Stay ConnectedTake Back Our Schools puts you on the front lines of the culture wars as Andrew Gutmann and Beth Feeley explore the increasing politicalization of our schools and universities and just what to do about it.
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Beth and Andrew speak with educator, political scientist, and author, Rick Hess, who shares his views on whether we can reform our country’s failing K-12 education system.
We discuss the appalling results of our public schools in teaching kids reading, math, history and civics, and how they have declined even more since the covid pandemic. Hess talks about how progressive ideology has taken over the education establishment including graduate schools of education and shares his opinions on what we can do to potentially reform the education system and why he is newly optimistic given the rise of the parent’s movement in the post-covid years as a force for change.
Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues. The author of Education Week’s popular blog “Rick Hess Straight Up,” Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next and a senior contributor to Forbes. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.
Dr. Hess started his career as a high school social studies teacher and has since taught at colleges including Rice, Harvard, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. His books include "Spinning Wheels,” “Letters to a Young Education Reformer," "Cage-Busting Leadership," “A Search for Common Ground,” and “The Great School Rethink.”
Beth and Andrew speak with psychologist J. Michael Bailey, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University.
Bailey speaks about his more than three decades of research on gender dysphoria, transsexualism and sexual orientation. He also shares his views on the recent explosion of gender dysphoria amongst young people, especially adolescent girls, and whether it is indeed a social contagion. We also discuss his recent experience having his research on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) retracted and being censored by the trans activist movement, about which he recently wrote in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press.
Michael Bailey obtained his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin in 1989. His research has primarily focused on the causes and expression of male and female sexual orientation, broadly construed, including correlated traits such as gender nonconformity and dysphoria. He is the author of the 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which presaged controversy about transgenderism.
On this episode Beth and Andrew speak with Civil Rights Commissioner, Peter Kirsanow, who discusses his background and talks about his four terms on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and its growing political polarization.
We also discuss the Supreme Court’s recent decisions overturning affirmative action, including how it might affect the private sector. Kirsanow shares other controversial issues that are being brought to the civil rights commission, including transgender issues and the sexualization of children.
Peter Kirsanow was recently reappointed by the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives to his fourth consecutive six-year term on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a partner with the Cleveland law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan, and Aronoff LLP in the Labor and Employment Practice Group and has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nominations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
He continues to testify before and advise members of the U.S. Congress on employment law matters, most recently on November 18 before the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight regarding disparate impact theory. Kirsanow is also past chair of the board of directors of the Center for New Black Leadership.
On this episode Andrew and Beth interview noted author Heather Mac Donald. She was the first to write about elite K-12 private schools being taken over by an obsession with race and identity nearly 20 years before the events of 2020 and the start of the parent’s movement. We also discuss her recently published book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty and Threatens Lives.
Mac Donald talks about how the concept of “disparate impact” and how it is corrupting our science and our medical system, our cultural institutions, and our criminal justice system, all with disastrous consequences for American and for western civilization.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and the 2005 recipient of the Bradley Prize. Her work has covered a range of topics, from higher education and immigration to policing and race relations. She is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Diversity Delusion and the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.
Beth and Andrew welcome in Paul Zimmerman of the Defense of Freedom Institute about his recently released report, “Catching the Trash: Holding Teacher Unions, School Districts, and the U.S. Department of Education Accountable for the Epidemic of Sexual Abuse in Public Schools.”
Zimmerman details the alarming rise in reported sexual abuse cases by teachers in public schools in recent years and explains how abusive teachers are allowed to remain in classrooms, being passed from one school district to another without parent’s having any knowledge of the teachers’ history of misconduct. We also discuss the teachers unions role in protecting abusive teachers and Zimmerman walks us through what kind of local, state and federal legislation can help put an end to the these shocking and appalling trends of sexual abuse in our nation’s public schools.
