Jonathan Butcher

Arkansas Enacts Given Name Act.

The more we learn about the dangers of so-called gender treatments, and the more we discover the lengths to which school officials will go to keep secrets from parents, the more urgent it becomes for lawmakers to act quickly to protect students and families.

Arkansas lawmakers delivered a clear message to parents of K-12 students this week: You have the right to know how your child is being treated in school.
Lawmakers in New Jersey, California, and hundreds of other school districts across the U.S. operating under policies that do the opposite and allow school officials to hide information about children from their parents should prepare to receive an influx of student-transfer requests.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday signed legislation, the Given Name Act, which says that school officials cannot call a student by a name that does not match the name listed on the student’s birth certificate without a parent’s permission. Likewise, educators cannot address a child by a pronoun that does not match the child’s sex.
The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Wayne Long, a Republican, explains that a teacher contacted him and said her conscience would not let her “affirm” a student confused about his or her sex. “This single mom was willing to lose her job rather than go against her Christian beliefs,” Long said via email.
That teacher is not alone.
A survey in March commissioned by Parents Defending Education found that 71% of voters favor legislation that requires schools to inform parents when their child wants to “assume” a different “gender” at school. A survey conducted for The Heritage Foundation in 2021 found nearly identical results among a nationally representative sample of parents. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
And lawmakers are responding.
In Kentucky, officials adopted a proposal earlier this year that said schools “shall not adopt policies or procedures with the intent of keeping any student information confidential from parents,” and state and school personnel cannot require educators to use pronouns that “do not conform to a student’s biological sex” as listed on his or her birth certificate. Utah lawmakers adopted a similar proposal this year, and legislators in Arizona, California, Florida, and Louisiana are currently considering proposals with those provisions.
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A Critical Look at Critical Race Theory in America’s Classrooms

The Heritage Foundation invited 13 scholars to contribute to “The Critical Classroom,” a volume that uncovers the often surreptitious application of critical race theory and analyzes the effects that such a biased theory has on teachers and students alike. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) “The Critical Classroom” traces the origins of critical race theory and explains that racist institutions, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws, violated our nation’s ideals—and adds that America is not systemically racist.

“There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students,” The Associated Press wrote recently.
If that’s true, why would the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, invest in a campaign to keep the theory in K-12 instruction? That is, how could the union keep critical race theory in classrooms if it wasn’t there in the first place?
The answer is simple: School officials around the country not only are teaching critical race theory’s components, such as “intersectionality,” to K-12 children. They also are applying the theory’s principle that discrimination is appropriate and necessary for school activities in the form of mandatory racial affinity groups. For example, where students are separated by skin color for different school functions.
Racial prejudice left a shameful mark on America’s past, but contrary to what critical race theorists believe, racism does not define America. And racial discrimination has no place in law or culture today.
The Heritage Foundation invited 13 scholars to contribute to “The Critical Classroom,” a volume that uncovers the often surreptitious application of critical race theory and analyzes the effects that such a biased theory has on teachers and students alike. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“The Critical Classroom” traces the origins of critical race theory and explains that racist institutions, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws, violated our nation’s ideals—and adds that America is not systemically racist.
Yet radical activists who aim to keep critical race theory in schools want students to believe that America’s laws and cultural institutions are beyond repair.
As Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez writes in the opening chapter of “The Critical Classroom”:
If, from the start, one teaches the young population that the system of beliefs of their parents and grandparents has produced an oppressive conceptual superstructure, and that they must begin de novo, then one can change society’s blueprint in a generation or two.
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