OUR OWN JOE KUHNS HAS SUCCESSFULLY TAKEN QUALIFIED CANDIDATES TO WINNING BOARD SEATS AND WINNING MAJORITIES. THERE IS A FORMULA THAT WORKS. MANY WOKE BOARDS OF ED ARE NOW FLIPPING TO TRADITIONAL-BASED POLICY BOARD MEMBERS. HIS HOW-TO OUTLINE SHOULD BE A LEARNING EXPERIENCE. 

How to Run a Successful School Board Campaign

Last November, in the town of Oakland, New Jersey, there was an election for two seats on the regional high school school board. The result of the election was to effectively “flip the board”. It put moderate conservatives in the majority by removing a board member who was not sympathetic to conservative ideas regarding education.

The result of the election was a resounding victory for two women who as yet had never been on the board of education.

Oakland is a middle-income suburban town of approximately 13,000 people in western Bergen County. Politically, it tends to be a fairly conservative, predominantly Republican town. If that is the case, how did it happen that there were people from Oakland on the regional BOE who were anything but moderate conservatives? The answer is that many Oakland citizens are like others in that they often don't get out and vote, especially in off-year elections.  Or if they do vote, they vote for governmental positions, but not the school board. Many times, voters have to be convinced that even though they no longer have children in school, they should still be very concerned about what is happening in the schools. This lack of participation often allows people who do have a political agenda that does not reflect the community or its beliefs and values.

Very early in the process, one should attend school board meetings to see firsthand what is going on and get a sense of the personalities and factions involved, and where they stand on the issues. Look at the district website. This will give valuable information about district policies, budget matters, test scores, and curriculum. Know what is happening in the school and the classroom. (One very important issue is that reading the curriculum alone will not always adequately reveal what is being taught. It is also important to learn about what online instructional materials are being used.)

Talk to people in the town to find out what their concerns are regarding the schools. Some people are primarily concerned about how school expenditures will affect their taxes. Some will be concerned with athletic programs and others with how test scores compare with state averages. And today, many people are concerned with ideologies being promoted in the classroom. All of these were issues in our town.

 A successful campaign will require financial resources. In

our town of about 13,000 people we spent between $12,000 and $15,000. I will not go into requirements for handling and reporting on campaign funds, as this will change from state to state depending on local laws.

 When the above things are taken care of, how do we actually get people to get out to vote for our candidate?

Many people think that the key to successful campaigning, even on the local level, is reaching people via social media. While this is useful as an adjunct method, the most important thing is to get a staff of people out to meet and talk with the voters through door-to-door campaigning. Telephoning and especially “robocalling” are not adequate substitutes. Our group of volunteers went out for weeks, knocking on doors, meeting people face-to-face, talking to voters and getting their support. This is most essential when you are promoting a candidate who has never been on the board, who may be largely unknown to the town people, and running against someone already on the board who is well known to people.

 It was not possible to knock on every door in Oakland. Since we had about ten people who were campaigning on a consistent basis, it was necessary to determine which voters were worth the time to contact. The County Board of Elections provided lists of voters (through the Open Public Records Act) showing voters' party affiliation and how many times each voter had voted over the last four elections. If a voter had voted four out of the last four elections there would be the number 4 next to his name, etc. Since this was an off-year election in which voter turnout is typically not high, to maximize our effort we only paid visits to those voters who were most likely to get out and vote. So we visited all of the voters who were registered Republicans or Independents and had voted three or four times out of the last four elections.

In short, don't waste your time on people who as indicated by past behavior probably won't vote. Go after those who probably will vote and persuade them.

Our candidate provided us with her business cards with her telephone number. We handed them out as we spoke to people and invited them to call the candidate herself if they had any questions. Most did not, but gestures of this type are very important to establish a connection with the voters.

