From Fox News (Bradford Betz) last week:
Virginia Democrats last week rejected a bill that would have required schools to teach about the dangers and victims of communism after the state's largest teachers union argued that it may encourage anti-Asian sentiment.
Emily Yen, a research coordinator for the Virginia Education Association (VEA), said the union opposed HB 1816 because four out of five current communist regimes are in Asian countries.
"We are concerned that this bill would subject Asian-American students to anti-Asian sentiments," she said.
Today the five remaining communist regimes are China, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam—all in East Asia—as well as Cuba, which is in the Caribbean.
The proposed bill would have required public schools to "suitably observe[] Nov. 7 as Victims of Communism Day"; would have taken the existing provision that, "The Board of Education shall include in the Standards of Learning for history and social science the study of contributions to society of diverse people" (with "diverse" defined to "include[] consideration of disability, ethnicity, race, and gender"), and added "and the study of the dangers of communism"; and would have required school boards to include that in part of the curriculum that they developed.
