In a recent
episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter at The Daily Wire and author of “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.”
The consequences of this destruction, Rosiak contends, “will be devastating for society, not long in the future, but over the next five to 10 years.”
Jan Jekielek: I just finished reading “Race to the Bottom,” where you say that people back in 2019 made you rethink your whole concept of politics.
Luke Rosiak: I was a reporter covering Capitol Hill when people started contacting me about problems in schools and how it affected them.
I realized then that local government has an impact. I also realized that because most people weren’t paying attention to local politics, things could go wrong. I began to focus on school problems, which occur across all 13,000 local school districts.
Mr. Jekielek: Some of these districts impact a huge number of people. The case you make in the book is that some people don’t realize the radical agendas at play.
Mr. Rosiak: I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, which has 1.2 million people. In 2019, one thing that woke me was learning that none of the 10 Democrats on the Fairfax County School Board had kids in the school system. So why would you run for school board if you didn’t have kids? It turned out they all had their own political agendas and were using the schools as a vehicle, to gain access to children, to money, or to whatever.
Mr. Jekielek: You heard from people because you were writing stories in other places?
Mr. Rosiak: Yes, people were contacting me about schools. I saw that schools mattered and that no one was paying attention to them. Because of that, special interests had started colonizing these schools in places like Seattle and Minneapolis, and then in places you wouldn’t expect.
Once coronavirus hit, a lot of people began paying attention to schools. But I started working on this book before then, and I found that a lot of what happened during coronavirus, and with CRT (critical race theory), was what some people had already wanted to do. They used coronavirus to ramp it up.
Mr. Jekielek: You contend in the book that the teachers unions weren’t fearing for the teachers’ safety—that some other agenda was at play to keep kids and teachers out of school.
Mr. Rosiak: I live in Virginia, where the lockdowns were bad, but you could go out to eat; you could travel. Everyone’s working. You go to Target and you’ve got cashiers there.
The only ones refusing to do their job were teachers. We all know that kids aren’t vectors of this disease. They shut down schools to get money, and got $80 billion in one bill alone. They got more money than the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, and the schools weren’t even open.
They were basically taking kids hostage. The thing to realize is, they’ve always operated these schools as employment centers for adults, as much as places to educate children.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you mean by taking kids hostage?
Mr. Rosiak: They said, “We’re not going to open schools unless you meet our conditions.” Primarily, the conditions were a lot of money they said they needed for safety, but it wasn’t true. In Fairfax County, for example, they had a warehouse full of so many masks that they ran out of room. But the teachers union said, “If you want us to go to school, you’re going to have to give us money to buy masks.”
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about Fairfax.
Mr. Rosiak: In Fairfax County, groups called PolicyLink and the Government Alliance on Race and Equity are two nonprofits that most people haven’t heard of, but they’re important in this effort to take over local governments and spread this radical agenda. They’ve been doing it for about a decade. One of them did a study on Fairfax County to determine, “How can we take it over?” Then they adopted a policy that said, “Every decision must be made through the lens of equity.”
If you go into the documents about these two activist groups, they’re explicit about their methodologies. We’ll take over this county, then this town, and then this city.
They’ve colonized a good portion of America with these radical policies.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned in your book that they use the term “equity.”
Mr. Rosiak: They realized that with equity, a lot of Americans were not paying attention. Americans thought equity was the same as equality, just because they sound similar.
Mr. Jekielek: In practice, equity means equalizing around the bottom.
Mr. Rosiak: The Obama administration was concerned about discipline disparities in schools, and they called it the “school to prison pipeline,” which essentially means that blacks are suspended more than others in schools. So Obama’s Department of Justice sent a letter to the school system stating, “You’re going to be investigated unless your discipline rates are the same for all races.” The rate of Asians suspended for bringing knives to school had to be the same as the rate of blacks.
But what if one group brings more knives to school than the other? What do you do? You wind up cooking the books and letting people off the hook for committing serious infractions.
For example, in Los Angeles, over a couple years during the Obama administration, suspensions went from 75,000 a year to only 5,000 a year. Unfortunately, it wasn’t because the kids became better behaved. Instead of changing behaviors, you just change appearances so the optics look better.
It’s also been incredible to see school systems devalue academic accomplishment. The teachers have turned against students who are working hard, doing homework, and getting the right answers—all in pursuit of equal outcomes. Instead, they’ve basically said, “No, we’re just going to stop measuring.”
The result will be devastating for society, not long in the future, but over the next five to 10 years. We’re not even trying to get the kids to be smart.
We’re spending $29,000 per student per year in New York City. How do you spend that much money and get such bad results? Equity is about giving up on helping minorities by just equalizing everyone—not by helping them, but by manipulating outcomes.
Mr. Jekielek: So CRT is a way to avoid responsibility for failing to educate students.
Mr. Rosiak: CRT is the cover-up. They’re failing our kids, in particular, the poor and minority kids. The cover-up is the various excuses they have to conceal it. CRT is obviously the big one because, they say, “Tests are racist.”
So this served the interests of the teachers unions and administrators, in the sense that they just concealed they were failing these kids and started ramming them through during coronavirus. It was essentially evil what they did to the kids. Coronavirus left 50 percent of the kids in Los Angeles truant. They don’t come to school anymore. We lost them.
Yet these are the people who are saying, “The parents’ job is subordinate. We know what is best.”
Mr. Jekielek: In your book, you mention that in critical race theory, there’s counter-storytelling. What is this, and how did you see it manifest?
Mr. Rosiak: CRT is a takeover ideology that rejects objectivity. One of the ways they do that is by saying lived experience counts more than facts. So you can go into a courtroom and a district attorney could find you guilty, but you could say that you’re innocent in some subjective way. A society can’t function on some philosophical framework that rejects objectivity, but that’s what CRT does.
That’s what counter-storytelling is. It’s when subjectivity preempts objectivity, but only if it furthers critical race theory.
In the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the top math school in the state, they’re saying math should be replaced by Mathmatx, which incorporates “indigenous ways of knowing.” In this framework, there’s no such thing as the right answer to a math problem.
It’s insane. It’s a total takeover ideology. What really bothers me is, we all just want our kids to be happy; having your kids focus relentlessly on this idea of negativity and oppression in America is bad.
One thing people can do is run for their school board. You might think, “I’m just a regular parent. I don’t have any background in education.” That’s the point. It is much better to have outsiders. Don’t be confused by all their jargon. If you’re not going to run for school board, at least show up for these meetings with courage and confidence.
There are very bad people coming for your kids. If you don’t fight, then who’s going to step up?
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
