Politico Writes Hit Piece on Moms for Liberty for Exposing Education Deep State Grift

The captain blames a sailor who pointed out a hole in a sinking boat. A house is burning, yet its dwellers trample on the one who pulled the fire alarm on their way out. With the help of biased media and lushly funded public relations campaigns, the woke antics of projection and gaslighting are in full swing as we get closer to this November’s general election. 

Politico, rated center-left and “trustworthy,” recently concocted a “2024 elections” investigative report, making an argument that “Republicans (are) losing the culture wars.” In it, Politico reporters Juan Perez Jr. and Andrew Atterbury compared Moms for Liberty’s support for parental rights school board candidates to Tim Walz’s “free school meals for all” campaign pledge. Perez Jr. and Atterbury salute Walz as “currently the most popular member of either presidential ticket” and lambast conservatives represented by MLF for causing divisions. 

In the hit piece, the two journalist-activists quoted Democratic opinion research firms, party officials and the Southern Poverty Law Center, lamenting that voters want a better education system that can prepare students for the workforce and retain teachers. Tim Walz, who governs a state where “fewer than half of tested students met state proficiency standards in reading and math” in the 2023-24 school year, is anointed as the de facto gatekeeper for American public education. 

There is zero proof demonstrating the Democratic Party platform as the one to deliver the American people from failing schools, lack of academic rigor and attacks on merit. The irony is not lost that the progressive education industrial complex is largely responsible for the abysmal state of public education. Across the country, learning standards are lowered, school discipline implemented with a hyper focus on race/color, tests removed or dumbed down, grades inflated to fulfill the ideological decree of equity and to coddle non-performance. 

To add insult to injury, school systems, bureaucrats and teacher-activists relentlessly inculcate our kids into proliferating regurgitations of illiberal Cultural Marxism, seducing them to join the cult of toxic, divisive, zero-sum identity balkanization. Our extensive database on indoctrination in California schools found that almost 90% of the school districts promoted far-left ideologies to varying degrees, with 23% engaging in omnipresent indoctrination in curriculum, policy, expenditure, and personnel. This ground-breaking project, with detailed information on 350 public school districts in California, surveys the implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory, and critical ethnic studies at the local level.

Lance Izumi, author and senior director the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute, examines the broken education system in his new book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools. Izumi’s work profiles students, parents, educators and policy makers who are experiencing the collapse of learning in American classrooms. Through compelling storytelling and data analysis, “The Great Classroom Collapse” vividly recounts real-life consequences of the education deep state’s failures to educate America’s next generation. 

In one particularly captivating story, Izumi interviews a Minnesota single mother about her journey to pursue good schooling options for her three boys. Growing up in Sierra Leone with a childhood filled with turmoil, Oredola Taylor is “a true American success story.” As a product development expert with two advanced degrees in engineering and business, Taylor holds a U.S. patent and appreciates the value of a good education. To give her sons a solid start, she chose to enroll them in the French Immersion School, one of the best schools in the St. Paul school system. Contrary to the progressive’s neo-racist bigotry on black students’ oppressive state of education, the French Immersion School was “run by a Nigerian American, plus many teachers were immigrants from African countries such as Cameron, Togo, and the Ivory Coast.”

Unfortunately, the school’s advantage of having a staff dedicated to rigor and excellence was ruthlessly crushed by the overarching education industrial complex. Without proper incentives for teachers to perform and compete, proven practices in math and language arts were jettisoned, grading policies became overly lax and classroom discipline was sacked for equity concerns. To make matters worse, the St. Paul school district told concerned parents of the French Immersion School that they were “too privileged” and they needed to “be like everybody else,” partly as justification for the school system’s preferential funding for remedial programs, vis-à-vis high-performing programs. Many good teachers quit, followed by parents, like Oredola Taylor who pulled her kids from the school. Taylor bitterly concluded:

[K]ids are walking out there who can’t read. [E]verybody’s getting their cut- the unions, the administrators – it’s a crazy money laundering operation and the taxpayers are paying out the nose for these kinds of results… They have the nerve to say let’s keep this going and blame racism.

This heart-wrenching story is not an aberration. As the money-laundering grift is happening to one of the best public schools in Governor Tim Walz’s backyard, it is happening elsewhere. My earlier analysis on campaign donations from teachers’ unions to education committee members in the California state legislature shows the pervasiveness of union influence. 

In the last 25 years, the California Teachers Association (CTA), the top donor among all teachers unions in California, has contributed over $280 million to 727 different political campaigns, of which the overwhelming majority went to Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party Committee. The same can be said of other teachers’ unions. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), in spite of being the defendant that lost a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 2018 against compelled union representation of nonmembers, continues to be politically active in California. AFSCME California People, one main state chapter of the organization, has given $2.65 million, including $1.92 million to Democratic campaigns. 

The teachers’ unions are more concerned with advancing political agendas than improving public education. The California Federation of Teachers (CFT), which has invested over $30.19 million in state politics in the last 25 years, hosted a Leadership Conference on racial and social justice. The convention featured speeches from State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Justice Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Organizer Cynthia Eaton who argued that it’s all about race. CFT also promotes an initiative named “Reclaiming Racial Equity for Black Males in California,” proclaiming its crusade against structural racism and “the same old racially inequitable results.” 

Similar examples abound. We cannot even begin to address the issue of learning decline without first and foremost acknowledging the causally significant role of thought indoctrination and having a proper reckoning against it. In this sense, the Politico hit piece on Moms for Liberty is shooting the messenger who is doing the public a good service by exposing the grift, sunshining facts and rightfully demanding changes. The American people are not so gullible that they will take this cheap shot at face value. 

Our kids deserve better and the “better” will never be delivered by the party that is actively participating in the education deep state.