Week in Review: This is what they’re teaching our kids?

Some Schools Don’t Want You To Know What They Are Teaching Your Kids. That’s a Problem.

Six months into the pandemic, some traditions will still not be upset by a virus. As approximately half of K-12 schools are only offering online instruction, parents will still know little, if anything, of what their children are being taught in school except by accident—or unless they ask. Incredibly, some schools are even attempting to prevent parents from finding out what is being taught.

If you consider what some schools are teaching, it’s not surprising why they would want to keep their curriculum secret. At Cooper Junior High in Wylie, Texas, eighth-grade students were assigned to write about a political cartoon that depicts slave owners, then KKK members, and then police in corresponding panels. Furious parents, who only learned of the assignment because their children told them, contacted the school and wrote angry statements on social media.

Goldwater senior fellow Jonathan Butcher writes more about the galling lack of transparency in American schools in a new article on In Defense of Liberty. If you think it’s crazy that parents can’t see what their children are being taught, rest assured that the Goldwater Institute is working to solve the problem. You can read about the Goldwater Institute’s proposal for academic transparency here.  

Arizona’s $1 Billion Tax Blowout

COVID-19 has left Arizonans reeling from unprecedented job losses and previously unimaginable disruption to students’ education. But now, under the banner of the ironically named “Invest in Ed” tax increase, political activists have doubled down on their union-backed plan to further inflame the economic insecurity of Arizona families and small businesses, while ignoring the needs of the very group they claim to serve: students.

Indeed, in a time when over 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed across the nation and Americans are looking to emerge from the economic devastation of COVID-19, tax increases on job creators are the last thing Arizona needs.

Yet under the Prop 208 ballot initiative, Arizonans would be hit with $1 billion per year in higher taxes, making Arizona the 10^th-highest taxing state in the nation. Arizona cannot afford this devastating plan, and that’s why the Goldwater Institute launched its Vote NO on Prop 208 campaign this week. Read more about why Prop 208 is wrong for Arizona here.

Victory for an Ohio Indian Child

An Ohio child of Native American ancestry will be allowed to remain with his family, instead of being taken away and sent to live two thousand miles away with strangers on an Indian reservation, thanks to a decision by an Ohio judge that has now become final. That decision puts an end to more than five years of litigation by the Goldwater Institute, the Attorney General, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and other allies.

The case involved a little boy known as C.J., now 8 years old, who was born in Ohio and lived there his entire life with a foster family after his birth parents proved unable to care for him. C.J. is happy there; his foster parents provide him with the stable, loving home he needs. Yet officials with the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) in Arizona determined that C.J. is an “Indian child” under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act —which imposes a set of race-based restrictions on efforts to protect children of Native ancestry—and sought to seize him from that home and send him to live on the GRIC reservation, which he had never even visited, with people he had never met.

Read more about Goldwater’s latest victory in a new article by Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.

You’re Invited: Phoenix Federalist Society’s Arizona Supreme Court Review

Join the Phoenix Federalist Society for its annual review of important cases from the Arizona Supreme Court’s previous term. Goldwater Executive Vice President Christina Sandefur will be among the speakers. The event will be held streaming online on Thursday, September 17, from 5:30 – 7 PM (MST). Click here for more information and to register.