Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 01-16-25_THURSDAY_8AM

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Rob Schlapfer from the Oregon Education Project joins the show...this networking group kicks off next week, a full-blown push to bring balance and reform to public schools. more at Oregon Ed Dot Info.

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at clouserdrilling.com. 14 after 8, out of the country, in the city, one way or the other, public schools are failing and there are people who are looking to do something about this. Rob Schlaufer, One of my favorite guys. I used to talk to him when he was doing some other community talks a while back. And then he had some family things, and you took off, took care of dad, and did all sorts of various things.

I'm back. And then he made his way back, and he's formed a new organization called the Oregon Education Project, and it's going to be launching this coming Tuesday. All right. I want to correct you on one thing. It's not an organization. Oops. It's going to be launching this coming Tuesday. All right. I want to correct you on one thing. It's not an organization. It's not. Deliberately.

I think we have a lot of organizations working in this field, but very few of them are actually getting down into the schools themselves and acting. This is an action network. We're going to do something. We're not simply going to talk. We're going to actually do things that are going to change the dynamics in local schools. And we're centering that on the role of the school boards. Okay. I'm glad to hear this. And because, you know me, I've talked with you off air and I said, I have kind of given up on the public school system that as long as it is a unionized workforce controlled by the Oregon Department of Education Association and you have school boards that are essentially silenced by the Oregon School Board Association, which more or less kowtows to what the Oregon Department of Education is wanting. And, you know, how dare you as a school board member think that you actually are supposed to have any power or influence in actually what happens. We're here

to tell you what you're going to do good and hard. I thought, OK, what's the point? Because one of the things that now in my world, I know you're a man kind of in the middle. Maybe, you know, I'm a hard righty and I make no bones about this. But one of the things that has been they've been told for years, oh, yeah, get on the school board. You'll make a difference here. And I watch school board member after school board member after school board member that goes there and just gets run over. And then some of the best people, even if they're inelegant, as I termed it. I'm talking like Michael Williams williams and i'm not advocating what michael williams did yeah but you know you see it's like it's a little rough

the system seems to be all about okay we're going to peck you to death we're going to force you out and there was even in bend i was just reading about a school board member that had um that was so was very anti-woke trying to get rid of the woke mind virus, right? Right. And got crushed under the political pressure and then took off. So I'm thinking, okay, why bother? All right. Why bother?

Get your kids out, and that's the only way. How do you propose, then, you think, to make this happen? And you're not going to be able to do it with just the right and or the left. So tell me what you think here. Yeah. Well, the first thing I want to say is many of you, your listeners are probably familiar with Stanley McChrystal, who's not necessarily a favorite among Republicans, but he's one of the people that was cited as creating the strategy that defeated ISIS. And the basic premise was it takes a network to destroy a network. We need a network.

You're absolutely right when you talk about the pressure, particularly from the state school board association. We're going to be building a network, starting in southern Oregon but around the state, bringing school board members in. One of our local groups that we're working with is Mountain Church's Community Action Group. They have now become an affiliate for Parents' Rights in Education, which is a national group. I'm familiar with Parents in Ed. Yeah, and they're going to be very active. They're going to be doing a series of town halls beginning in February focused on exactly what is the role of the school boards. Because you sent me, you and I had some correspondence over the summer when I was beginning to work on this project, and you challenged me the way that you just did.

And one of the things we did was we got a hold of a couple guys, one of whom is the president of the Oregon Association of Scholars, who has worked in Oregon government for a long time. And he went through the OARs and the ORSs and all that stuff to find out exactly what it is that local school boards can do. And we discovered that there are a lot of things that school boards could do. What's needed is school board members. We need school board members, directors, who will stand up and do the right thing. And

that's what we're hoping to do, creating this network. Okay, this network. Oregon, once again, Oregon Education Project. You got a lot of work ahead of you because you look at the numbers, and even just from your notes here, almost 60 percent of Oregon students fail in English. Right. 70 percent failing in math, 70 percent failing proficiency tests in science. Well, again, this is where and you said this earlier. I have been for a long time. I've been trying to get particularly Republicans to recognize what I think is the basic facts of Oregon politics, and that is that we have to build a coalition that moves beyond Republicans if we're going to gain power.

