Week in Review: Reparations Math?

With millions of students struggling to keep up in reading, math, and history, the public education establishment just unveiled its newest scheme to flood classrooms with progressive propaganda: “Reparations Math.”

Branded under the New York Times 1619 Project’s umbrella, the “Reparations Math” lesson plan even requires students to evaluate which math function “the U.S. should use to determine and provide monetary reparations” to the descendants of slaves. This latest classroom “innovation” joins a suite of radical lessons for teachers to sprinkle into their classroom curricula, Goldwater Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes in National Review. Among the highlights: so-called “essential” questions like, “How does white rage fuel the racial wealth gap?”

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for activists to slip this radical content into their lesson plans without parents’ knowledge. That’s why the Goldwater Institute is promoting its Academic Transparency Act in state after state. The law requires schools to post online a list of all the specific learning materials used in class. “Parents deserve to know—before they have to make an enrollment decision for their child—which schools are promoting actual literacy, numeracy, and constitutionally grounded civic education, and which are pushing nakedly political pet projects like ‘Reparations Math,’” Beienburg concludes.

Read more of Beienburg’s National Review op-ed. 

Taxpayers Forced to Fund Union Boss’ Lies

Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten, best known for locking millions of students out of schools and then lying about it, hasn’t stepped foot in a classroom to teach for a quarter-century. Yet taxpayers are on the hook for her government pension benefits at a total cost of up to $230,000—and maybe more.

So why are taxpayers forced to fund this powerful political operative’s government pension benefits? “The culprit is a corrupt, unconstitutional practice that many taxpayers haven’t even heard about,” Goldwater Vice President for Litigation Jon Riches writes at Fox News.

That pervasive practice, union release time, “releases” public employees from their government responsibilities and allows them to work for their private union on the public dime—to the tune of millions of dollars each year, as Goldwater Institute research has revealed. Weingarten is receiving taxpayer-funded pension benefits while spending the bulk of her time advocating for the private special interests of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which donates tens of millions of dollars to leftist causes each year.

The Goldwater Institute has a long record of successfully challenging release time across the country. As Riches writes: “Now citizens should demand that their tax dollars stop funding special interests and the operatives who are getting rich representing them—and fund the public interest instead.”

Read the rest at Fox News.

Ditch This Jim Crow-Era Mandate for Good

Jim Crow is long gone. But Jim Crow-era government mandates are back with a vengeance, Goldwater Institute Staff Attorney John Thorpe writes in the New York Post.

In more than half of U.S. states, prevailing wage laws force businesses competing for public-works projects to provide their employees with wages and benefits based on complicated formulas produced by the federal government—among other burdensome requirements. It shouldn’t be surprising that these burdens fall disproportionately on minorities. After all, when Congress passed a prevailing wage law in 1931, it specifically intended to prioritize white workers and white-only unions over non-unionized, black, and immigrant workers.

Yet in 2023 alone, Michigan imposed its own statewide prevailing wage mandate, while Illinois progressives are trying to expand existing prevailing wage requirements. In Arizona, the Phoenix and Tempe governments only abandoned prevailing wage proposals after Goldwater drew attention to their detrimental effects.

Prevailing wage laws “smuggle in high costs, bureaucratic red tape, and favoritism toward large, politically connected unions—all under the guise of helping workers,” Thorpe writes. “Don’t listen to the empty promises: prevailing wage laws hurt the very people they’re supposed to help.”

Read more in the New York Post.