The most insidious part of the left’s Gramscian march through our culture is their takeover of the education system.
I am of the age when I can take qualified charitable distributions from my IRA so I’m looking for charities to help fight this. Here are some ideas that have occurred to me.
An organization to support the admittedly small part of the population that will homeschool their children. A big organization here is the homeschooling legal defense fund HSLDF. As their name implies, they support parents who are being harassed by the truancy people. But they also provide support for parents, too, homeschool such as arranging play dates for homeschooled children.
There are other more local home school organizations, such as the Texas Home School Coalition.
Moms For Liberty fights it out inside the education industry by for example, putting up candidates for school boards. They must be effective since they’re hated by the left and received an extremist label by the SPLC.
Edchoice advocates for school choice laws. There’s been some success in Republican leaning states, although there has been resistance by sellout Republicans. Texas Governor Greg Abbott had to clean house in the Texas legislature after they torpedoed his school choice law.
None of these will give immediate results and they may not have a chance to affect the culture before a shooting Civil War breaks out.
Bob-Do it! I have done it. One of my charitable IRA donations is to the National Association of Scholars. another is good ol’ Hillsdale.
In the event of Civil War !!, the South shall rise and snuff the dirty Dems out. Filthy buggers, also known as Yankees. Mamdani is one.
Bob, another organization that I would recommend is Defending Eduction: https://defendinged.org
I gather their core effort initially was to research the various laws and rules in the states and localities; and then put together educational programs for parents and other activists who want to learn how to correct the direction of their local school boards, superintendents of education, state legal structures and to education legislatures with model legislation, etc. They will take on teachers’ unions in some cases since they are often a major blockage to reform.
They provide the guidance and background on the best avenues to use, etc. to enhance the chances of legal and political success.
They will also aggressively pursue law suits of universities or others when they perceive DEI or related violations of state laws etc. are discovered (sometimes by selective undercover investigations).
If we count the start of the decline at Woodrow Wilson (arguably it was a bit sooner, but he was the first socialist president), that was my grandparents’ era.
So we are into the 5th generation “away” at this point (my grandkids).
You may have noticed that I managed to quote every man on Mount Rushmore plus Eisenhower and Reagan. Their greatness lies in fighting for the right of Americans—real Americans—to make America great again.
RTWT – and he had a great “picture” of Washington on a Harley!
I would say your contributions to NAS are a waste of money. I joined NAS early on and even attended a general meeting, which I enjoyed. However, with a change of leadership, and the retirement of many older faculty members, such as myself and a very active member I was friends with over at Univ. of Hartford, it became a very ineffective organization. I dropped my membership after it became apparent that all NAS was doing was churning out policy papers. Now mind you, the papers were well-researched, and were on the mark. Such papers have zero effect on the administrations and far left faculty. The organization lost its “boots on the ground” faculty within institutions, and so became irrelevant. Basically, the classic liberal and conservative faculty which were the backbone of NAS are all gone, and of course replaced with far left faculty.
Physicsguy: Heh. I had a long and pointed (but friendly) e-mail exchange with NAS President Peter Wood six years ago on precisely this issue. My parting shot:
“There’s a lot more both of us could say about all this, but I’ll stop here. I’m making these comments and suggestions in the same spirit as Michael Anton’s notorious “Flight 93 Election” article, in which he basically asked: If Conservatism Inc. has been doing such a great job, how come we’re losing on all fronts? NAS’s current business model appears to be based primarily on producing long and well-researched reports on the Left’s continuing depredations. That has its place, but: I’m tired of reading about the Left’s latest outrages. I want to stop and if possible undo and reverse them. As you know, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is. In the near future, I hope to be able to devote more time to this as well. But I want to back organizations that are prepared to fight, not just write. I’d be happy to talk with some or all of the board members, on Zoom or in person (I’ve kept the family home in […], get up there at least several times a year, and could make it down to NYC for a day). In closing for now, I’ll recommend Mark Bauerlein’s latest article in American Greatness, aptly entitled “When Will Conservatives Understand That It’s Not a Contest of Ideas?”. This is about Who-Whom. The Left understands that. Time we did as well.
My offer to meet with the board was tactfully ignored. I’ve kept in touch with the NAS and still send them an occasional contribution, but most of my charitable giving now goes to organizations that litigate, like Bill Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection Foundation (LIF).