That's what President Trump did. He brought in a lot of Democrats and independents into the fold, and that has strengthened his resolve to do the right things. He's focused on a few things that can be done, and he's got a more broad base of support. We've not done that, and we've not done that particularly in Jackson County, which is why I've put together what I call a three-lane approach. And the Russ's group, Parents, Rights, and Education in particular, they're going to be really going after churches. We need to get more churches involved. We need to get churches to see that this

is not politics. This is our children. Yeah, we're talking about the kids and their kids' future. Nothing succeeds with 70 percent of students not really being able to function all that well at a high level getting out of school. It doesn't help anybody. And again, nine out of ten kids in Oregon go to public schools. And yes, things like school choice are great things. But even if we had school choice today, we don't have the capacity to bring a significant number of those kids into private schools and all that kind of thing. So we're kind of forced to do something at the local level with our local schools. And again, we can do it. What it's going to take is parental commitment. We need grandparents. And most of all, we need school building. One important thing I've been

cultivating in a relationship with one of the people at the Oregon Department of Education, the man who is in charge of overseeing the implementation of the latest social science standards, which is kind of the motherlode of critical race theory coming into the schools along with the transformative SEL framework. You know, I'd be willing to bet, though, like you had mentioned, though, many people don't really understand what critical race theory is all about. And that's a big part of what we're going to do is I'm going to be publishing content that is easily understood so that people understand all this. But my contact at ODE has assured me over and over again, and it's almost like he's doing a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. He's saying, you can, you conservative folks out there in rural Oregon, you can moderate these standards the term the the trio that i use is balance moderate and replace we can balance the the very uh politically left oriented material that's coming and we can balance that by bringing

in uh more conservative approaches so that we have viewpoint diversity and you see that would and that's the key that's the key you know i i don't think anyone's talking about wanting to take the uh the education system in oregon and turn it into a you know a republican a gop outpost it's not that but on the other hand it it should not be a dome a a domain only of the left and the hard left and the woke left, especially here. And that's what it is. And I'm going to be publishing the history. I call it How Oregon Went Woke.

It's the history of how the 2017 Ethnic Studies Bill that the House put through led to what we have today. And basically the legislation got hijacked by social justice activist educators who took the – the intention of the legislature was we wanted – they said we want to see more stories of black pioneers and Chinese immigrants. And why wouldn't we want that? I mean that's fine. Everybody agreed on that, Republicans, Democrats. And that was what they thought they were getting. But as is usually the case, buried in the legislature was a little clause that opened the door for them to put critical race theory into the mix. And that's exactly what they did. So what we're calling for – again, this is not Florida. We're not calling for a ban on critical race theory, for example.

We're saying critical race theory is one way of looking at the world. Older kids today need to understand that. But it is not the one way of looking at the world. Older kids today need to understand that. But it is not the only way to look at the world. It's not the only way. And they talk a lot about critical thinking. And again, as you know, I teach fundamentally. I teach critical thinking. Critical thinking means looking at different points of view, which the standards say we're supposed to do.

So we've got cover. Oh, that's really great until you try to do that. Exactly. So what we have to do, I'm meeting tomorrow, for example, with the curriculum director for the Medford School District, who's a wonderful, wonderful person. And she has the best interests of the kids in mind. And they are very receptive. One of the things we're going to be doing, ODE, for example, they put a public, they send them, these are the resources you should use when you're putting your curriculum together to follow the standards. And it's all woke stuff. So what I'm doing is I'm saying, here's an alternative. We're going to be publishing black studies to start for a black history month. We're going to be putting

together a list of all the books that are written that aren't woke, that are not in the curriculum. We're going to be going out to schools all across Oregon saying you need to bring these books in as well because we need viewpoint diversity and critical thinking, not critical theory. And you see, diversity is not diversity of color of skin. Exactly. color of skin exactly we're talking about viewpoint and uh and educational diversity meaning that you know there's a lot there's a lot about a lot of stuff out there to know all right exactly and not just all from one ideological viewpoint i think that's wise yeah so again the balance the other is moderate we're going to moderate we want to moderate some of the content we do and there are tools available for school boards to moderate some of the more extreme content on gender.

