1/ 🚨BREAKING: Lawsuit filed today against educational agencies, teachers, principal, & CEO responsible for hosting workshops requiring children to make public professions about their racial, sexual, gender & religious identities, some of which were singled out for interrogation.

2/ Educators directed the plaintiff "to reveal his identities in a controlled, yet non-private setting, to scrutiny and official labeling," and are "coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm."
3/ The educators "repeatedly threatened William Clark with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements."
4/ Plaintiffs claim that the educators' "coercive and intrusive behavior compelled William Clark’s protected speech and invaded his privacy, violating his constitutional rights under the First Amendment and his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."
5/ The new curriculum, based on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, was done stealthily: "The generic name and syllabi provided to parents remained the same," and "parents were not made aware of the ideological turn in the curriculum."
6/ The new educational sessions were not "descriptive or informational" but were "normative and prescriptive."

"Parents...were not aware of the turn towards coercive, ideological indoctrination until they began seeing the detrimental effects it worked up in their children."
7/ "The teacher’s material stated who qualified as oppressors, and who in virtue of their gender and race harbored 'inherent belief in the inferiority' of others," which "assigned moral attributes to pupils based on their race, gender, sexual orientation and religion."
8/ Plaintiff "was obliged to profess himself complicit in 'internalized privilege [which] includes acceptance of a belief in the inherent inferiority of the [corresponding] oppressed group' [and] supporting 'the inherent superiority or normalcy of one’s own privileged group.'"
9/ The education agency "Democracy Prep" encouraged radical activism against existing school policies.
10/ The plaintiff, student William Clark, has suffered "severe mental and emotional stress" resulting from the hostile environment and is "living in fear" of retaliation.

This proved justified, as he has now been suspended and accused of being a racist.
11/ COUNT I: VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
12/ COUNT II: VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE U.S CONSTITUTION
13/ COUNT III: VIOLATION OF THE FIFTH & FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT (42 U.S.C. § 1983) (Due Process: Invasion of Privacy & Equal Protection)
14/ COUNT IV: VIOLATION OF THE FIRST & FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT (42 U.S.C. § 1983) (Substantive Due Process: Establishment Clause, Family Integrity &
Retaliation)
15/ COUNT V: Title VI Violation of 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq. (Intentional and Retaliatory Discrimination on The Basis Of Color, Race and Religion against Authority, DPAC, DPPS and Defendants in their individual capacity)
16/ COUNT VI: (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681 et seq.)
17/ COUNT VII: (Breach of Contract)

Parents were essentially fooled into approving of the new curriculum because the ideological alterations were not made apparent. The same old syllabi were used, so parents were "caught off guard."
18/ To my knowledge this is the first lawsuit of its kind. Keep a close eye on this one, as it could set a precedent and cause a lot of dominoes to start falling.

More from Education

When the university starts sending out teaching evaluation reminders, I tell all my classes about bias in teaching evals, with links to the evidence. Here's a version of the email I send, in case anyone else wants to poach from it.

1/16


When I say "anyone": needless to say, the people who are benefitting from the bias (like me) are the ones who should helping to correct it. Men in math, this is your job! Of course, it should also be dealt with at the institutional level, not just ad hoc.
OK, on to my email:
2/16

"You may have received automated reminders about course evals this fall. I encourage you to fill the evals out. I'd be particularly grateful for written feedback about what worked for you in the class, what was difficult, & how you ultimately spent your time for this class.

3/16

However, I don't feel comfortable just sending you an email saying: "please take the time to evaluate me". I do think student evaluations of teachers can be valuable: I have made changes to my teaching style as a direct result of comments from student teaching evaluations.
4/16

But teaching evaluations have a weakness: they are not an unbiased estimator of teaching quality. There is strong evidence that teaching evals tend to favour men over women, and that teaching evals tend to favour white instructors over non-white instructors.
5/16
We've been falsely told 'schools are safe', 'don't drive community transmission', & teachers don't have a higher risk of infection repeatedly by govt & their advisors- to justify some of the most negligent policies in history. 🧵


data shows *both* primary & secondary school teachers are at double the risk of confirmed infection relative to comparable positivity in the general population. ONS household infection data also clearly show that children are important sources of transmission.

Yet, in the parliamentary select meeting today, witnesses like Jenny Harries repeated the same claims- that have been debunked by the ONS data, and the data released by the @educationgovuk today. How many lives have been lost to these lies? How many more people have long COVID?

has repeatedly pointed out errors & gaps in the ONS reporting of evidence around risk of infection among teachers- and it's taken *months* to get clarity on this. The released data are a result of months of campaigning by her, the @NEU and others.

Rather than being transparent about the risk of transmission in school settings & mitigating this, the govt (& many of its advisors) has engaged in dismissing & denying evidence that's been clear for a while. Evidence from the govt's own surveys. And global evidence.

Why?

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