Follow The Money I keep trying to get the point across that our school board members are marionette money managers that dance to the pull of the strings of the money suppliers. As always I would suggest a book on the subject but since no one has the time to read, which is baffling in itself since the subject is education, I will offer a clue as to where the policies being objected to are coming from. Highlighting just two organizations that make money available for public education, The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH), money is sought from these organizations through grant requests. These organizations along with many others including private ones (ie, Google, The Kellogg Foundation, etc) require grant requests to include a clear statement that they will be held accountable to regarding how they will approach diversity and inclusion. If left out or downplayed they do not get the money. It is all about checking the unrepresented minority boxes not mattering if those minorities are qualified or available or not. Our public schools at the local and the state level write grants and thus if they do not have policies that are representative of diversity and inclusion they are tossed. This happened with science grants at the early stages and still today over global warming. If you requested funding no matter how irrelevant global warming was to the project it must contain a certain degree of pertinence to that issue. As a cave explorer I totally observed this as it affected our research. Access to caves and funding just disappeared. I absolutely do not support the discrimination of qualified people in any entity regardless of race, ethnicity, handicap or sexual orientation. However, to lower the academic bar so they can slip in so it appears to be fare completely undermines American excellence that put us where we are along with widening the achievement gap. Science and technological excellence is being taken over by the Chinese because of one huge growing difference. They still use merit as the guiding principal for selection of the best where we are more and more using identity politics. Why do the complaints to the school board fall on deaf ears? Just follow the money. Rob