But it will take, though, school board members who are very firm, I think, in their conviction. Exactly. That's it. That's the key, which is why, again, Russ and his group are going to be doing the town halls. I'm going to be doing a series of talks starting February 8th on woke education. I want to explain to people what it is because most of what you hear about woke is not really accurate today, even coming, especially coming from the right. Wokeness is not a religion. It's not a philosophy. It's none of those things. It's a way of seeing the world. It's a coming to an awareness of oppression. But yeah, but is it is not the basic,, the basic most easily understood aspect of woke is that, you know, essentially everything is through either the – you are either an oppressor or the oppressed.

Okay, that's fair. That's just critical theory, is it not? That's the critical lens. Yeah. theory. That's the critical lens. And the critical lens is used, and it's used in classrooms through discussion to get students to reflect. And what do they reflect on? They reflect on the stories of oppression. And when they reflect on the stories of oppression, they see, wow, the world is full of inequities. We need equity. And the way to get equity is through social justice. That's what I call the anatomy of woke. And then you end up getting to the point where someone who is not qualified is given a position or put in a position of power or elevated or given the job, not because they actually have the qualifications, but because there is equity.

And to get equity means that – and that's where – and then the right comes out of it and says oh dei didn't earn it right right and so yeah you and the sad part about this is that i think of someone who was let's say a person of color or a member of the oppressed uh club as you you could put it this way and then that may be perfectly qualified but they'll know you're a dei hire and so you're already going oh yeah you know you don't know what you're talking about because you got the gig for something other than the fact that you could do the job and that's not fair to them either well and it's offensive to most black people uh and oh yeah how'd you like to be a black person who got yeah i got the job because of a dei hire it's like oh yeah that'll help now and it's changed a little bit but that's part because the media landscape over the last 10 years has

been pushing against stories of oppression and you know black men being killed but all this stuff there's a that one of the most important insights from cognitive psychology is what's called the availability heuristic and it's the whole idea that we view the world through the lens of the things the information that we're aware of if we watch msnbc all day long like my dad did, I'm going to think that Trump is Hitler because I'm getting a very narrow kind of perspective. And our media, go on Netflix, it's all full of stories of black oppression and not just blacks, but other people.

And if you have a steady diet of that, you would think that, well, America is a horrible place. Well, in the New York Times, there have been studies I did a talk a few years ago about and show how the New York Times, when you look at the usage of words related to racism, you know, racism, white supremacy, and about 2014, it just shoots up. And so they have been pushing this narrative for a long time. And so it's a psychological thing. And of course, the only way in my mind that you can undo that is by bringing in all the other we have to step back and open the aperture and say well actually there are a lot more stories that we need so you're talking you're talking about rob schlaffer then uh opening up the overton window absolutely in the in the

public school system yeah yeah and this is something that progressives ought to get on board with. Well, progressives used to do that. They do. Yeah, and I think progressives realize that the woke education is going too far. I also know that they think – I would also hope that they were realizing that looking at the test scores, that it's also not – that it's not being effective. Right, and let me say this. Getting rid of woke education is not in and of itself going to change that. But right now, the big problem in Oregon, and the reason why I say it's the biggest problem, is the Oregon Department of Education is so focused on this.