School board elections in New Jersey are non-partisan contests, and our school board campaign was kept separate from any political party. However, the Oakland Republican Party (ORC) was campaigning to get Republican candidates into several mayoral and town council positions. To increase their chances in these contests the ORC initiated a campaign to get Republican voters to sign up for Vote by Mail. The rationale behind this was that Democrats in our area would typically be well behind in the election day vote but would often win big with vote by mail and thus win the election.

 When election day comes, many people for one reason or another fail to make it to the polls. They may be sick, or the kids may be sick. Or they could be delayed getting home from work. The weather might be terrible. In any case, on election day the window to vote in person is about 14 hours (less for most people, who work a full day). Democrats got people to vote by mail early, and thus “banked their votes”. This advantage of getting their people to vote by mail was often decisive in Democrat victories. In Oakland, the effort by the ORC did not completely close the gap between Republican and Democrat early voting registration, but it narrowed it enough so that the Republican advantage in voting day totals brought victory in all of the town council election.

 In a school board election, the voters who will support candidates with common sense conservative ideas will be largely Republicans. Thus, the effort to better turn out Republican voters in this way no doubt greatly assisted our school board candidates.

Our candidates also sent out three mailers to every household in the town during the campaign. These should be colorful, hard-hitting, and listing clearly the ideas the candidate is running on. The points should be brief and concise. Do not write too much on the mailer because many people will not take the time to read something too long and wordy.

Also, a campaign letter was sent to every household to coincide with the time that vote-by-mail ballots were being received by those who requested them.

If you are campaigning against a candidate currently on the school board, it is not a problem to list on a flier or handout some of the votes, decisions, or actions the opponent has taken which citizens may find objectionable. This is vital to getting support for your candidate. But avoid mean personal attacks on the opponent. This may have the effect of drumming up sympathy and support for your opponent. Try to always keep it positive.

Lawn signs are actually important, both the number of them and how they are strategically placed. When we met a voter who seemed very sympathetic to our candidate, we would always ask if we might a lawn sign on his or her property. To the average citizen, seeing a great many signs for one candidate, indicates a high level of support in the community. If nothing else, this will engender an interest in that candidate.

Of course, what we did was tailored to our particular town and to the resources we had. These methods we adapted may not be entirely applicable to other towns which are quite different demographically or politically. The first step is always to analyze your town, and what is the best way with the resources you have to get your fellow citizens out to vote for sensible candidates.

 
EDUCATION IN AMERICA TODAY:

JOE KUHNS

Mr. Kuhns background in both law enforcement, academic instruction and his resent research and field work in Critical Race Theory gives him a unique advantage in both analyzing and discerning solutions for the academic curriculum that best prepares our students for the challenges in a changing world. Joe will focus on issues in education that have gained traction while becoming political with media attention. His page will also present new tools of education that enhance the bedrock of matriculating our children and adults to successful careers and a productive life.         

A Great Move by Arizona

Article 3

By Joseph Kuhns

 For those following the issue, it is very apparent that one of the greatest threats the country faces is what is happening in our schools. In a tremendous number of public schools across the country the curriculum is under the control of leftists who are instituting Critical race theory and the LGBT Agenda as prominent parts of the curriculum. Many parents who are opposed to this either try to homeschool their children (very difficult if not impossible for most) or try to find a private school as an alternative to public school. But private school can be financially beyond the reach of a large number of parents. 

      Arizona may have found a solution. Governor Ducey has just signed H.B.2853, which means, in the words of Majority Leader Ben Toma, “We fund students, not systems”. Under the law, every K-12 student in Arizona will be eligible for an education scholarship of $6,000, which can be used for any school-related purpose, including going to public, private, religious, or charter schools.

      There are two principal advantages to Arizona's approach. The first is that everything is improved by competition. If students are trapped in under performing schools with no way of choosing a better option, then what incentive do the ineffective school districts have to improve. They have a captive audience which can't go anywhere. This phenomenon has been repeated again and again in economically disadvantaged, usually minority neighborhoods. Parents desperately want something better or their children, but being unable to afford private or religious schools for their children there is nothing they can do. Giving parents this option requires deficient public schools to improve if they want to retain students.

