What to do about schools pushing toxic ideologies

Reports of schools at all grade levels pushing critical race theory, the New York Times 1619 in addition to participating in the climate strike of several months ago, and the embracement of socialism suggest that schools of all grade levels are using children to further political and ideological goals. The goal is to create future generations with fundamentally different values than what has fueled this country’s success.

There have been numerous anecdotal stories from parents who claim the education their children are receiving has deemphasized the traditional subjects in favor of espousing political and ideological positions. They claim American history does not provide a balanced view, but, instead, has emphasized the various injustices and wrongs that America is alleged to have committed. There are even reports of schools suggesting limits on free speech to only what is politically acceptable.

One approach to start addressing this is determining in an objective way the accuracy of these assumptions the degree they apply to an individual school. A set of questions would be developed for parents to ask of their children. The questions would be age-tailored from elementary school through college. They would ask about what the students are being taught and determine the degree that traditional subjects are being covered versus social and ideological positions some claim are being used to indoctrinate children. The questions might be multiple choice to provide some objectivity to the process. Responses indicating traditional subjects being taught would get positive scores, while responses indicating political and ideological indoctrination would get negative scores. A total, composite score would be calculated.

To implement this, a person or organization with expertise and credibility would be sought to create the age-tailored questions. The questions could be distributed by a combination of social media, news and other sites that agree with the approach, and possibly local newspapers. There would need to be grassroots efforts to get the process known, questions distributed, and parents engaged.

If parents are dissatisfied with the results, they would have evidence to confront school boards, work through PTA organizations, or become active in local and state politics. Newspapers and other media might solicit parents to submit results, so that the public is aware of how the schools are performing. While no scoring system is perfect and bias can be introduced, it should be possible to create a fair scoring system so that the results would be credible and motivate reforms.