I have been to all of the state board of education meetings since September in 30 hours or so. There's only been about – it's all diversity, equity, inclusion all the time. And of course the state board, there are 10 women, there are no men. There is one woman who identifies as white. She represents rural Oregon and she's a union organizer. They have spent the total,

they've only spent about 15, 20 minutes talking about the problem of proficiency. And that's only because Charlene Williams, the director, had to give a 15-minute PowerPoint explaining the test results that had just come out a few weeks before. And in that PowerPoint, she basically said, yeah, we're doing really poorly, but we're going to do better. I've been hearing that for many years. Yeah, there's no strategy. There's no, and there's no, when you watch the, tune into some of these meetings. It's like a woke version of the view.

All right. This is what, how about this one, Rob? I'm going to float this one by you. Rob Schlaufer with me once again. And Rob Schlaufer, interesting, interesting thinker here. And this is why I wanted to bring him in because the Oregon Education Project, which he's a part of, this networking deal, it's going to be launching on Tuesday. But you're actually going to have a meeting this weekend, too. So I want to – I'll let you let people know about that.

How about this? How about – what if we were to then make every school student pay Oregon Department of Education, no, OEA, Oregon Education Association, if they were to all pay union dues? Could that help? Could that actually help the educational process? Because, you know, I'm thinking about those old quotes in which you would have the teachers union advocates, they would say, well, you know, we'll care about the kids, what's going on with them, as soon as they start paying union dues.

I see your point. It's like, okay, well, then why don't we have them pay union dues? And unions are a part of the problem, certainly at the national level. I don't know locally because they're pushing this stuff, too. But, you know, woke is drying up. And this is something important. And you alluded to this earlier in your program this morning. People who are Trump supporters, this is not the time to say, oh, thank God, Donald Trump.

He's going to put an executive order that's going to end DEI, which he probably will do. Yeah, but it's baloney because it'll just get reversed next time. It doesn't mean anything. Well, and in Oregon, my sense is they're going to fight it. They're going to fight it. So this is the time right now is the time to engage, which is why we're asking parents and grandparents and people in the community. Next Thursday is the first board meeting for the Medford School District of the Year. Our team is going to be there. We plan to have a couple of us are going to be speaking for doing our three minutes.

We're going to be introducing the Oregon Education Project. And we're going to be laying out to the school board exactly what we want to do, that what we want is a cooperative arrangement where we are working with them, not against them, to balance, modify, and replace curriculum and practices and policies in the schools that undermine student success. And we want parents to come out and support that effort. Come out for 15, 20, half an hour and just say, yes, we want to see this in our schools. All right. This is Thursday then. It's coming Thursday. And yeah, now I'm going to be putting this on Clear Connections over the weekend. So I'm not sure when people are going to necessarily hear it.

So that's going to be Thursday, the upcoming Thursday at the Medford 549C board meeting. And what's that, 530? Normally when they do that? 530. 530. Right.

Okay. All right. So you're looking for the parents. Now, if you are successful and you can do this three-lane support and it's not just the right wing, it's not just the progressives, it's, you know, it's a whole coalition. And it's not just the right wing. It's not just the progressives. It's a whole coalition.

It's a community, all the community. Of bringing some balance into this thing. When it comes right down to it, the Oregon Education Project could be heroic to do this because I don't think just voting in school board members is enough. Right. I've just looked at too many failures that have happened over the years. Well, they need support. And they definitely need support. And the other thing is, you know, again, I put together a 52-page plan that outlines all of this, where we're going to begin in Southern Oregon.

And then this year in the fall, we're going to move over towards Bend and up to Pendleton. And then in January, a year from now, organizing, bringing everyone, getting people cooperating. And then this time next year, I'm hoping to come on your show and say we are ready to launch an assault on the Willamette Valley, which is the hub of all of this stuff. And again, we are not looking to ban critical race. We are certainly not looking to avoid issues of race and discrimination and marginalization, which are very real, but we need to do it in a balanced way. And we need to do it in a way that is effective. There's a lot of data coming in showing that these DEI programs have the same approach are counterproductive. They actually create racism.