      The second advantage involves the preeminent issue causing turmoil in K-12 education. That is the fact that the curriculum is infused with the teaching of the socially destructive doctrine of Critical Race Theory and the promotion of the LGBT agenda. Many parents do not want this for their children, but find they can do little to affect change. This law in Arizona gives them an avenue to protect their own children from it and to pressure the schools to change.

      Laws of the type just enacted in Arizona will very predictably be opposed by various actors on the political left, in particular the teacher's unions. These organizations care only about their own power and the welfare of the teachers, but they care little about the children in the schools. They will do everything in their power to stymie alternatives to public education where they maintain their monopoly. It must also be mentioned here that the teacher's unions derive much of their power from their close connection to the Democratic Party, to which they are a major contributor.

      Needless to say, it would be very beneficial to the nation if more states would follow Arizona's example and enact similar laws.

COMMON SENSE

Article two submitted by J. Kuhns

I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated Children are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school. That’s why I am.

Story by Paul Rossi

Apr 13, 2021

I am a teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan. Ten years ago, I changed careers when I discovered how rewarding it is to help young people explore the truth and beauty of mathematics. I love my work.

As a teacher, my first obligation is to my students. But right now, my school is asking me to embrace “antiracism” training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to them and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding.

“Antiracist” training sounds righteous, but it is the opposite of truth in advertising. It requires teachers like myself to treat students differently on the basis of race. Furthermore, in order to maintain a united front for our students, teachers at Grace are directed to confine our doubts about this pedagogical framework to conversations with an in-house “Office of Community Engagement” for whom every significant objection leads to a foregone conclusion. Any doubting students are likewise “challenged” to reframe their views to conform to this orthodoxy.

I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.

My school, like so many others, induces students via shame and sophistry to identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed. Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

All of this is done in the name of “equity,” but it is the opposite of fair. In reality, all of this reinforces the worst impulses we have as human beings: our tendency toward tribalism and sectarianism that a truly liberal education is meant to transcend.

Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.) It was a bait-and-switch “self-care” seminar that labelled “objectivity,” “individualism,” “fear of open conflict,” and even “a right to comfort” as characteristics of white supremacy. I doubted that these human attributes — many of them virtues reframed as vices — should be racialized in this way. In the Zoom chat, I also questioned whether one must define oneself in terms of a racial identity at all. My goal was to model for students that they should feel safe to question ideological assertions if they felt moved to do so.

It seemed like my questions broke the ice. Students and even a few teachers offered a broad range of questions and observations. Many students said it was a more productive and substantive discussion than they expected.

However, when my questions were shared outside this forum, violating the school norm of confidentiality, I was informed by the head of the high school that my philosophical challenges had caused “harm” to students, given that these topics were “life and death matters, about people’s flesh and blood and bone.” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”

He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.” The school’s director of studies added that my remarks could even constitute harassment.

A few days later, the head of school ordered all high school

Advisors to read a public reprimand of my conduct out loud to every student in the school. It was a surreal experience, walking the halls alone and hearing the words emitting from each classroom: “Events from last week compel us to underscore some aspects of our mission and share some thoughts about our community,” the statement began. “At independent schools, with their history of predominantly white populations, racism colludes with other forms of bias (sexism, classism, ableism and so much more) to undermine our stated ideals, and we must work hard to undo this history.”

Students from low-income families experience culture shock at our school. Racist incidents happen. And bias can influence relationships. All true. But addressing such problems with a call to “undo history” lacks any kind of limiting principle and pairs any allegation of bigotry with a priori guilt. My own contract for next year requires me to “participate in restorative practices designed by the Office of Community Engagement” in order to “heal my relationship with the students of color and other students in my classes.” The details of these practices remain unspecified until I agree to sign.

I asked my uncomfortable questions in the “self-care” meeting because I felt a duty to my students. I wanted to be a voice for the many students of different backgrounds who have approached me over the course of the past several years to express their frustration with indoctrination at our school, but are afraid to speak up.

