FAIR News

Civil Rights in Our Schools

And Other News

September 30th, 2021

 

FAIR Legal Webinar

On Thursday, October 7th, from 8:00pm to 9:30pm EST, FAIR will be hosting a legal webinar titled “Civil Rights in Our K-12 Schools: Challenges and Options in the Era of Intolerance.”

The webinar will include FAIR Advisors and a panel of legal experts who will discuss the legal avenues available for civil rights violations in schools, including Title VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment. They will also discuss pending litigation, including Deemar v. Evanston, and other options available to parents and guardians, both to learn what schools are teaching their children and to advocate for civil liberties and tolerance. 

Panelists will include FAIR’s Legal Network Managing Director Letitia Kim, FAIR Advisor Maud Maron, and litigator and trial lawyer Daniel Craig. The panel will be moderated by FAIR Advisor Ian Rowe. 

 

Register for the webinar here.

 

FAIR Takes Action: The Gateway School

On September 15th, four anonymous incident reports were submitted to FAIR Transparency regarding potentially unlawful practices at The Gateway School, a private K-8 school in Manhattan for children with learning disabilities.

 

According to the reports, Gateway has instituted “affinity groups” and established a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” committee without notifying the parents, leaving them “completely in the dark.” Allegedly, some teachers are repeatedly asking students to declare their pronouns, revising curricula through an “anti-racist lens,” and centering “social justice” rather than support of students with disabilities.

 

FAIR has sent a detailed inquiry to Gateway regarding those practices and reminding them of New York’s Human Rights Law (which applies to private schools) and their own stated mission. We are hopeful they will issue a substantive response and embrace a pro-human approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

 

Download FAIR's full response to the incident report here.

 

Other News

 

This week, on NPR’s Watching America, host Dr. Alan Campbell spoke with FAIR President Bion Bartning and FAIR Advisor Daryl Davis about FAIR’s "pro-human" approach to civil rights, and its relevance in K-12 education. 

Davis is an R&B and Blues musician, but is perhaps most famous for his interviews with Ku Klux Klan members—and his de-conversion of them. Davis talks about his methods for addressing and mitigating racism, how he and Bartning crossed paths, and why he is excited to be a part of FAIR.


Listen to the full conversation here.

 

For The Atlantic, psychiatrist Sally Satel notes that while Right-wing authoritarianism is well-documented, there seems to be scant interest among social psychologists for studying authoritarian tendencies on the political Left. Indeed, many even question whether Left-wing authoritarianism exists at all. 

A new study on authoritarianism by researcher Thomas H. Costello at Emory University, however, “firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate.” According to the study, the commonalities between Right- and Left-wing authoritarianism include a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

Satel believes that the increasing political skew in our public institutions, including universities, gives cause for concern, noting that “whatever its origin, this political imbalance makes truth-seeking harder.”


Read the full article here.

 

For EdSource, John Fensterwald wrote about a newly-formed group of educators in California who believe the rise of “polarized politics” in their classrooms and curriculum may pose a “threat to democracy” and urgently need to be addressed.

Fensterwald wrote that organizations like FAIR, which “promotes its ‘balanced’ curriculum that teaches historic and contemporary racism” that also presents students with “an honest and accurate view of our nation’s history while emphasizing constructive principles that inspire optimism for the American future” may be the best way forward.

However, in order for this to occur, it is important to provide students a learning environment where they're able “to argue from facts and evidence without personal attacks, while listening to and understanding alternative viewpoints.”


Read the full article here.

 

For Persuasion, Sahil Handa wrote about how an “illiberal” mindset has crept into academia. However, Handa believes that the mainstream story depicting “spineless” university administrators afraid to stand up to student activists harboring a “humorless, identitarian ideology” is somewhat misleading. 

Instead, Handa believes that “the internet placed extraordinary economic pressures on publishing and higher education before the turn of the century, and the institutions that succeeded in responding were those who explicitly chose to give up on serving a general audience.”

Rather than lamenting the loss of our public-serving institutions as we knew them to be, the new digital landscape presents us with the opportunity to “turn our attention towards building the ones that could never have existed before.”


Read the full article here.

 

Hosted by Free Black Thought and The Institute for Liberal Values, FAIR Advisors Erec Smith, Angel Eduardo, and Zander Keig sat down to discuss the problems with dominant narratives about “authenticity” surrounding race and trans issues, and how people are frequently “erased and replaced” for expressing alternative viewpoints.

Eduardo and Smith are quite familiar with this type of treatment, as both have frequently found themselves on the receiving end of it for criticizing fashionable orthodoxies on issues of race. And Zander Keig, a transgender man, has faced similar harassment for questioning mainstream narratives surrounding sex and gender identity within his own community. 


View the entire conversation here.

