Rep. Chip Roy If there has been any silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that the corruption and the authoritarian elements in our public education system have been totally exposed. The jig is up; parents across the country are waking up, standing up for their rights, taking back their school boards, fighting Big Education as a whole — and winning.
But we have only just begun to fight.
Largely driving this movement is the discovery of just how pervasive the radical progressive agenda is in schools across the country. Millions of parents working from home were also able to see firsthand the poisonous, anti-American indoctrination their children were receiving in their online classrooms.
Now that the left’s attempted ideological colonization of our children is completely out in the open, they are actively trying to push parents out of the education equation.
They aren’t even trying to hide this agenda. Former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAullife famously said he “[doesn’t] think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” and criticized parents for being concerned about gender ideology, critical race theory, and schools’ sexual assault cover-ups. Less than a month later, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) compared similarly concerned parents at school board meetings to the January 6th rioters. The Michigan Democrat Party recently had to delete a social media post which all but said the same thing.
Most alarmingly, after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent Attorney General Merrick Garland a letter likening concerned parents to “domestic terrorists”, the AG dutifully followed and ordered DOJ to investigate parents — a shameful directive he has still refused to rescind. In response to this directive, the public discovered that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division was compiling and categorizing threat assessments related to parents and directing FBI personnel to use the specific “threat tag” to track potential investigations. To make matters worse, emails recently unearthed by Parents Defending Education indicate that the NSBA letter actually solicited by Biden’s Secretary of Education.
In addition to the radicalism curricula, this pandemic also exposed the level of corrupting influence that teachers unions have in their shameful crusade to keep schools closed.
Chicago public school students recently lost five days of school because the Chicago Teachers Union refused to comply with the city government’s decision to return to in-person teaching. Less than four months ago, the union criticized officials for closing failing schools, instead proposed “investing in real equity,” and complained that the public school system was “underfunded.” In reality, Congress appropriated more than $204 billion in new federal spending to K-12 schools, the largest ever influx of federal education funds.
And while families across America were struggling to balance online school, childcare, work, and their businesses being shut down, the American Federation of Teachers was successfully lobbying the CDC to advise keeping more than 90% of America’s schools closed when the science said otherwise.
The bottom line is obvious, and so are its implications.
Big Education, through teachers unions and bureaucrats at every level, is directly attacking our way of life by trying to corrupt and indoctrinate our kids.
To my colleagues in Congress, we need to stop funding the bureaucrats that put teachers unions ahead of kids and that target the parents with counter terrorism tools. This is what Jefferson called tyranny over the minds of men, and we must stop it. No more excuses.
To parents, keep demanding your rightful control over your children’s education. You know what is best for them — not the government. Hold your school officials and politicians accountable for every single decision they make that affects your child.
We owe this fight to our kids and to the Republic they will inherit.
