Anti-Catholic Idealogues and Catholic Education

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The full original report is found here at the Lepanto Institute. 

Since the publication of our report on the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) last week, we have received a very strong response from Catholics all across the country. Some emails have informed us that their diocese is confirmed as partners of NWEA, some have forwarded us responses they've received from their diocesan directors of Catholic Schools, and some just wrote to thank us for our work and to encourage us to keep it up.

Incidentally, we are not assigning any kind of blame on any diocese, administrators or educators for what we discovered regarding NWEA. The promotion of LGBTQ ideologies was not front-and-center in NWEA's promotional materials, and it is very likely that dioceses and administrators deciding to use NWEA for their assessments were unaware of the organization's agenda. That having been said, those administrators who are now aware of the situation have an obligation to seek alternatives.

Through the responses we've received from our readers, we can confirm the following dioceses (in addition to the 45 already identified in our initial article):

• Indianapolis
• Manchester
• Phoenix
• Charleston
• San Jose
• Lafayette

One of our readers sent us a response received from a representative of their diocesan Catholic schools. This is what the respondent wrote:

We thank you for reaching out to us directly to express your concern. When we received the information regarding the report, we immediately reached out to NWEA for clarification regarding the article recently released by the Lepanto Institute.

NWEA recently held a meeting with several Catholic School Superintendents and the leaders of NCEA (National Catholic Educators Association) to address the concerns that you shared in your email. Upon speaking with our NWEA representative last Friday, we were assured of the following regarding the content of the testing items that our students are reading:

Regarding our assessments, we do not have any LGBTQ+ related test items … our assessments include fiction and nonfiction passages written by authors of diverse backgrounds, informational passages by experts in their fields, and passages from various historical periods.

In addition, we were assured that these passages were vetted upon request by Catholic Diocese leaders and that if the company were to begin to include "identity affirming reading passages" that Catholic and Christian partners would have the option to remove these passages from the tests given in their schools.

We will work with NCEA to monitor this and to have convened a committee to evaluate this situation and determine our next available steps, including switching our testing platform. We value our primary purpose: to form disciples in our faith through appropriate content and materials which align with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

It is very promising indeed to see that Catholic schools are working with NCEA to determine what the next steps should be and that they are even considering the possibility of going elsewhere for student evaluation testing. However, NWEA's assurances that "LGBTQ+ related items" are not in the evaluation assessments for Catholic school students, and the promise to allow Catholic schools to remove any pro-LGBTQ materials from future tests are not good enough. NWEA is now on the record as an ideologically driven organization with a stated intention of changing school policies and promoting homosexual and transgender ideologies. Furthermore, every assessment test and every resource purchased from NWEA will now be dollars and cents helping to further build the LGBTQ agenda.

In short, we have to ask, "Why should Catholic schools partner with an entity that is directly attacking Catholic moral teaching and scandalizing children?"

Read the rest at Lepanto Institute.

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