And I would say as somebody – I just hit 66. America in many respects is more racist certainly out in the ether, out in the media. It's a lot more racist than it was in say 1970 when we were enjoying a huge movement towards unity among races but the thing is though you had very um i'm going to put a very robust free speech culture totally and so you were able to to flesh this out and now just about every other day a lot of it through the world culture uh well cultural rather uh i'm sorry you're not allowed to use this word. No, you can't bring this up. No, you can't talk about that statistic.

No, you can't because it makes other people uncomfortable. Oh, that is hate speech. This is the sort of nonsense which has taken over so much of our education. Right, and we expect, for example, we expect next Thursday, like we did with the library, we expect the folks who are the progressive activists who I know very well and they know me very well. We expect some of them will come out, and of course they're going to call me a white supremacist, which is ridiculous. I'm one-eighth black among other things. They're going to say this is –

Oh, I just thought it was your clothing. All right. Never mind. No, I'm very proud of that, that my male ancestors were slaves in the fields of Kentucky, and I'm very proud of that. This is not a right-wing effort, and you know me. You know that I'm not a right-wing guy. I'm not a Republican. Now, I work with the Republicans a lot, and the reason why is I'm trying to get Republicans to recognize that they've got to form a coalition with moderate Democrats, people who are fed up.

You have to get out of the silos, in other words. Absolutely. We need to get out of the silos in other words. Absolutely. We need to get out of the silos and start – we need a team of teams in order to defeat this network. It takes a network to defeat a network, and that's what we're building. Okay. Now I would also mention that you're also going to be appearing Saturday – this Saturday, January 18th, 11 in the morning at Grants Pass High School at the MLK community gathering. Yeah, I'll have a table there. And great news.

I've made some wonderful contacts with folks who are kind of on the left. So again, this is not a right wing thing. We want to bring in people who are concerned about these issues. And again, there's a lot of people who are Democrats. They may not say it publicly, but they're kind of like Bill Maher. They have, if you've watched Bill Maher's progression, and he's had a lot of conservative folks on his show, this right now is the time to seize on this issue. And I believe that if Republicans, conservatives, which is most of your audience out there,

if we could seize on the education issue, this is how we build a coalition that longer term, we can get school choice and some of these other things that we have. We're not going to get them as if Republicans stay in the silo. We have to form a larger – we have to make the tent bigger like Trump did if we're going to be successful without sacrificing our principles. And the other thing is that school choice works for everybody. If you're a progressive, if you're a moderate, if you're a tidy-righty or whatever the case might be, it works for everyone. But you're progressive, if you're moderate, if you're tidy-righty or whatever the case might be, it works for everyone. But we have to prepare, too. Again, we don't have a lot of private schools, charter schools. So if that's in the equation for school choice,

people begin to need to think about that now so that when we make the argument for school choice, we can say, yeah, but we're already preparing. We're creating micro schools. We're creating alternatives. There's a plan. There's a strategic plan. No more words. We need strategic plans, something that you can put on a chalkboard and everybody can say, yeah, that's what we're going to do. Here's the end game. We can measure it. We can see if we're successful. No more rhetoric. We've got a lot of rhetoric around this issue. This is a time to act. If you want to act, if you want to, if you care about what's going on in the schools, come out and show your support next Thursday and tell the Medford School Board that you want to work together as a community to make change in our schools. All right. And once again,

Rob Schlaffer from the Oregon Education Project. Website? Go to smartresistance.com and you can sign up for our newsletter. It'll be going out every week. We do have an information website, but the best bet is to get on our newsletter because we'll be sending out content, a lot of content. We're going to be doing, for example, a lot of content around Black History Month. I'd written a piece on American slavery, which is completely misunderstood by the American population and is not taught accurately in many of our schools. So we're going to be doing things like that. We're going to be republishing Thomas Sowell's great work on the real history of slavery,

which is buried in one of his books, and we're going to bring it out into a form where people can pass it around. All the content that I'm creating is designed. It's in PDF form. There's links. It's interactive. It's designed so that you can study these issues. It's designed to help you understand the issues and look at what the possible solutions are and engage in critical thinking.

