Education Liberty Watch

Education Liberty Watch is a conservative watchdog group that evolved out of EdWatch, formerly the Maple River Education Coalition (MREDCO), which was founded in 1998 as a nonprofit organization by Renee T. Doyle, a school board member of the Maple River School District in south central Minnesota. In August of 2003, their mission statement said that "MREdCo changed its name to EdWatch to more accurately reflect the organization's growing national influence." ^[1] The group opposes occupational and workforce retraining programs that target poor, disadvantaged, and low-skills wage earners, as well as job retraining programs that Minnesota established to help retrain workers unemployed by changes in jobs and occupations in a modernizing workforce.

Mission

According to their website, "Education Liberty Watch supports knowledge-based education that promotes the American Creed, free enterprise, limited government, and the primacy of parental rights."

Beliefs

Also on their website, the group spells out its ten important action items in education^[2]:

1. Parents are the primary authority in the education and rearing of children.

2. Accessible, nonpublic education without government interference is essential to a healthy education system.

3. Good education is most importantly about acquiring knowledge and understanding, not about inculcating government-approved values and beliefs.

4. Good education in the United States promotes the American Creed (Principles of Liberty) as defined by the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, including national sovereignty, natural law, self-evident truth, equality, God-given inalienable rights of all people, the right to life, liberty and private property, the consent of the governed, and the primary purpose of government being the protection of citizen’s inalienable rights. The American Creed creates “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one), i.e. people from many nations gathered under one American Creed.

5. Good education accurately teaches the political heritage of western civilization, including the Judeo-Christian worldview, as America’s historical foundation.

6. Good education teaches a thorough understanding of the world in which we live, but also reinforces the sovereignty of the United States and American exceptionalism.

7. Good education understands that truth exists, and that it can be discovered, understood, and taught.

8. The constitutional authority over education is reserved to the individual states and citizens, not to the federal government. The constitutional limit on federal powers is an essential part of the separation of powers that protects the freedom of the American people.

9. Early childhood care from birth to five is best determined by the child’s parents. Establishing ideological and political child-outcomes and universal preschool is a dangerous expansion of government power over families.

10. Universal or routine psychological screening of students and young children in schools and childcare settings is a usurpation of the authority of parents and a dangerous violation of personal privacy.

Actions

EdWatch played a prominent role in the rewriting of Minnesota’s science and social studies standards to the Christian right's fight against creationism and broadening the social science curriculum to include non Judeo-Christian points of view. They have attempted to block the expansion of early childhood programs. They have an averse obsession with early childhood programs, what they term 'mental screening' and evaluations of children's learning capabilities.