporate people of color into the story of America — perhaps the second greatest story ever told.” This is one of the reasons, if elected State Sup’t of Schools, my first priority will be to get CRT out of our schools.

 May 25, 2022. I have written before about Vivek Ramaswamy’s book “Woke Inc.” He writes about Google firing James Damore for writing a harmless paper concluding that “we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology.” David Shor, a left-leaning data analyst was fired by Data Analytics for tweeting in support of a study suggesting that “violent protests are counterproductive.” We need to fight back, including in our schools, against Woke ideology, which defends even violent protests and seeks to destroy the careers of anyone who disagrees.

 May 22, 2022. Emory Professor of philosophy George Yancy talks about how his approach to critical race theory involves psychologically bullying his students. “White students often persist in their denials. They shift in their seats, their faces contort in great discomfort … some have teared up … I hope to change my white students’ understanding of racism so they can bring to see themselves as racist.” Ricky Allen, a professor in the school of education at the University of New Mexico says “critical educators need to create an environment of dissonance that brings white students to a point of identity crisis.” Never mind the psychological damage to white students, and to students of color from being propagandized that they are victims and may as well not try.

 May 13, 2022. A recent article by professor Stanley Ridgley describes the psychological attack on students in critical race theory in colleges. He describes a program of “coercive thought reform that deploys psychological weapons against undergraduate students. The centerpiece of this crude coercive method is an explicit attack on ‘central elements of self.” It seeks to “neutralize a person’s psychological defenses.” Facilitators urge students to make themselves vulnerable in a “trusting” environment. “The students private revelations are filtered through the racialist interpretation and then turned back against the student at his most vulnerable points. “ White students are attacked as victimizers and students of color are attacked as psychologically deficient if they do not accept their scripted role as victims. When the psychological damage of these attacks is pointed out, they scoff and characterize negative reactions as “discomfort,” “resistance”, or “bad attitudes”.

 May 7, 2022. It didn’t start with Disney. Last December I wrote here about Woke, Inc. by successful entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. He substantiates how wokeness is a religion. He writes: “Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees ‘to be less white’ and that ‘to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble,’ and that ‘white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.’ Starbucks said it would mandate anti-bias training for executives and tie their compensation to increasing minority representation in the workforce.” I’m switching from diet coke to diet pepsi.

 April 19, 2022.Two of my favorite conservative, black intellectuals are Thomas Sowell and Jason Riley. Now it turns out that Riley has just written a bio of Sowell. He summarizes it in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College. He reports interesting poll results. Most blacks support voter ID laws, school choice, oppose racial preferences in college admissions, defunding the police. Most liberal black intellectuals, the ones tv stations choose to interview, take the opposite view. He says “if you think Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones represent the views of most black people, you need to get to know more black people.” You can subscribe to Imprimis for free: imprimis@hillsdale.edu.

 April 10, 2022. An article by Daniel Mahoney speaks of a specter haunting the West that is self-loathing, nihilistic and fanatical. The most fundamental threat is that “nearly the entire intellectual class in the Western world bristles at the suggestion that we, in the freest, most prosperous, most self-critical societies in the history of the world, have been bequeathed a patrimony that is worth preserving.” He traces the trend from French intellectuals after the May 1968 student revolt, to American intellectuals and critical race theory. The place to start putting a stop to this is in k-12 education, and that is part of my crusade.

 April 4, 2022. Examples of critical race theory in elementary schools that reporters have found out about: Cupernito, Calif., third graders in math class had to “deconstruct their racial identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege”. Philadelphia, fifth graders had to march across an auditorium stage bearing signs that read “Jail Trump” and “Black Power Matters” in a rally celebrating “black communism.” Buffalo, an “emancipatory curriculum” instructed students through its “pedagogy of liberation” that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.” My first priority as State Supt of Schools will be to get critical race theory out of Arizona schools and teach students to treat each other as individuals, not according to race.

 March 31, 2022. A friend of mine teaches remedial reading in High School. Under “social and emotional learning” she was told to have the students do races with an egg in a spoon. She said that she had students failing biology because they couldn’t read and she needed to focus on that. An administrator said if she didn’t do “social and emotional learning” she would be written up. From the State Supt of Schools down, there is a lack of emphasis on academics and diversion to nonsense like critical race theory, social and emotional learning, “deep equity”, “power diversity”, etc.. If elected State Supt of Schools, I will get the focus back on academics.

