LA left throws fit over lost education agenda

Controversy over an endorsement of elementary and secondary education options stoked by Louisiana’s political left and its fellow travelers serves as a reminder that they cannot tolerate invitations to open, comprehensive, and fact-based inquiry in the education process, a state of affairs only now being corrected.

Earlier this week, Superintendent of State Education Cade Brumley announced a partnership with the web content producer PragerU. Founded by opinion columnist Dennis Prager, its materials provide primers on issues of the day, and has resources dedicated to educational dissemination from kindergarten to 12^th grade. PragerU holds itself out as presenting information as an alternative to leftist paradigms that frequently plague education that completely ignore contrary information questioning their validity, giving students an incomplete picture that serves more to indoctrinate than to educate that PragerU materials seek to overcome.

Mirroring arrangements in several others states, PragerU will make easily accessible to Louisiana educators material congruent with meeting state standards adopted at the beginning of this now-concluding academic year. PragerU was chosen because it has such material. Note that its content doesn’t replace core instructional material, which is determined by local education agencies and not the state, nor is it required for use in state classrooms.

The howls heard from the left after the announcement in actuality trace back three years to when it was defeated in its attempt to force “action civics” into the periodic revision of social studies standards for state schools, an approach that deemphasizes acquisition of impartial factual knowledge and its analysis in favor of guided discussion open to following an agenda that then becomes translated into action outside the classroom. While proponents at first seized the initiative, Brumley and others eventually sidelined that approach in favor of one organized around the theme of American exceptionalism and how the pursuit of liberty has shaped that, where students learn historical facts and, by their high school years, begin to explore to what degree the ideals upon which the country was founded and developed have been realized and can evaluate and explicate viewpoints concerning that.

This, of course, drove crazy the more committed leftist ideologues in public education, who must have cringed or even stroked out when they read in Brumley’s introductory letter to the standards that they illustrated “how the United States has become the greatest country in the history of the world,” which “teach our students to appreciate the majesty of our country and their obligations as citizens to safeguard America’s founding principles,” and finished with quotes from Republican former Pres. Ronald Reagan. Thus, this learning is the basis on which students henceforth are tested from which school and district accountability scores are computed and the basis on which pupil progression and diploma awarding are determined.

So, as PragerU content emphasizes the same sentiments, it’s entirely logical to hold it out as a resource, which elicited leftist outrage because it challenges the stranglehold the left tries to maintain over education. Never forget that the left cannot countenance such challenges because it knows its version of things has serious factual and analytical problems that become obvious when challenged, so it must do everything it can to delegitimize any contrary view to disqualify it as a challenger.

Therefore, naturally enough, from the left arises bogus claims that PragerU content isn’t factual, when in reality when analyzed such charges equate opinionated but factually sustainable views with error merely because they disagree with the preferred narrative. And that exercise is entirely hypocritical because of the enormous amount of inaccurate/biased material the left encourages for insertion into public education over which it raises no concerns.

In several cases, leftists not only didn’t raise alarms over such propaganda entering schooling, but advocated for it. A popular textbook – it’s unknown in how many Louisiana schools it’s used – by a social activist on the left disguised as a historian is riddled with inaccuracies and books similar to it in tone and lack of factual care an organization pushed for dissemination in Louisiana in response to the new social studies standards. Criticized heavily for similar shortcomings is the notorious 1619 Project – whose tone is almost the polar opposite of the new standards – which again may have been taught in Louisiana schools. And, where was the outcry when a teacher union began campaigning for school libraries to adopt the highly-biased NewsGuard rating system, now under legal trouble for censorship activities – and again, with an unknown number of Louisiana schools allowing it in?

Understand that this current rant – which went so far as to have the Democrat chairman of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee state Sen. Cleo Fields, without any legal authority to do so, thereby abusing his panel’s power of reviewing executive appointees, call in Brumley for a closed-door hearing (the committee vets single executive appointees, but the superintendent is appointed by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education without Senate approval) over the matter – comes as a tantrum as part of the grieving process of the left, triggered by its inability to present policies that a healthy majority of Louisiana support that include social studies education. It believes its own ideology that opposition to it is illegitimate, and it can’t wrap its head around the fact that its agenda is discarded and without power.

Let these children throw their fit, while the adults get on with the business those displaying these histrionics neglected for so long.