On the plus side, the NAS has produced an extremely useful set of detailed K-12 standards in Civics, Social Studies, English, Math, and Science:
I’d be interested in your opinion, as a retired physics professor, of the standards for math and science.
Cicero: another way to fight back, especially for us retired guys, is to get involved in state and local policy. Since retiring from higher ed two years ago, I’ve gotten involved in efforts to reform K-12 public education in Alabama. Finally, as a transplanted New Englander, I had a back-and-forth with former commenter “DNW” on the “correlation of forces” between North and South in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when such strategic calculations seemed, sadly, relevant. I’m pretty sure they’ll become relevant again.
Hubert,
Like all NAS white papers, the ones you list for math and science are well done, and list common sense objectives, and will go absolutely nowhere. The papers fail to address the key problem: the takeover of K-12, and academia by the left. Until there’s a real solution to retake K-12 and colleges (which I wish I knew), no change such as NAS proposes is ever going to happen.
3 years before I retired, the college revamped its GE program. Basically, the far left faculty gutted all area requirements and replaced the whole system with a student designed system. You know how that turns out. The STEM faculty fought against it, well physics, chem, and math did, the biologists were split as they had hired some leftist women. Physics in particular was accused of teaching nothing but white racism physics. We were told that we were ignoring African physics as a “way of knowing”. I asked if the person who was making such an accusation would like to test her theory of the invalidity of Newton’s view of gravity by jumping off a building. Crickets. You can’t fight such with logic and reason and papers. And our Education Department was busy producing K-12 Marxists to go out to the schools.
NAS does nothing in this regard. Sad, but true.
Physicsguy, you have a board of trustees. What are they doing to fix the school? If the answer is nothing, ask yourself how the board is chosen and what sort of person lands on it. Decay is a choice.
Art Deco
The Board was long ago compromised by previous presidents. Now composed of rich alums who are also leftists, so nothing is going to change.
Physicsguy: thanks for your take on the NAS standards. You worked at a small private liberal arts college in the Northeast. They’re among the worst (with some honorable exceptions–e.g. the new campus of California-based Thomas Aquinas College in Northfield, MA). It’s a little different at a large public research university in a deep-red state in the Southeast. The same problems are there, but the state has more leverage and is starting to flex it. See, for example, Alabama Senate Bill 129 (SB129), an anti-DEI law enacted in 2024:
Alabama Senate Bill 129 (now codified as Alabama Act 2024-34) is a state law that prohibits public entities—including state agencies, local boards of education, and public institutions of higher education—from maintaining or funding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, programs, and policies. The legislation, which went into full effect on October 1, 2024, also bars these institutions from requiring students or employees to participate in DEI training or personally affirm “divisive concepts,” and mandates that multi-occupancy restrooms on college campuses be designated based on biological sex. (Google AI summary)
Different states, different political cultures, different possibilities. You now live in Florida, where you have a similar law. True, having a law is no guarantee of good outcomes. It’s a constant struggle against institutional inertia–and worse. For example, UFL has just hired the former president of the University of Alabama, a DEI supporter who left Alabama after SB129 became law. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
Alabama will be getting a new governor in the fall. Chances are it’ll be current U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, who was elected to the Senate in 2020 as a counterweight to the protegée of outgoing swampmeister Richard Shelby. I think Tuberville has sized up the Senate as a corrupt and deliberately ineffectual institution. He wants to get things done, which is why he’s leaving D.C. and running for governor. Look for real changes, including changes in K-12 public education.
Deco: Physicsguy is happily out of the fray. It’s not his headache anymore. And boards of trustees are mostly useless (see UFL example above). We know what kind of person lands on them and why they’re selected. No need for lectures on that score. I’ve raised the BOT issue with legislators in Alabama. They recognize the problems but are largely dependent on the governor to make good BOT appointments to the public institutions. Fortunately, the current governor–an establishment GOP figure dubbed “Meemaw”–is on her way out. Here’s hoping things will change for the better under new management. Maybe we can put a dent in Physicsguy’s pessimism.
Hubert,
All you said is quite true. Where I worked was one of the “Little Ivies” and they really are the worst. Yes, so glad to be in Florida and I know DeSantis has worked hard to turn things around at the state university level; but it is a struggle. While I will definitely vote for Donalds as the next governor, I’m not convinced he will be as effective as DeSantis…..though those are big shoes to fill.