They report that, in their classes and other discussions, they must never challenge any of the premises of our “antiracist” teachings, which are deeply informed by Critical Race Theory. These concerns are confirmed for me when I attend grade-level and all-school meetings about race or gender issues. There, I witness student after student sticking to a narrow script of acceptable responses. Teachers praise insights when they articulate the existing framework or expand it to apply to novel domains. Meantime, it is common for teachers to exhort students who remain silent that “we really need to hear from you.”

But what does speaking up mean in a context in which white students are asked to interrogate their “white saviorism” but also “not make their antiracist practice about them”? We are compelling them to tiptoe through a minefield of double-binds. According to the school’s own standard for discursive violence, this constitutes abuse.

Every student at the school must also sign a “Student Life Agreement,” which requires them to aver that “the world as we understand it can be hard and extremely biased,” that they commit to “recognize and acknowledge their biases when we come to school, and interrupt those biases,” and accept that they will be “held accountable should they fall short of the agreement.” A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”

When I questioned what form this resistance takes, examples presented by a colleague included “persisting with a colorblind ideology,” “suggesting that we treat everyone with respect,” “a belief in meritocracy,” and “just silence.” In a special assembly in February 2019, our head of school said that the impact of words and images perceived as racist — regardless of intent — is akin to “using a gun or a knife to kill or injure someone.”

Imagine being a young person in this environment. Would you risk voicing your doubts, especially if you had never heard a single teacher question it?

Last fall, juniors and seniors in my Art of Persuasion class expressed dismay with the “Grace bubble” and sought to engage with a wider range of political viewpoints. Since the BLM protests often came up in our discussions, I thought of assigning Glenn Loury, a Brown University professor and public intellectual whose writings express a nuanced, center-right position on racial issues in America. Unfortunately, my administration put the kibosh on my proposal.

The head of the high school responded to me that “people like Loury’s lived experience—and therefore his derived social philosophy” made him an exception to the rule that black thinkers acknowledge structural racism as the paramount impediment in society. He added that “the moment we are in institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate,” and discussing Loury’s ideas would “only confuse and/or enflame students, both those in the class and others that hear about it outside of the class.” He preferred I assign “mainstream white conservatives,” effectively denying black students the opportunity to hear from a black professor who holds views that diverge from the orthodoxy pushed on them.

I find it self-evidently racist to filter the dissemination of an idea based on the race of the person who espouses it. I find the claim that exposing 11th and 12th graders to diverse views on an important societal issue will only “confuse” them to be characteristic of a fundamentalist religion, not an educational philosophy.

My administration says that these constraints on discourse are necessary to shield students from harm. But it is clear to me that these constraints serve primarily to shield their ideology from harm — at the cost of students’ psychological and intellectual development.

It was out of concern for my students that I spoke out in the “self-care” meeting, and it is out of that same concern that I write today. I am concerned for students who crave a broader range of viewpoints in class. I am concerned for students trained in “race explicit” seminars to accept some opinions as gospel, while discarding as immoral disconfirming evidence. I am concerned for the dozens of students during my time at Grace who shared with me that they have been reproached by teachers for expressing views that are not aligned with the new ideology.

One current student paid me a visit a few weeks ago. He tapped faintly on my office door, anxiously looking both ways before entering. He said he had come to offer me wordsof support for speaking up at the meeting.

I thanked him for his comments, but asked him why he seemed so nervous. He told me he was worried that a particular teacher might notice this visit and “it would mean that I would get in trouble.” He reported to me that this teacher once gave him a lengthy “talking to” for voicing a conservative opinion in class. He then remembered with a sigh of relief that this teacher was absent that day. I looked him in the eyes. I told him he was a brave young man for coming to see me, and that he should be proud of that.

Then I sent him on his way. And I resolved to write this piece.

CORRECTION: The anecdote about Glenn Loury was originally attributed to the head of Grace Church School. In fact, those statements were made by the head of the high school. Apologies for the error.

