WASHINGTON, DC, Nov 5 — Parents across the country are lashing out at school boards for seeking to replace the traditional reading, writing, and American history curricula in their schools with the bogus, Marxist teachings of the Critical Race Theory [CRT]. So, what does the Biden administration do? It orders the Feds to track down suspicious Moms and Dads alleged to be engaged in the “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school board members, teachers, and workers in our nation’s public schools.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland is portraying it as a crisis of major proportions, and so instead of sending in a few investigators to see what’s going on, he’s gone all out. A news release issued by the Department of Justice [DOJ] reveals that Garland has created a massive task force to investigate those allegations. It is composed of the “Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs.”
Merrick took action based on a September 29 letter from the National School Boards Association [NSBA] that charged parents with using “threats and acts of violence” to express themselves at School Board meetings. The NSBA has since “expressed regret about and formally apologized” for its letter, noting that “There was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on the communication of this significance. We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
Nicole Neily is president of Parents Defending Education [PDE], a group “working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.” When she learned about NSBA’s deceit, she sent messages to members of her organization and 47 state school board associations for comment. Neily reports that as a result, 19 of the state associations “distanced themselves” from the national association.
Neily was so incensed by what the NSBA did that she sent an email to the Associated Press calling out the DOJ for “weaponizing” its resources to intimidate parents. In her email to AP, she blasted Garland’s precipitous action as “a coordinated attempt to intimidate dissenting voices in the debates surrounding America’s underperforming K-12 education – and it will not succeed. We will not be silenced.”
Parents can get pretty emotional when it comes to their kids, and many of them are up in arms regarding school board attempts to foist the un-American doctrine of CRT on their children. According to Tucker Carlson at Fox News, “Parents who believe in things like biological sex, who oppose racial hierarchies imposed in pre-kindergarten classrooms, teaching kids to hate their parents. Those are the threats, according to the Biden administration.”
And, in light of the NSBA’s admission, Carlson was right to accuse the Biden administration and the DOJ of trying to scare school board members by implying that they faced imminent physical danger from parents. “This is an utter perversion of the mission and the power of the United States Department of Justice. It is almost impossible to overstate how sinister and crazy this is,” he said.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita calls the administration’s efforts to silence the voices of parents with what some would call blunt force and “a blatant assault on the First Amendment.” When the DOJ announced its intention to “crackdown” on unruly parents, Rokita and thirteen other AGs sent a letter last week to Mr. Biden and Mr. Merrick. In it, they said, “Because the NSBA letter was the basis for your memorandum and given that your memorandum has been and will continue to be read as threatening parents and chilling their protected First Amendment rights, the only responsible course of action is for you to fully and unequivocally withdraw your memorandum immediately.”
If the Biden administration is so concerned about America’s student body, it needs to redirect such antics as demonstrated by the DOJ and start focusing on the less than acceptable quality of education in our schools. Jobs for America’s Graduates [JAG} is a 40-year-old national bipartisan organization focused on education. An analysis of the current state of education by Governor John Bel Edwards [D-LA] and Governor Kim Reynolds [R-IA] and published in Newsweek last Friday shows that education faces a worrisome crisis. Their conclusion is that our country is at risk of losing a generation of knowledgeable and productive citizens.
“The learning loss and student disengagement across America is far broader and deeper than one might imagine. As this is written, many school systems are making final decisions on how to measure student disengagement, dropouts, and learning loss. Their reports will be forthcoming over the next several weeks. We know from our work in 1,500 locations in 40 states—from the most urban to the most rural—that the scale of learning loss and disengagement is truly frightening. This conclusion is supported by June, and July reports from McKinsey & Co., in which McKinsey measured the impact to be a half-year of learning loss in math and English overall.”
Exacerbating the crisis is the fact that the pandemic has played havoc with the way our youngsters engage in the learning process. We’ve had nearly a year’s worth of widespread school closures forcing students to learn from afar, hoping that a computer screen is as effective as a real live teacher. Schools have begun to return to onsite teaching, and that teachers will return to the task of teaching our kids how to live, learn and become productive members of society. There’s little or no room for classwork such as the Critical Race Theory that seeks to indoctrinate rather than educate.