On a more positive note: I’m a member of the EAA chapter at Fernandina Beach airport. The chapter is much more involved with education, than building planes. The Nassau school district own 2 airplanes used to support the aviation program in the high schools. The chapter maintains the planes for the schools, and we have a scholarship program that fully support qualified students to get their PPL paid by us. Nassau county is extremely red,and the schools reflect that. However, FB has always been a vacation spot for rich northeast liberals in the spring, and now some of them have moved and a few got on the city council. They passed a paid parking law, refused to let a citizens referendum go forward, and now the downtown is dying. The locusts are invading.
I live in Duval (Jax) county and it is much more mixed here. As usual, inside the beltway is more blue, while the parts of the county outside the beltway are red, and the schools reflect that also.
Physicsguy: on the plus side, Hampshire College is going out of business. One down, more to go.
EAA: good for you. Kids, but especially boys, love aviation and airplanes. Bet you can do a lot of hands-on math and physics education just by guiding students through aircraft maintenance and experimental aviation projects.
DeSantis is leaving big shoes to fill in the governor’s office but there’s a silver lining: maybe he’ll become active again at the national level. He’s still very young and has a lot of political altitude left. And Trump has moved the Overton Window of political discourse to the right, so some of the heavy lifting has been done.
Too bad about progressive locusts from the Northeast moving into Nassau County. The same thing happened decades ago in my part of New England, which used to be a traditional Yankee backwater but experienced an influx of well-heeled left-wing counterculture types from the cities in the 1960s-1980s, followed by a wave of third-world immigrants. Now, having ruined New England, the locusts are moving south. I think Alabama is pretty resistant to them but I’m not sure my neighbors appreciate what they’re up against. I do my best to warn them of the danger.
physicsguy et al.:
Peter Wood authored an early anti-Diversity book titled “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept”, published 2003. I reached out to him, not hard to find as an anthro. prof at Boston University, found we were both alums of the very little, very Leftist Haverford College, and I watched and supported NAS when he became its president. NAS has had important successes, such as identifying Confucius Institutes as propaganda arms of the Beijing government placed on many unknowing, money-grubbing campuses, and bringing that to our esteemed governing Washington DC, which worked to extinguish them.
That beats complaining and accomplishing little.
The Board was long ago compromised by previous presidents. Now composed of rich alums who are also leftists, so nothing is going to change.
==
And which state law allows this?
@Art Deco:And which state law allows this?
The law that established that particular state university, plus any additions tipped into other laws or state budgets, which have the force of law.
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The most insidious part of the left’s Gramscian march through our culture is their takeover of the education system.
I am of the age when I can take qualified charitable distributions from my IRA so I’m looking for charities to help fight this. Here are some ideas that have occurred to me.
An organization to support the admittedly small part of the population that will homeschool their children. A big organization here is the homeschooling legal defense fund HSLDF. As their name implies, they support parents who are being harassed by the truancy people. But they also provide support for parents, too, homeschool such as arranging play dates for homeschooled children.
There are other more local home school organizations, such as the Texas Home School Coalition.
Moms For Liberty fights it out inside the education industry by for example, putting up candidates for school boards. They must be effective since they’re hated by the left and received an extremist label by the SPLC.
Edchoice advocates for school choice laws. There’s been some success in Republican leaning states, although there has been resistance by sellout Republicans. Texas Governor Greg Abbott had to clean house in the Texas legislature after they torpedoed his school choice law.
None of these will give immediate results and they may not have a chance to affect the culture before a shooting Civil War breaks out.
Bob-Do it! I have done it. One of my charitable IRA donations is to the National Association of Scholars. another is good ol’ Hillsdale.
In the event of Civil War !!, the South shall rise and snuff the dirty Dems out. Filthy buggers, also known as Yankees. Mamdani is one.
Bob, another organization that I would recommend is Defending Eduction: https://defendinged.org
I gather their core effort initially was to research the various laws and rules in the states and localities; and then put together educational programs for parents and other activists who want to learn how to correct the direction of their local school boards, superintendents of education, state legal structures and to education legislatures with model legislation, etc. They will take on teachers’ unions in some cases since they are often a major blockage to reform.