I am extremely proud to publish this piece by Paul Rossi. If you are a teacher who finds yourself in a similar situation; if you want to speak out but are afraid to risk your job; if you believe that political indoctrination has no place in schools, Paul would love to hear from you. Write to him at: teachingfortruth@gmail.com

Submitted by

Joe Kunes

Is the West More Guilty Than Everyone Else?

By Joseph Kuhns

Article 1

The political left has had a campaign underway for some time now. It is an effort to establish the narrative that Western Civilization is the central problem of the present world and of history as well. The charge is that Western Civilization is essentially an evil entity. It is the embodiment of all of those things which in the mind of the left constitute the aggregate of evil in our world: racism, slavery, sexism, imperialism. And the connecting common threads of all of these things are “whiteness” and “white supremacy”. Together, these evils are believed by the woke crowd to constitute the essence of Western Civilization. And the left Judges the West to be uniquely guilty of these things. The left will never ascribe any of these evils to other cultures or civilizations.

In fact, all of these evils are manifestly present in the history of Western Civilization. But what the left ignores is that they are by no stretch of the imagination exclusively a Western phenomenon. They are present in the history of all civilizations and cultures, in many cases far more so than in the West. You could say they are the common historical sins of all of mankind.

Let us take racism first. Most of us today consider as self-evident truths the ideas that all people are equal in human dignity, equally deserving of respect as human beings, and that all peoples have rights which must be respected by others. But these ideas only began to be gradually accepted anywhere as universal truths in the last few centuries. The people on the left , especially our young students with their gross lack of historical knowledge, do not understand this.

Throughout history, the common way of thinking in human societies everywhere was essentially tribal. People grouped themselves into tribes or nations, with a strong sense of obligation to their own tribe or nation. But their sense of obligation did not extend to those outside of their own group. This was particularly true when they encountered the “other”, the outsider who had markedly different culture, language and religion, or who was very different in physical appearance. The “other” was seldom recognized as equal to the members of one's own people. Racism is just one particularly malignant manifestation of this way of thinking.

Europeans certainly thought like this, but so did all human beings in general. For example, the Chinese did not consider those from outside of the Middle Kingdom (including Western people) to be the equals of themselves. It was because outsiders did not share their Chinese culture. The Muslims did not consider non-Muslims to be equal in dignity and human rights to Muslims. Has this ever really changed? Long ago as a soldier in Vietnam, I saw how the majority ethnic Vietnamese looked with great disdain upon the Montegnard tribes of the Vietnamese Central Highlands who were racially different, had different languages, and a much less advanced culture than the Vietnamese. One could mention the Hutu and the Tutsis in Ruanda among so many other modern examples.

And what about slavery? Yes, it was practiced by Western peoples. But it was certainly not invented by them. And it was also practiced by people in every other part of the world as well in one form or another.

The African slave trade was not invented by Europeans as it was a well-established reality in Africa long before the Europeans arrived. Africans from one tribe captured and kept other Africans as slaves. And once the Europeans arrived and an off-shoot known as the Atlantic slave trade began, it was Africans who captured fellow Africans to sell them to the Europeans. In fact, several of the West African cities and states of the period became wealthy due to the Atlantic slave trade, which formed a major part of their economy.

In his book entitled “African Perspectives on Colonialism” University of Ghana Professor A. Abu Boahen relates a conversation in 1820 between a British diplomat and the king of the Ashanti state in West Africa. This was before the imposition of European colonial rule in most of Africa but after the passing of the Act of Parliament in 1807 forbidding further British participation in the African slave trade. The Ashanti king was very upset that the British would no longer trade in slaves. He saw nothing wrong with this trade and even justified it with these words, as reported by the British diplomat, “If I fight a king and kill him when he is insolent, then certainly I must have his gold, and his slaves, and the people are mine too.”

And before the Europeans came onto the scene, there was a booming slave trade of Africans being kidnapped and sent north as slaves into the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Middle East. This continued after the Atlantic slave trade ended. Paradoxically, it was the imposition of European colonial rule which brought an end to this facet of the African slave trade.