 March 24, 2022. Like all extremist movements, ethnic studies and critical race theory have a heavy dose of anti-semitism. When I was fighting ethnic studies, I went on the website of MECHA. MECHA, which figured prominently in the Tucson ethnic studies curriculum, is a movement to give back the states taken from Mexico in 1848, such as Arizona, California, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, Utah, etc.. It had an official office in the offices of ASU. (I don’t know if it still does.) Its website took me to a periodical called La Voz de Aztlan. It had statements like “the Jews are poor losers” and a well known hispanic mayor was a “tool of the jews”. I just read an article by Brett Stephens about how the first version of California’s “model curriculum” for a required ethnic studies course endorses Boycott, Divest and Sanction which essentially calls for the elimination of the Jewish State. There was also a glowing mention of a Palestinian singer rapping that Israelis “use the press so they can manufacture.” Stephens correctly concludes: “Public education is supposed to create a sense of common citizenship while cultivating the habits of independent thinking. This is a curriculum that magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological groupthink.”

 March 21, 2022. A writer in Commentary Magazine writes about how when he received his Master’s degree in education 20 years ago, his portfolio was judged in part on how well his work demonstrated a “commitment to social justice” as part of a goal of teachers to become “agents of change”. Justice is individual, not social. When people speak of social justice, they are speaking of proportional outcomes by race, which discourages equal opportunity, ambition, and hard work. Teachers should be teaching students knowledge, and thinking for themselves, not being agents of change for the teacher’s narrow ideology. My commitment is to individual merit, not proportional outcomes by race, and for teachers to teach, not push their ideology.

 March 5, 2022. This week’s National Review has a story about the Montgomery County, Md. school system. Administrators promise to come up with a curriculum that “strengthens students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities.” That is the precise opposite of what American schools should be teaching students. They should teach them to treat each other as individuals, to value individual merit, and that race is completely irrelevant. That was the national motto, e pluribus unum, out of many one. It is now time to fight for that ideal, which we used to take for granted, but which is now under massive attack from the far left.

 March 2, 2022. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a column describing how, In Fairfax County Virginia, the school board altered the admissions standards for a top ranked selective Science and Technology High School. They eliminated standardized testing and added subjective criteria in order to reduce the number of Asian students admitted, an outrageous, racist move. A court ruled the move unconstitutional. My crusade is for treating students as individuals, and eliminating race as a criterion for anything.

 Feb. 20, 2022. Some teachers live with the fantasy that they have a first amendment right to use the captive audiences of their classrooms to propagandize their ideology, rather than teach the state adopted standards. They do not. The United States Supreme Court declined to review a decision of a three judge panel in an Indiana case in which the panel ruled: “The first amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system.”

 Feb. 17, 2022. The current Democrat Supt of Schools, Catherine Hoffman, posted an “equity toolkit” which stated “They’re not too young to talk about race!” which recommends that white parents “can and should begin addressing issues of race and racism early, even before their children can speak.” When it got some publicity, they took it down. But we need a Supt of Schools who treats everyone as individuals, regardless of race, and expects teachers to do the same with students, not a race obsessed person like the current Superintendent.

 Feb. 12,2022. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about two people who read 100 hours of leaked videos of 108 workshops of a woke group. The seminars had 6,000 participants. One of the seminars taught that “kindergartners are natural social-justice warriors.” Kindergartners! Another taught that “perfectionism, punctuality, urgency, niceness, worship of the written word, progress, objectivity, rigor, individualism, capitalism and liberalism are some of the characteristics of white-supremacy culture in need of elimination” . There are two reasons I want to take office to fight CRT: its venal racism, and its war against merit and achievement, which if not stopped, will make us a third world country.

 Feb 9, 2022. The State Supt of Schools automatically serves on the Board of Regents. We need diversity of thought among College faculty, and a thorough review of what is happening in the School of Education, where radical teaching prevails. Also, how much is spent on administration: from 1987 to 2012, colleges added more than a half million administrators. Those numbers doubled relative to academic faculty. When I last served on the Board of Regents, I voted against every tuition increase. Same problem k-12: When I became President of my school board, in 1981, we sent district office administrators back to the classroom and spent only 2.5% on district office administration. I have always campaigned to bring that kind of frugality to all school districts, and will make it a priority if elected Supt of Schools.

 Feb. 6, 2022. I previously posted about Woke, Inc., by successful entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. He writes about how ‘wokeness’ has gone from Universities to corporations to public schools. Here’s an example: “Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees ‘to be less white’ and that ‘to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble’ and that ‘white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.’” I am pledged to fight woke reverse-racism in the schools, but this is, unfortunately, a fight for all of society.