They provide the guidance and background on the best avenues to use, etc. to enhance the chances of legal and political success.
They will also aggressively pursue law suits of universities or others when they perceive DEI or related violations of state laws etc. are discovered (sometimes by selective undercover investigations).
If we count the start of the decline at Woodrow Wilson (arguably it was a bit sooner, but he was the first socialist president), that was my grandparents’ era.
So we are into the 5th generation “away” at this point (my grandkids).
Don Surber’s essay today:
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/defining-maga
RTWT – and he had a great “picture” of Washington on a Harley!
https://babylonbee.com/news/nation-agrees-to-let-biden-be-president-to-hear-him-attempt-to-say-semiquincentennial
CICERO,
I would say your contributions to NAS are a waste of money. I joined NAS early on and even attended a general meeting, which I enjoyed. However, with a change of leadership, and the retirement of many older faculty members, such as myself and a very active member I was friends with over at Univ. of Hartford, it became a very ineffective organization. I dropped my membership after it became apparent that all NAS was doing was churning out policy papers. Now mind you, the papers were well-researched, and were on the mark. Such papers have zero effect on the administrations and far left faculty. The organization lost its “boots on the ground” faculty within institutions, and so became irrelevant. Basically, the classic liberal and conservative faculty which were the backbone of NAS are all gone, and of course replaced with far left faculty.
Physicsguy: Heh. I had a long and pointed (but friendly) e-mail exchange with NAS President Peter Wood six years ago on precisely this issue. My parting shot:
My offer to meet with the board was tactfully ignored. I’ve kept in touch with the NAS and still send them an occasional contribution, but most of my charitable giving now goes to organizations that litigate, like Bill Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection Foundation (LIF).
On the plus side, the NAS has produced an extremely useful set of detailed K-12 standards in Civics, Social Studies, English, Math, and Science:
The Civics Alliance (Civics): https://civicsalliance.org/
American Birthright (Social Studies): https://civicsalliance.org/american-birthright/
The Cather Standards (English): https://www.nas.org/report/the-cather-standards/
The Archimedes Standards (Mathematics): https://www.nas.org/report/the-archimedes-standards/
The Franklin Standards (Science): https://www.nas.org/report/the-franklin-standards/
I’d be interested in your opinion, as a retired physics professor, of the standards for math and science.
Cicero: another way to fight back, especially for us retired guys, is to get involved in state and local policy. Since retiring from higher ed two years ago, I’ve gotten involved in efforts to reform K-12 public education in Alabama. Finally, as a transplanted New Englander, I had a back-and-forth with former commenter “DNW” on the “correlation of forces” between North and South in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when such strategic calculations seemed, sadly, relevant. I’m pretty sure they’ll become relevant again.
Hubert,
Like all NAS white papers, the ones you list for math and science are well done, and list common sense objectives, and will go absolutely nowhere. The papers fail to address the key problem: the takeover of K-12, and academia by the left. Until there’s a real solution to retake K-12 and colleges (which I wish I knew), no change such as NAS proposes is ever going to happen.
3 years before I retired, the college revamped its GE program. Basically, the far left faculty gutted all area requirements and replaced the whole system with a student designed system. You know how that turns out. The STEM faculty fought against it, well physics, chem, and math did, the biologists were split as they had hired some leftist women. Physics in particular was accused of teaching nothing but white racism physics. We were told that we were ignoring African physics as a “way of knowing”. I asked if the person who was making such an accusation would like to test her theory of the invalidity of Newton’s view of gravity by jumping off a building. Crickets. You can’t fight such with logic and reason and papers. And our Education Department was busy producing K-12 Marxists to go out to the schools.
NAS does nothing in this regard. Sad, but true.
Physicsguy, you have a board of trustees. What are they doing to fix the school? If the answer is nothing, ask yourself how the board is chosen and what sort of person lands on it. Decay is a choice.
Art Deco
The Board was long ago compromised by previous presidents. Now composed of rich alums who are also leftists, so nothing is going to change.
