Guess why the Muirlands Middle School student above was suspended and barred from attending future sporting events in the La Jolla school district. Yes, a hysterical school administrator, almost certainly pushed by racial-grievance obsessed CRT fanatics, said that the boy wore “blackface” at a school football game. The disciplinary notice describes the student, only identified as “J.A.” as engaging in serious misconduct because he “painted his face black at a football game” making the incident an instance of “Offensive comment, intent to harm.”
That’s odd; I’ve studied blackface and its history, and I don’t recall any minstrel shows with performers painting only half their faces black. By that standard, Star Trek was using blackface in this episode…
…which was bad enough as it was.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has galloped to the rescue, since the ACLU no longer cares about free speech as long as it is suppressed as part of racial justice grandstanding. In a letter to the school, it stated in part,
Many at the game wore face or body paint. At J.A.’s request, his classmate painted J.A.’s face…J.A.’s appearance emulated the style of eye black worn by many athletes as shown below
…Such use of eye black began as a way to reduce glare during games, but long ago evolved into “miniature billboards for personal messages and war-paint slatherings.” J.A. wore his eye black throughout the game without incident. Six days later, on October 19, you summoned J.A. and his parents to a meeting, where you told them J.A. was suspended for two days and banned from future athletic events for wearing “blackface” to the football game. You did not indicate that anyone complained about J.A.’s face
paint or that it caused any sort of disruption… J.A.’s non-disruptive, objectively inoffensive face paint was constitutionally protected expression..
Not only that, but this kind of extreme thought-control bullying of students to ensure that the government’s interpretation of WrongThink is as powerfully embedded in a child’s brain as electric shocks could achieve is child abuse. “J.A.” face paint did no harm, but harm has been inflicted on him. Not only has he been branded a racist by the school; he has been alerted to the dangers of angering Big Brother. “J.A.” is well on his way to being a compliant, model progressive citizen, avoiding any expression that has not been pre-approved those who wield power and influence.
Sure, the school needs to be sued, the principal needs to be fired, the school district needs to be overhauled, and the parents need to get their son out of California before it is too late. I expect FIRE to have the school groveling soon, but none of this addresses how risky it is today to send one’s child to a public school. Children need an education, parents can’t do it alone, and the public school system along with the teaching profession has rotted to its core. The canary in the mine is long dead, but the mine can’t be abandoned.
I know what my family did: we resigned ourselves to home-schooling our son. I still feel like he missed a great deal of what I experienced in public school, and most parents aren’t in a position to just quit the system. No presidential candidate is presenting any concrete policy ideas to address the problem.
Is it hopeless?
Ethics Alarms 
Yes, it is hopeless. It is hopeless because there is no way for a government agency to ‘fail’. In Illinois, the public schools are successful at teaching students to read only 35% of the time, but they were rewarded with an end to school choice. Some cities have single-digit success numbers, and are punished with increased funding. No private entity could survive success rates like that. People would go to other schools rather than a school with a 7% success rate. They can’t however, because it is the government. They can’t fix it because they are government employees and government employees aren’t accountable to anyone except, perhaps, the union.
School boards have limited ability to remedy the situation. They may know that they have a teacher who is only teaching the kids lesbian dance therapy, but what can they do about it? This is a union teacher and the union must agree to fire the teacher. If the school board fired them anyway, they would be sued by the union, they may have to go before the NLRB. In court, their fellow teachers, the education departments, and NCATE would be called to testify that it is best practices to teach lesbian dance therapy to second graders. The judges would buy this because ‘the experts all said so’.
You could try to dissolve the schools altogether, divide the education money by the number of children and pay that to whatever school the child is sent to. However, you will be destroyed by the lawfare this would bring from the education establishment, the state government, and the unions.
The President should have no say in this because the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to regulate education.
In addition to all of that, remember the teachers come out of the colleges. Even if you fired every teacher in the country, the next batch submitting resumes would be every bit as bad. There’s no one competent to replace them with. Even religious private schools have trouble finding people who won’t try to undermine their mission.
There’s a similar problem in other professions saturated in wokeness. Hollywood writers, for example. Even if execs recognize that they’re going broke on leftist garbage, even if they fire entire writer rooms, they just have to turn to UCLA and Harvard and other film school where they’ll find a fresh new crop who can’t wait to spread leftist garbage.
Journalists, therapists, lawyers… There are certainly individuals who can do these jobs ethically and effectively, but that’s in spite of every attempt to ensure they’re indoctrinated.
Just get rid of the whole thing.
It has failed.
How tolerant of failure was Darth Vader?
How about this one? The police arrest a 10-year old girl. She drew a sketch about the student who was bullying her. The girl she showed the sketch to told her own mother, who called the school and told them to call 911. The school and police all insisted that they had no choice but to arrest the girl because a parent, unrelated to the bullying or the drawing, wanted the girl arrested.