A radical teachers’ union has a message for parents: We control your children, not you. And it means to prove it by shoving Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT) down your kids’ throats, part of the union’s ongoing effort to “fundamentally change” America. If you want the best for your children’s education, you’ll say “hell, no!” to this pernicious, anti-American ideology.
Unfortunately, many centrist and conservative parents have looked the other way as our nation’s once-superior public schools have been taken over by leftist unions and their “educator” allies, using race-based Marxist CRT as their tool. It’s a pity.
Just last weekend, the 3-million-strong National Education Association, the largest labor union in America, stated its outright opposition to parents’ groups and state legislatures seeking to end CRT’s baleful influence on a whole generation of school kids.
Doubling down, the NEA announced not just its support for CRT, but also said it would encourage teachers to hold a “national day of action” each year on martyr George Floyd’s birthday to “teach lessons about structural racism and oppression.”
No parents needed. In fact, teachers are actively opposing parents who don’t like what they’re doing. The NEA last week, for instance, also voted to “research” (that is, spy on and politically attack) groups that oppose CRT in our nation’s schools.
“NEA will research the organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work and/or use the research already done and put together a list of resources and recommendations for state affiliates, locals, and individual educators,” the union threatened.
Meanwhile, “More than 5,000 educators have signed a petition vowing to break anti-critical race theory laws being considered in multiple state legislatures – as the controversial curriculum faces a reckoning in districts across the country,” the New York Post reports.
And why is this so important to the left? It thinks it owns your children. Don’t you remember? “It takes a village.” So it has a right to push hateful CRT and the wholly specious 1619 Project on gullible students.
The creepy, but disciplined, left knows that seeds planted today will bear fruit tomorrow. We can see that in a whole generation of kids who think America is a racist dystopia, not a grand experiment in freedom and prosperity.
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” Russian communist leader V.I. Lenin once said.
Well, we’ve given leftist unions two generations of control, not four years. Any surprise now that, as we recently reported here and here, young people today embrace socialism and reject the free-market system that made America the wealthiest, freest, most powerful nation in human history? Or that liberal young students overwhelmingly say they’re not proud to be American?
Chalk it up to the lies and racist poison propagated by CRT and its Marxist adherents. “Systemic racism” and “implicit bias,” and other CRT catch phrases used to shame students, are merely synonyms for “born that way.” It’s fundamentally racist, hateful and inhumane.
For those seeking change, it won’t be enough just to have an opinion. Or to vote. Unfortunately, leftists make their control over education very difficult to destroy via the ballot box.
Parents are already reacting to CRT and other unwanted leftist intrusions on their children’s education. Enrollment in pre-school and kindergarten plummeted 13% this year, while overall school enrollment dropped 3%, as more parents remove their children from public schools for alternatives.
Indeed, getting kids into well-run charters, private schools and home schooling are important elements of choice for parents wanting to keep their kids away from Marxist indoctrination.
Local school boards already face growing parent revolts, possibly the start of a national movement, as Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo reports, noting that 58% of Americans in a recent YouGov survey oppose Critical Race Theory.
As for those who still wish to send their kids to public schools (they pay for them with their tax dollars, after all), they must understand three things:
One, unions are not your friends. They’re not interested in the well-being of your children. Generations of Americans were educated successfully without teachers’ unions. Letting education be unionized, which really got under way in the 1960s, was a huge mistake for which we’re paying dearly today.
Two, parents need to roll up their sleeves and get ready to fight. They need courage in the face of what will surely be vicious attacks from groups such as the NEA, which will portray anyone who opposes them as fascists, white supremacists, and worse.
Three, insist to your local congressional representative and senators that you want vouchers and other elements of school choice. Choice is one of America’s great success secrets, and keeping it out of our public schools dooms them to failure.
No one can do this job but the parents of America. They can write letters, run for school boards, attend meetings and speak up, and push politicians to act as if our schools and what they teach really matters.
Our kids and our nation are at stake. Nothing parents do for their kids will be more important than saving them from brainwashing by the America-hating leftists that now run our schools.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
The only reason parents are upset about CRT is that trumpists are lying about what it is, and what schools are teaching. It’s not any of the nonsense that they say.
So sad when “trolls” lie.
While so many American schools are turning out children who are undereducated, the teacher’s union has decided their mission is “equity and social justice”. Who exactly decided to supplant a solid education and foundation with “equity and social justice”. I hope the silent majority rises up and sends those communist minded teachers packing.
Just think that if all this misguided CRT energy was used to promote an excellent 3R education, how much more fulfilling the lives of future generations would be.
Your children go to school for about 6 hours per day five times a week and all they learn is hatred!
The idea that white people are congenitally disabled by virtue of being born white and must receive therapy by learning tenets of critical race theory is a racist and preposterous belief. If it weren’t so dangerous, especially for African Americans who will eventually, if not immediately, reject the bigotry of low expectations implicit in the theory’s teaching that absent the scaffold of white self-abasement they will not achieve their full potential, the whole enterprise would rank as the most absurd and comical of progressive conniptions. Most white Americans like most Black Americans pursue a one day at a time pace, trying to keep their loved ones safe, fed and happy. Now hurdling progressive charlatans will have to be added to the daily grind.
The best way to take care of the public (Propaganda) schools is to remove your child/children and send them to private schools (many have scholarship) or home school. Yes, this is difficult for some but the only way to right the wrongs the “teacher’s union” has done this we MUST fight it. The only other option is to observe the class rooms, read the books your child is given and tell your children that they learn reading, writing, and arithmetic in school not morals and life lessons, that comes from YOU. If you don’t like what is going on then it is up to you; you have to do something, it is not and will not be the government that will clean this up. The government IS the problem.