1/ 🚨BREAKING: Lawsuit filed today against educational agencies, teachers, principal, & CEO responsible for hosting workshops requiring children to make public professions about their racial, sexual, gender & religious identities, some of which were singled out for interrogation.

2/ Educators directed the plaintiff "to reveal his identities in a controlled, yet non-private setting, to scrutiny and official labeling," and are "coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm."
3/ The educators "repeatedly threatened William Clark with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements."
4/ Plaintiffs claim that the educators' "coercive and intrusive behavior compelled William Clark’s protected speech and invaded his privacy, violating his constitutional rights under the First Amendment and his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."
5/ The new curriculum, based on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, was done stealthily: "The generic name and syllabi provided to parents remained the same," and "parents were not made aware of the ideological turn in the curriculum."
6/ The new educational sessions were not "descriptive or informational" but were "normative and prescriptive."

"Parents...were not aware of the turn towards coercive, ideological indoctrination until they began seeing the detrimental effects it worked up in their children."
7/ "The teacher’s material stated who qualified as oppressors, and who in virtue of their gender and race harbored 'inherent belief in the inferiority' of others," which "assigned moral attributes to pupils based on their race, gender, sexual orientation and religion."
8/ Plaintiff "was obliged to profess himself complicit in 'internalized privilege [which] includes acceptance of a belief in the inherent inferiority of the [corresponding] oppressed group' [and] supporting 'the inherent superiority or normalcy of one’s own privileged group.'"
9/ The education agency "Democracy Prep" encouraged radical activism against existing school policies.
10/ The plaintiff, student William Clark, has suffered "severe mental and emotional stress" resulting from the hostile environment and is "living in fear" of retaliation.

This proved justified, as he has now been suspended and accused of being a racist.
11/ COUNT I: VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
12/ COUNT II: VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE U.S CONSTITUTION
13/ COUNT III: VIOLATION OF THE FIFTH & FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT (42 U.S.C. § 1983) (Due Process: Invasion of Privacy & Equal Protection)
14/ COUNT IV: VIOLATION OF THE FIRST & FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT (42 U.S.C. § 1983) (Substantive Due Process: Establishment Clause, Family Integrity &
Retaliation)
15/ COUNT V: Title VI Violation of 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq. (Intentional and Retaliatory Discrimination on The Basis Of Color, Race and Religion against Authority, DPAC, DPPS and Defendants in their individual capacity)
16/ COUNT VI: (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681 et seq.)
17/ COUNT VII: (Breach of Contract)

Parents were essentially fooled into approving of the new curriculum because the ideological alterations were not made apparent. The same old syllabi were used, so parents were "caught off guard."
18/ To my knowledge this is the first lawsuit of its kind. Keep a close eye on this one, as it could set a precedent and cause a lot of dominoes to start falling.

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

You May Also Like