Remember our friends at the Center for Disease Control? After their sterling performance throughout the COVID era, the credibility in this particular government agency is in tatters, and that will last for at least a generation. And who could possibly lose faith in the CDC, what with their insistence on letting the American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten to essentially write the guidance for when schools would open back up, their science-free mandates on masks and vaccines, or even their withholding of data that undercut the political narrative behind the policies they were trying to implement in the first place?
Lots can and should be done to restore the agency to one that people can turn to for reliable information and advice, and that begins mostly with blowing out everyone in leadership and cutting ties to political advocacy groups and unions. Investigations and sunshine have to permeate the entire agency from top to bottom, and heads have to roll before anyone in any serious numbers will believe anything offered by the CDC again at face value.
That said, I am pleased as a columnist, if not stunned as a political observer, to report that the Center for Disease Control has not pursued any of that advice. To quote the great retired Lt. General Russell Honore’, the hero from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 that devastated the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, the CDC is stuck on stupid. A new self-assessment tool has been offered up through the agency’s Division of Adolescent and School Health for school administrators, teachers and staff. Keep in mind, the CDC was given its Congressional authority 76 years ago to help rein in malaria as the Communicable Disease Center. Its job literally was to try and control the spread of communicable diseases. Three-quarters of a century’s worth of mission creep has now led us to this week.
LGBTQ Inclusivity In Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool is the latest offering from the agency that wants you to believe it can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, we’re still in pandemic that originated with a virus from China, but we can’t call it a China flu. And all of the variants from specific parts of the world are not to be called those particular location variants because of their possible offensive factor.
Of course, monkeypox, even though calling it monkeypox isn’t appropriate anymore because of the offense to monkeys and/or other primates, is something that wouldn’t be too good if it spreads rapidly. The regular flu is sweeping the country, and there are tons of actual illnesses the agency can and should be focusing on in order to at least attempt to rebuild any semblance of credibility. This tool isn’t dealing with any of that.
In the Overview of the report, the CDC makes this proviso:
Please note that this document includes many resources from non-governmental organizations focused on improving school inclusivity, and the ideas and opinions expressed within them do not represent the official opinion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
So before they even get to passing judgment on educators who aren’t woke enough on gender and sexuality issues, they admit that this thing isn’t science-based at all, and that the agency itself doesn’t even necessarily buy all this nonsense they’re about to dish out. But dish it out, they nevertheless do, traveling further down the road of becoming politicized by outside advocacy groups by tackling…the spreading disease of gender dysphoria and pronoun preference?
The self-assessment tool is 32-pages long, but here’s the long and the short of it.
I’m not an educator. I’m not a principal, teacher, nor do I have anything at all to do professionally with the educational field other than as a parent with a vested interested in having my kids actually learn subject matter necessary for their future career development. But I took this tool as though I were a teacher. You should, too.
There were several questions that didn’t offer an answer that was applicable to me or what my approach would be. I kept wishing there was a D – none of the above option. But if I had to pick from the answers available, I’d probably answer C on most, not because I’m bigoted, but because I’m very decidedly not.
If I’m a math teacher, my job is to teach every student in front of me how to do algebra. I don’t care what gender, race, religion they are. They’re students who don’t know algebra, I’m a teacher that purportedly does, so I’m there to teach them. If I use a boy or a girl as a hypothetical in a math problem, I’m certainly not getting into what they hypothetically do with their private parts. It’s an algebra problem. X is what I’m trying to solve, not a gender I’m trying to define.
If I’m a Spanish teacher, one of the world’s great romance languages, the language literally is a gendered language. Every noun is assigned male or female. If I have to teach in gender-neutral language, I might be teaching something, but it’s not Spanish.
The part about this tool that struck me is that despite all the talk about how this tool is voluntary and non-binding, if you answered mostly C’s, it instructs you to “make time to commit to changes.” Thanks, but no thanks. The only change I’m committed to is a Republican president in 2024 that will go through the federal agencies with a scythe and eliminate the positions of these social engineering monsters.
This tool was released right around Christmas, and will not be seen by very many people because it’s the end of the year and focus on news is at a minimum. But what this tool demonstrates is that the agency learned nothing from the corrosive effect of politicization. Credibility with the American public can only begin to be rebuilt once the agency makes the decision to get up off the floor and admit they made mistakes. That’s not going to happen so long as the people running the CDC are comfortable remaining on the floor.