 Jan 26, 2022. The New York Times, of all sources, reports on the anti-merit activities of some leftists. In San Francisco, the Board of Education replaced merit-based admissions to a formerly elite academic school with a lottery. A member stated: “When we talk about merit, meritocracy, and especially meritocracy based on standardizing testing, those are racist terms.” The former Chancellor of New York City schools, stated: “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these [high academic] schools.” I would answer: “Neither does anyone else, you idiot. We favor admission by individual merit without regard to race.” If America abandons its traditional reliance on merit it will lose the international competition and be a third world country, like, say, Ghana.

 Jan 19, 2022. Under Jim Crow, whites imposed racial segregation. This was gone by the mid-1960’s. Now the left wing promoters of “equity” want, with drums rolling and flags flying, to go backwards to Jim Crow in reverse. In 2020, Seattle began segregating employees by race for diversity training to force whites to “accept responsibility for their own racism.” This year, a school in Denver held a racially exclusive “Families of Color Playground Night” as part of its racial equity program. A school in Chicago had a racially exclusive “Students of Color Playground Night” as part of its equity program. If elected Superintendent of Schools, I will emphasize that students treat each other as individuals, that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin, and go to war against equity Jim Crow in Arizona.

 Jan 16, 2022. The ASU School of education has a required course called TEL 215: Infant, Child, and Adolescent Development. The text for the course has a chapter called "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race." The class discussion for this chapter includes how these future teachers should articulate how "white people are inherently racist" to their future captive audiences of young elementary students. The Board of Regents (which I would automatically serve on if elected Superintendent) needs to look into what is going on at the ASU School of education.

 Jan 9, 2022. The current Democrat Supt of Schools, Catherine Hoffman, wrote an op ed in the Arizona Republic arguing that biological boys who identify as girls should be able to compete in girls’ sports. There have been numerous reports of previous girl champions in track, and champion sports teams, who can no longer compete because they are up against biological boys. Now word comes from the University of Pennsylvania that an average male swimmer (Lia, formerly Will Thomas) decided to identify as a girl, and is setting national records in freestyle. The crowd is silent when Thomas crosses the finish, cheering for the second place instead. For anyone who cares about girls’ sports, replacing the current Supt needs to be a high priority.

 Jan 6, 2022. I have been an active advocate for parental choice for the past 15 years. In the legislature, I was chair of a conference committee on the education omnibus bills, and killed a provision that had passed the Senate to limit the growth of charter schools. As a result, in my last year as Superintendent of Schools, 2010, Arizona led the nation in attendance at charter schools, at 10% of our students, with Florida second at 7%. Polls show 58% of blacks and 52% if Hispanics favoring charter schools. The only group opposed are white Democrats. If elected this year, I will continue to advocate for parental choice.

 December 29, 2021. When the public wants to stop teachers from using their classrooms to propagandize students, rather than teach them, they claim violation of their first amendment rights. However, a federal appeals court held unanimously that the first amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system.

 December 24, 2021. Lincoln said that when passion prevails over reason, democracy is in trouble. I think of this when I see mobs in the street, with superficial knowledge of a case, wanting to determine guilt or innocence, instead of relying on the jury, which hears all the evidence.

 December 21, 2021. Parental choice: When I was in the legislature in the 90’s, I was chairman of a conference committee and killed a bill to restrict the growth of charter schools. When I left office, Arizona was first in the nation for charters, with 10% of students in charters, while second was Florida with 7%. Polls show 58% of blacks and 52% of hispanics support charters. The only group opposed was left leaning whites.

 December 16, 2021. The vast majority of Americans of all ethnicities are opposed to defunding the police. Yet Mother Jones argued that the police should be defunded even if it did not “poll well”. The authoritarian left wants to impose its will on us — a profoundly undemocratic ideology.

 December 12, 2021. A recent article by Jay Nordlinger describes how CRT is not only anti-intellectual, but is philistine, and is destroying the arts: “The music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven — just to take the big three — is increasingly labeled white, Western, and male. In reality, this music is human. Or universal. [It belongs to everyone] The cops are on the beat, and they are getting stronger. You can hear the tramp of their boots outside the door… Certain people will kill art, and civilization along with it, if we let them. … Don’t let them. Fight.”

 December 4, 2021. One hour interview on Chipsnsalsa, a show for hispanic conservatives. Start at 12:00 minutes. https://www.facebook.com/1489080134703814/videos/213917857555019

 December 1, 2021. A recent poll shows that 75% of blacks and 87% of Hispanics call political correctness “a problem” for the United States. The only group that supports the movement is young liberal white women.