Slavery was a major factor in the Muslim world until very recent times. This was because the Quran as well as the Hadith (the words and example of Mohammad) explicitly permitted slavery. Thus slavery was given religious sanction. Besides Africans, large numbers of Europeans were captured and enslaved by the Muslims too.

In the Americas, slavery existed among the Native American tribes. Warfare was very common among Native American tribes, and captives were often enslaved. A key example of this was the Kwakiutl tribe of the Pacific Northwest.

Let us consider imperialism. We all know the story of Western imperialism. But imperialism has been a staple of human behavior since time began.

The left loves to tell us that the United States is on “stolen land”. My response is that ALL land is stolen. If you could go into the history of virtually any nation, people or tribe, I believe you would find that just about every people or ethnic group today is living on land which at some point in the past their ancestors pushed someone else off of. Either that or they moved in and seized control of the land and dominated those already there, perhaps absorbing them into their own population.

Let us look at a few examples or two from the history of non-Western peoples. Today, the country of Turkey is universally accepted as the legitimate homeland of the Turkish people. Nobody disputes this. But the Turks didn't originate in Turkey. Rather they originated far to the east in Central Asia. They migrated into the Middle East and in the 11th Century seized the territory now called Turkey from the Byzantine Empire by military conquest. And how did the contiguous Muslim world get so large in a short period after the death of Mohammad, reaching from Morocco and Spain all the way to Afghanistan? It was through imperialist conquest by Arab armies!

Look at the other great non-Western empires of the past, beginning in ancient times. Consider the empires of Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, China, the Ottoman Turks, the Songhay in West Africa, the Mongols, the Moghuls, the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas in South America. How did these empires grow so big? They did so by military conquest, in other words, imperialism. And the expansion of these empires often entailed far more violence and cruelty than the European empires of the modern period. The European nations also created empires together covering most of the world. They were the most successful empire builders. This was mainly because at the time of their expansion they possessed an advanced technology in seafaring and weaponry which enabled them to do it.

We read in history about the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez, who overthrew the Aztecs of Mexico in the early 16th Century. But just who were the Aztecs? Were they just a peaceful tribe living in Mexico? No, they were an empire. They had conquered and were holding under their control many weaker Indian tribes. In fact, this made it possible for Cortez, who had only a small number of Spaniards, to conquer the Aztec Empire. Some of these subject tribes allied themselves with Cortez to throw off the Aztec yoke. When he defeated the Aztecs, many of Cortez's troops were native warriors, not Spaniards.

And how about more recent times? The 1930's and 1940's saw the brutal and bloody imperialist expansion of Japan resulting in many millions of deaths in Asia. And there is present-day China's expansion into the South China Sea in violation of international law. Are these things not imperialism?

Nothing I have said is intended to justify or make excuses for the existence of racism, slavery, or imperialism in Western Civilization. These things are always wrong. Rather I wish to put things in historical perspective and context, by pointing out that throughout history these were common evils in all of human society and not just in the West.

But finally there is another aspect of all of this, something the American left ignores completely. The development of the ideas which counteracted these evils were an outgrowth primarily of Western Civilization itself.

There are two main sources of Western thinking about social morality: the Judeo Christian tradition and the European Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries. From these sources came the ideas of universal human rights and the equality of rights of all men before God. These concepts were further developed by Enlightenment philosophers, men such as John Locke, Voltaire, Montesqieu, and others.

It is true that these ideas did not take hold everywhere in Western Civilization immediately and simultaneously. It was a gradually developing process taking many years. But that is how history always works. And to the extent that these ideas have been accepted in others parts of the world, it was due to the spread of the ideas from Western Civilization.

To conclude this argument, Western Civilization has never been and never will be perfect and without blemish. But the viewpoint of the American left, which is to consider Western Civilization as a unique embodiment of all that is evil in human history with no redeeming features, is factually incorrect and an example of the kind of bias and hatred which blinds one to reality and rational thou