UT: State Board Member Attacks Teachers

It was, the Utah State Board of Education concluded, within a board member's rights to make statements as an individual, even if she exercised her First Amendment Rights by saying something really troubling and false. And so, this time, Natalie Cline doesn't even get a slap on the wrist.

What did Cline say this time? In a July 4 Facebook post, Cline wrote:

Schools are not only complicit in the grooming of children for sex trafficking, but they are aiding and abetting this evil practice by giving kids easy access to explicit, unnatural, and twisted sexual content and brainwashing them into queer, gender bending ideologies.

That's a lot. But the state board stopped short of actually censuring her for either that post or an incident in which she allegedly made some comments about an employee that she found insufficiently female. Cline had jumped the gun and declared herself cleared of all charges based on a preliminary report, but the final finding was mild. She's got a First Amendment Right to say things, it said, but it would be nice if those things were both civil and accurate.

The Utah Education Association issued a release saying it "vehemently opposed" her remarks, as well they should be. 

We are deeply troubled by USBE's failure to find her toxic words in violation of its standards and its unwillingness to take action or censure Cline.

"I am horrified that an elected official entrusted with overseeing education policy in our state would blatantly disregard teachers' tireless efforts and intentionally create an environment of mistrust and hostility detrimental to the educational process," President Renee Pinkney said.

Cline was elected to the state board in 2020, and if nothing else, you can't say she wasn't up front about what she saw as the major issues for education in Utah. Here are some of the answers Candidate Cline offered the website Ballotpedia in response to their standard questions.

What are three key messages of her campaign?

* I will fight for - TRUE Local Control of Curriculum, Assessments, and Spending; Strong Supports for Educators; Parental Voice and Choice in their Children's Education; & Parents and Teachers Deciding Together what is BEST for the Child

* I will fight to - Protect the Innocence of Youth, their Mental Health, and Data Privacy

* I will fight to - Restore Freedom in Education! NO... Anti-American Curriculum, Political Indoctrination, or Sexualized Lesson Plans

What areas of public policy is she passionate about? Take a deep breath...

I am concerned about the increasingly politicized nature of our schools and the rapid advancement of programs and curriculum created by special interest groups to sexualize our children, confuse them about their gender, and indoctrinate them in Anti-American revisionist history and Karl Marx's Critical Race Theory that assumes all white people are inherently racist. Children are not inherently racist or sexual. To teach them otherwise is abusive and harmful to their mental health. I am also passionate about protecting children from an increasingly technology-driven school experience. This too is harmful to the mental health of many of our children. Technology is useful in its proper place, but can often get in the way of curriculum that builds character and understanding in our students. Deep learning comes from a study of classical literature, history from original source documents, and traditional math, science, and the arts. It's time to get back to the basics. To do this we must return decision making power to those closest to the child - the parents and teachers. We must send more money to the local districts and let them choose their standards, curriculum, and assessments. We must provide the help, support, and training our teachers need!
We must return to teaching the principles of freedom that made our country great and restore within our students a love for America!

Cline, a registered nurse, said that she has been fighting for "family-friendly policies at the international and local level for the past decade," and if so, she hasn't left much of a digital footprint beyond Higher Ground, a sort of organization/website that sounds the alarm that "the public school system is out of control" and has become a "cultural tsunami." 

Cline's Facebook page is loaded with Kim Ells and Chris Rufo and a variety of hard right influencers, and Higher Ground is more of the same. SEL, DEI and whole child mental health are all about indoctrinating children. Comprehensive sex ed is part of a plan to erase sexual inhibitions and boundaries so that evil adults can prey on children. Standardization is about socially engineering children (don't think for a moment that these folks have forgotten the evils of Common Core). There's the outsourcing of decisions to "experts" (I think I agree with her a bit on the scare quotes, since so many edu-experts are not actual experts at all). 

And this is interesting-- the group opposes "exploiting children for socioeconomic agendas," which includes the "college and career readiness" umbrella as well as school choice.

Yes, Cline and folks in her orbit turn out to be an example of how this far right ideology does not always get along with school choice.

If the government funds it, they reason, the government controls it. "Parents give the government access to their children at home and in private school settings in exchange for state-sourced school choice money," says the site, but there are always "strings attached."  Vouchers, charters, home school funding, etc are "only the illusion of choice" because the government controls what it pays for. The "educational-industrial complex" has grown and been co-opted, so "the window for truly free market solutions has been effectively sealed." We're supposed to depend on God, not the government.

Your children are worth infinitely more than the government is willing to pay you to have access to them.

If all this sounds like the belief system of a person who would be a bad fit for the state's education board, well. Cline's latest dustup is certainly not her only one. Within her first eight months in office, the board (which has 15 members in all) issued statements condemning her various comments, which have been anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black Lives Matter. The Utah Pride Center, Equality Utah, the Black Lives Matter chapter for the state, and the NAACP branch for Salt Lake City had all spoken out against Cline’s remarks within her first month in office. In a particularly nasty incident, she accused a teacher, by name and without evidence, of promoting communism; the teacher's district denied the allegation, but of course the teacher was subjected to a barrage of online attacks. There was a petition calling for her removal, but unless she does something like knock over a bank, nobody really has the power tyoi do that. Elections matter.

Nothing seems to have chastened Cline or slowed her roll. Her Facebook page is still loaded with far right material, including the usual celebration of standing out because you are a put-upon minority fighting for what is right. "You were born to stand out." "Do what is right, let the consequence follow. God will protect you in doing what's right." "If they succeed in silencing me, they succeed in silencing you!" Posts offering "more PROOF of GROOMING/INDOCTRINATION." 

There's just a lot. Like someone who found a copy of "Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea" (great books-- the twins love them) in which the pronoun "themself" is used instead of "himself" (our copy, fwiw, has "himself"). "This," Cline explains, "is about grooming children into radical gender-bending ideology. It is the science of indoctrination posing as a literacy program to improve reading." That's why she voted against the Kids Read Now $4.5 million grant to send books directly to kids' homes (part of Science of Reading initiative). 

Utah doesn't have any Moms for Liberty chapters, and Cline and her supporters don't seem all that interested in the kind of political game playing that M4L is busy with. This all seems much more over on the religious Q-anon end of the spectrum.

After he launched critical race theory panic, Chris Rufo said his next move would be to get folks stirred up over LGBTQ issues, so he's probably pleased with Cline's trajectory in Utah. She seems entirely sincere, but this level of fear and concern has to be exhausting. How tiring can it be to believe that most of the country is against you, that there is a vast conspiracy bent on consuming children, that there is a groomer around every corner (and how ignorant to believe that LGBTQ persons only exist because they were "recruited" as children). How hard is the work of collecting and creating proof, of casting educators and schools as evil menaces. How dispiriting to worship a God so tiny that He has to be defended from things like pronouns in children's books. 

I've known folks like Cline, and I imagine that she gets her energy from envisioning a story in which she is a beleaguered crusader for all that is Good and True, so righteous that she strikes fear into the large dark army arrayed against her. That's a perch from which it can seem perfectly okay to slander the entire school system, but it has to be exhausting, and I'm not sure what good it does the children of Utah. Cline is next up for election in 2024. This kind of over-the-top attack on schools is just wrong; let's hope voters put a stop to it.