Week in Review: Schools Are Discriminating. We Can Stop It.

January 8, 2022

Racial discrimination is running rampant as public schools and universities nationwide adopt radical, left-wing ideologies—often under pressure from the federal government. But the Goldwater Institute is offering states a model to defeat the toxic influence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the admissions, hiring, and disciplinary decisions and overall treatment of students and teachers.

Goldwater’s “Stop CRT and Racial Discrimination in Public Schools Act” would prevent school districts from weeding out aspiring teachers who don’t profess allegiance to a racialized political agenda. It would also bar public schools and universities from discrimination against students and teachers in any form—including in admissions and hiring decisions—because of their skin color. Moreover, the legislation would prohibit teachers at public institutions from using their position of authority to promote the tenets of racial discrimination.

Public schools should not be shredding resumes from great teachers simply because the applicants are the wrong skin color or insufficiently political. States should not be discriminating. Goldwater’s new law puts a stop to it.

Read more at In Defense of Liberty.

Defending the Freedom to Work – and to Fight Government Overreach

Should you need permission from the government to run a business? The Goldwater Institute says “NO,” and that’s why we filed a brief this week urging the Arizona Supreme Court to review the case of an engineer whose business has been crippled by overzealous bureaucrats.

When state officials told Greg Mills he needed to obtain a “certificate of registration” from the Arizona Board of Technical Registration to continue designing computer circuits for spacecraft, he filed suit, arguing the registration requirement didn’t apply to him. But the Arizona Court of Appeals dismissed his case because he hadn’t gone through a Board hearing yet.

“[I]t makes no sense to force Mills to undergo a full hearing, only to do it all over again on appeal—when the real question in the case is whether the Board has authority here to begin with,” Goldwater Vice President for Litigation Timothy Sandefur writes. “To do otherwise—and force people to undergo the time and expense of an agency hearing before they can challenge the agency’s authority—would likely deprive many Arizonans of the opportunity to defend their rights against the bureaucracy.”

Read more about the case at In Defense of Liberty.

$409,000 to Access Public Records?

Public records aren’t actually “public” if the government charges citizens more than $409,000 to access them. But that’s exactly what a Michigan public school district tried to do when concerned parents requested public records about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and related subjects, Goldwater’s Joe Setyon writes. It’s yet another example of a troubling nationwide trend that highlights the barriers government bureaucrats put up to keep parents from finding out what is being taught in the classroom.

Parents deserve the truth about what their children are learning, which is why Goldwater is advocating for its Academic Transparency Act, a law that enables parents to easily access curriculum information without having to go through cumbersome bureaucratic processes.

Read more at In Defense of Liberty.