All right. We're good with that. Rob Schlaffer, once again, Oregon Education Project. We'll get your information up and we'll have you back, I'm sure. Oh, yes. Thank you, Bill. 839 at KMED, 99.3 KBXG. Don't settle for a typical store-bought cake.

You're hearing the Bill Myers Show on 106.3 KMED. It is 842. You know, we've talked about so much heavy-duty stuff today. We need a palate cleanser here. How about a dad joke? Dad joke of the day. And that is sponsored by Two Dogs Fabricating on Brian Way, rather, off Sage Road in Medford. And today's dad joke.

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here go ahead bill good morning hey so conspiracy theory thursday we remember that the word conspiracy breaks down con means with uh spire spire rest same root as respiration literally means breathing the same air yes yes so we're right so it's that idea of you're you're close enough to somebody else that you're actually breathing the same air. You're maybe kind of thinking the same way. It is so easy for people to be involved. One of the things that I think anyone could take away from your show this morning is that a small number of people can make a difference and they can. All you have to do is be willing to get involved. You know, I was getting a haircut yesterday. A young business owner, a hardworking little gal, she's 33. Her name's Valerie. She owns the shop. Her husband is a blue-collar guy,

works in the electrical business. Hardworking young couple, they're busy. And I was telling her, you know, you're the perfect people to get involved. There's about 250 positions in Jackson County that are volunteer committees and commissions and that kind of thing. Would you be interested? And she said, you know, I think my husband and I would be interested because that's the only way our community is going to remain well-governed and doing the things it's supposed to do is if is that people get involved this is just a great show today to remind all of us there are all of these positions and opportunities for people to get involved and if they do get involved things can be better for all of us i would also remind people to uh attend the public meetings that are possible that that

make a lot of sense i'm thinking about bob remember how bob hayworth uh complained the other week because he was talking about the uh speed limits in downtown and so he went down to complain about that with the city council but he was one of only two people that wanted to speak about that and i think that there has been an epidemic of feeling that uh the citizenry has been beaten down so much that they've gotten to the point where there's nothing we can do about this. Nothing. And so they don't engage. Yeah.

So there are a lot of people that are disappointed at things that the city council does, but they need to take your advice and show up to the meetings and just present their point of view. The city council can only consider the people that show up. If you don't show up, they don't know what you're thinking. They can't act on it. If enough people show up and express the same opinion, I promise you the city council will act on it. All right, very good. Appreciate the call there.

Thank you very much, Brad. Okay, it is 846. Man, it has been a busy morning. Busy, busy morning morning physical gold and silver you know i was talking about this a little bit ago with uh with matt how the uh we're always talking about keep something in your possession whether it was uh you know copies of books you know digital information music whatever the case might be and yet it's funny that the national gold places are always trying to get you to put physical gold and silver into an ira that they're going to hold for you or some other third party will hold for you and then if you're getting physical gold for a just in case or

currency destruction or you know what if there's an issue you know how could i you know preserve some wealth here and then it's sitting in someone else's vault rather than in something you control. Where do you go? Well, that's why I'm talking to the folks over at J. Austin. J. Austin & Company, Gold and Silver Buyers in Ashland, 1632 Ashland Street in Ashland, 6th and G in downtown Grants Pass. They're not a big fan of putting the gold in those places because for the very reason that the whole idea of this is protection,

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So go talk to them today, okay? Jay Austin in Ashland and in Grants Pass. FortuneReserve. com is their website. You're invited to experience 859 and change. Well, it's almost nine o'clock, so I'm just going to have to check out for the day. Podcast will be up on Bill Myers show dot com in just a little bit. And remember, today we have Senator State Senator Jeff Golden will be having his town hall. That's at 515 Medford Library.

Tomorrow morning we're going to be talking more about that with him and also about some other people about the fire map issue. I just want to make sure you're here for that. That's going to be around 730. A lot to discuss, a lot of controversy, and we'll try to pick our way through it and come to some understanding. 9 o'clock, this is KMED, KMED HD1 Eagle Point, Medford. KBXG Grants Pass.