Paul Zimmerman serves as Policy Counsel at the Defense of Freedom Institute, where he leads the organization's Teacher Union Accountability Project and contributes to its legal and oversight efforts. Prior to joining DFI, Zimmerman was Counsel at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he coordinated agency responses to requests from oversight entities, consulted on legal privileges in the context of litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests, and prepared senior personnel for testimony before congressional committees. He also worked for over a decade in multiple roles at the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.
Andrew and Beth welcome back school choice evangelist, Corey DeAngelis who updates us on the progress the school choice movement has made in the past year, and takes us on a state by state tour of who has passed “fund students not schools” legislation.
Corey explains how teachers unions are typically the barrier to passing school choice bills despite the fact that school choice is overwhelming popular with Americans, both Democrats and Republicans. We also discuss Corey’s new book, Medocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today’s Students, and Corey shares some of the findings of his research on why America’s public schools are performing so poorly.
Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. He is also the executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at Liberty Justice Center. He was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work on education policy and received the Buckley Award from America's Future in 2020. DeAngelis has authored or coauthored over 40 journal articles, book chapters, and reports on education policy, and he is the coeditor of School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom and co-author of the recently published, Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students.
Every week on Take Back Our Schools we tackle the culture of illiberalism that has permeated our education system. With teachers and administrators now involving themselves with medical decisions and parents' rights to control the care students get, this week we speak with physician and healthcare policy advocate Carrie Mendoza, MD.
Dr. Mendoza discusses how the culture has changed our medical system, especially after the events of 2020. She also explains how the “administrative state” within the healthcare system has worked to diminish the voices of doctors in favor of bureaucrats, beginning with the rise of Medicare and Medicaid and accelerated after the adoption of Obamacare. Mendoza shares her views on why so many doctors are fearful to speak up, especially on controversial issues such as gender dysphoria and transitioning children and also issues a warning on how lowering standards for medical schools will significantly impact medical care in the future.
Carrie Mendoza has spend over 20 years practicing emergency medicine in rural, suburban, and urban hospitals treating snakebites to gun shot wounds to 1000s of Covid-19 patients. She is a medical technology inventor with two patents for an Emergency Department communications app. The doctor is also a healthcare policy advocate and social entrepreneur with the non-profit The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) where she is the Director of FAIR in Medicine.
Beth and Andrew speak with education innovator and author Ray Ravaglia about what lead to his founding of the Stanford Online High School back in 2007, and the challenges of using technology to create a robust online school for gifted and talented students.
Ravaglia discusses how online learning has changed over the past several decades, and especially since the Covid years. We delve into his current work at the organization, Opportunity Education, and how technology can be used in the classroom to successfully track student learning and engagement. We also talk about the pros and cons of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT in education.
Ray Ravaglia is the author of two books, numerous articles, and has produced over 100 online courses.
Education analyst Max Eden joins Andrew and Beth for a wide-ranging discussion on the issues facing today's eductaion system. Eden describes what led to him to a career studying education policy and we discuss his explosive and bestselling book about the Parkland school shooting, which concluded that progressive “restorative justice” policies in the school led to the horrific incident.
Eden also gives us an update on the Biden administrations proposed changes to Title IX rules and their impact on girls sports. We also discuss what states like Florida are doing to combat progressive ideology in public schools and we talk about the rapidly growing movement for school choice.
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on education reform, specifically K–12 and early childhood education, and was previously a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Max is the coauthor of the bestseller “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students” and the coeditor of “The Every Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools, Systems, and States.” Eden has testified about school violence before Congress and about the “school-to-prison pipeline” before the US Commission on Civil Rights.
On this episode, Andrew and Beth speak with comedian and diversity trainer, Karith Foster.
Foster shares her views on what is wrong about the way diversity training is done in schools and corporations and talks about her own methodology for DEI trainings, which she calls “inversity.” She explains how comedy can be used in a productive way to bring people together, rather than divide them, as happens in typical DEI trainings. We also discuss the state of comedy in today’s climate of hypersensitivity and cancel culture.
Besides her standup work, Foster is the CEO of Inversity Solutions & Funder of F.R.A.M.E., the Foster Russell Family Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which is committed to inspiring free speech, social change and empowerment through education and mentorship.
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