 

For The Harvard Gazette, Fair Advisor Steven Pinker shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Rationality: Why It Seems Scarce and Why It Matters.” In it, Pinker claims that “rationality ought to be the lodestar for everything we think and do.” Far from being a recent invention of Western philosophers, the human capacity to “understand the world and bend it to our advantage” has been a defining feature of humanity since the dawn of our species.

But, if this is true, how is it that irrationality appears to be in such excess everywhere we look? Pinker reminds us that “rationality is not a power that an agent either has or doesn’t have, like Superman’s X- ray vision.” Instead, we should think of rationality as “a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds.”

While misinformation is on the rise due to widespread use of social media, Pinker nevertheless believes that people can still be taught to “think outside their comfort zones,” which can help circumvent our tribal instincts so that we can pursue collectively beneficial outcomes. 


Read the full article here.

 

For Harper’s Magazine, FAIR Advisor Thomas Chatterton-Williams describes his trip to Switzerland to retrace the footsteps of American essayist and activist James Baldwin, who retreated to the Alps in the early 1950s to write his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain

Chatterton-Williams contrasted the racial landscape of Switzerland, as depicted by Baldwin in the 1950s, to his own impression today. He noted that, despite the widely divergent histories and racial makeup of Switzerland and the United States, many of America’s racial politics have been “copied and pasted” into Swiss culture following George Floyd’s death last year.


Read the full article here.

 

For the Fordham Institute, FAIR Advisor Robert Pondiscio wrote about “performative teaching,” and how it undermines trust in our schools and institutions.

Pondiscio cites political analyst Yuval Levin's recent book, A Time to Build, which says that institutions engaged in performative teaching “aren’t really asking for our confidence, just for our attention. And in our time, many of our most significant social, political, cultural, and intellectual institutions are in the process of going through this transformation from mold to platform.”


Read the full article here.

 

FAIR Spotlight

FAIR Spotlight is where we share some of the reasons our members give for supporting FAIR’s pro-human mission. If you would like to share your reasons you support FAIR, please do so by emailing [email protected].

This week we are spotlighting Moshe K. Levy, from RiverVale, NJ.

*     *     *

I would like to express my appreciation for the work you do. I support FAIR wholeheartedly because the organization is proactive, generating very relevant and professional content. FAIR is not only saying that rational parents oppose illiberal authoritarianism within education, but offers viable pro-human alternatives instead. 

FAIR's board consists of a diverse cross section of intellectuals, from left to right, in every color, neutralizing charges of partisanship. The work of FAIR gets more urgent with each passing day. I have been most impressed with what I have seen so far, and look forward to getting more involved.

-Moshe K. Levy

 

A Call for "Pro-Human" Materials

FAIR would like members to submit recommendations of books, videos, essays, and other materials that align with FAIR's pro-human messaging so that we may highlight it and share it with the FAIR Community. Please send your suggestions to [email protected].

 

Upcoming Events

 

On Thursday, October 7th, from 8:00pm to 9:30pm EST, FAIR will be hosting a Legal Webinar titled “Civil Rights in Our K-12 Schools: Challenges and Options in the Era of Intolerance.”

The webinar will include FAIR Advisors and a panel of legal experts who will discuss the legal avenues available for civil rights violations in schools, including Title VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment. They will also discuss pending litigation, including Deemar v. Evanston, and other options available to parents and guardians, both to learn what schools are teaching their children and to advocate for civil liberties and tolerance. 

Panelists will include FAIR’s Legal Network Managing Director Letitia Kim, FAIR Advisor Maud Maron, and litigator and trial lawyer Daniel Craig. The panel will be moderated by FAIR Senior Advisor Ian Rowe. 

 

Register for the webinar here.

 

Please join our Educator Curriculum Webinar on September 30th from 7:00pm-8:00pm EDT, where we will be introducing the FAIRstory curriculum principles, standards, lesson plans, and resources. A separate Parent Curriculum Webinar will be taking place on October 1st from 12:00pm-1:00pm EDT.

Register for an Educator Curriculum Webinar here.

Register for a Parent Curriculum Webinar here.

 

Every two weeks, FAIR will be hosting several Grassroots Advocacy Training Workshops for members. Go here learn about each session and how to register.

LOCAL CHAPTER EVENT: On October 7th at 6:00pm, the FAIR's Indiana chapter will be hosting an in-person evening discussion with FAIR Advisor and best selling author Wilfred Reilly.

 

Register for the event here.

 

Join the FAIR Community

Click here to become a FAIR volunteer, or to either lead or join a FAIR chapter:

Join a Welcome to FAIR Zoom information session to learn more about our mission by clicking here. Or, watch a previously recorded session click here to visit the Member section of www.fairforall.org.

Sign the FAIR Pledge for a common culture of fairness, understanding and humanity.

Join the FAIR community to connect and share information with other members.

Join or start a FAIR chapter in your state, to help launch the pro-human movement.

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