Public Schooling Battles: January Dispatch

January brought a new year to our calendars —more on calendars shortly—but a look at the public schoolingvalues and identity-based battles for the month shows that nothing much has really changed. Some of the big battlegrounds of 2017 —and years before that—are still big battlegrounds at the outset of 2018. Which should come as no surprise: A new year doesn’t suddenly make diverse people abandon the cultures, histories, and values they cherish. Let ’s look at some of the recurring conflicts in January:Gender:How to fairly treat both transgender students and people who are concerned about privacy, and sometimes transgenderism itself, remains probably the hottest flashpoint in public schooling today. We posted three new battles on the topic in January, including two —onein Virginia, onein California—in which efforts to instill tolerance of transgender children was seen by some as indoctrination. The California incident included the “Gender Unicorn,” which was asource of concern in North Carolina in 2016. The third battle was inClark County, Nevada, in which a boy who said he was gay but not transgender —how should that be handled?—but who felt more comfortable changing with girls, was using the girls’ locker room. There was also an update to a conflict in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There the school districtsettled with a transgender student who was required to wear a green wristband to monitor his bathroom access, as well as other policies that made him feel ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs