Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Scott Yenor and Anna Miller
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.

Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.

Jeremy C. Young and Jeffrey Sachs
The Daily Beast

Excerpt: The legislative war on college and university free speech has sadly become a persistent feature of the policymaking process in statehouses across the country. Another round of state legislative sessions has come and gone and with it many new proposals that would impose extensive restrictions on what can be taught in higher education classrooms.

Robert C. Platt & Steven McGuire
Real Clear Education

“All children, except one, grow up,” wrote J.M. Barrie in “Peter Pan.” Today’s college and university administrators seem eager to prove him wrong. American students are increasingly micromanaged, coddled, and, as a result, controlled by the ever-growing ranks of bureaucrats who run their campus Neverlands. Now some institutions want to continue this infantilizing behavior after students graduate.

Alumni-affairs offices have developed overbearing codes of conduct to regulate volunteers and, in some cases, everyone who attends alumni events. Some of these codes prohibit constitutionally protected speech and require signatories to support institutional orthodoxies on topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.

J. David Goodman
New York Times

Excerpt: Cheryl Hensley, a librarian in Houston, was excited for the start of school. A veteran of four decades in the city’s public school system, she had stocked her library at Lockhart Elementary, a mostly Black school, with $40,000 in new books, and won a statewide award for her work. Then, late last month, Ms. Hensley, 62, was told she was no longer needed: The school’s library would be one of dozens turned into multipurpose computer rooms and used, in part, for discipline.

Alexander Schmidt
Globe Gazette

Excerpt: Books are being pulled from the shelves of Mason City Schools' libraries to comply with newly enacted state legislation Gov. Kim Reynolds says will protect children from damaging and obscene material.

At its Monday, July 17 meeting, the Mason City School Board conducted the first reading of a series of policy changes that would bring the district into compliance with newly enacted statewide legislation, most notably regarding the review of instructional materials and the district's policy towards students' gender identity. The policy changes, as recommended by the Iowa Association of School Boards, were made as a result of a sweeping educational reform bill championed by legislative Republicans and signed by Reynolds in May.

Oliver Milman
The Guardian

Excerpt: Videos that compare climate activists to Nazis, portray solar and wind energy as environmentally ruinous and claim that current global heating is part of natural long-term cycles will be made available to young schoolchildren in Florida, after the state approved their use in its public school curriculum.