Physicsguy: thanks for your take on the NAS standards. You worked at a small private liberal arts college in the Northeast. They’re among the worst (with some honorable exceptions–e.g. the new campus of California-based Thomas Aquinas College in Northfield, MA). It’s a little different at a large public research university in a deep-red state in the Southeast. The same problems are there, but the state has more leverage and is starting to flex it. See, for example, Alabama Senate Bill 129 (SB129), an anti-DEI law enacted in 2024:
Different states, different political cultures, different possibilities. You now live in Florida, where you have a similar law. True, having a law is no guarantee of good outcomes. It’s a constant struggle against institutional inertia–and worse. For example, UFL has just hired the former president of the University of Alabama, a DEI supporter who left Alabama after SB129 became law. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
Alabama will be getting a new governor in the fall. Chances are it’ll be current U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, who was elected to the Senate in 2020 as a counterweight to the protegée of outgoing swampmeister Richard Shelby. I think Tuberville has sized up the Senate as a corrupt and deliberately ineffectual institution. He wants to get things done, which is why he’s leaving D.C. and running for governor. Look for real changes, including changes in K-12 public education.
Deco: Physicsguy is happily out of the fray. It’s not his headache anymore. And boards of trustees are mostly useless (see UFL example above). We know what kind of person lands on them and why they’re selected. No need for lectures on that score. I’ve raised the BOT issue with legislators in Alabama. They recognize the problems but are largely dependent on the governor to make good BOT appointments to the public institutions. Fortunately, the current governor–an establishment GOP figure dubbed “Meemaw”–is on her way out. Here’s hoping things will change for the better under new management. Maybe we can put a dent in Physicsguy’s pessimism.
Hubert,
All you said is quite true. Where I worked was one of the “Little Ivies” and they really are the worst. Yes, so glad to be in Florida and I know DeSantis has worked hard to turn things around at the state university level; but it is a struggle. While I will definitely vote for Donalds as the next governor, I’m not convinced he will be as effective as DeSantis…..though those are big shoes to fill.
On a more positive note: I’m a member of the EAA chapter at Fernandina Beach airport. The chapter is much more involved with education, than building planes. The Nassau school district own 2 airplanes used to support the aviation program in the high schools. The chapter maintains the planes for the schools, and we have a scholarship program that fully support qualified students to get their PPL paid by us. Nassau county is extremely red,and the schools reflect that. However, FB has always been a vacation spot for rich northeast liberals in the spring, and now some of them have moved and a few got on the city council. They passed a paid parking law, refused to let a citizens referendum go forward, and now the downtown is dying. The locusts are invading.
I live in Duval (Jax) county and it is much more mixed here. As usual, inside the beltway is more blue, while the parts of the county outside the beltway are red, and the schools reflect that also.
Physicsguy: on the plus side, Hampshire College is going out of business. One down, more to go.
EAA: good for you. Kids, but especially boys, love aviation and airplanes. Bet you can do a lot of hands-on math and physics education just by guiding students through aircraft maintenance and experimental aviation projects.
DeSantis is leaving big shoes to fill in the governor’s office but there’s a silver lining: maybe he’ll become active again at the national level. He’s still very young and has a lot of political altitude left. And Trump has moved the Overton Window of political discourse to the right, so some of the heavy lifting has been done.
Too bad about progressive locusts from the Northeast moving into Nassau County. The same thing happened decades ago in my part of New England, which used to be a traditional Yankee backwater but experienced an influx of well-heeled left-wing counterculture types from the cities in the 1960s-1980s, followed by a wave of third-world immigrants. Now, having ruined New England, the locusts are moving south. I think Alabama is pretty resistant to them but I’m not sure my neighbors appreciate what they’re up against. I do my best to warn them of the danger.
physicsguy et al.:
Peter Wood authored an early anti-Diversity book titled “Diversity: The Invention of a Concept”, published 2003. I reached out to him, not hard to find as an anthro. prof at Boston University, found we were both alums of the very little, very Leftist Haverford College, and I watched and supported NAS when he became its president. NAS has had important successes, such as identifying Confucius Institutes as propaganda arms of the Beijing government placed on many unknowing, money-grubbing campuses, and bringing that to our esteemed governing Washington DC, which worked to extinguish them.
That beats complaining and accomplishing little.
The Board was long ago compromised by previous presidents. Now composed of rich alums who are also leftists, so nothing is going to change.
==
And which state law allows this?
@Art Deco:And which state law allows this?
The law that established that particular state university, plus any additions tipped into other laws or state budgets, which have the force of law.