Media Misleads Americans to Fuel War on Parents

There’s a new shadow looming over the battle for America’s public schools. As parents clamor for more information about what’s being taught in the classroom, a powerful institution has thrown in with the deeply entrenched special interests who oppose the academic (curriculum) transparency movement.

That institution is the news media—specifically, state-based “news” outlets across the country. Now they’re working in lockstep with teachers unions—whose opposition to parents’ rights has been well-documented—school boards and the federal government, whose collective efforts to tie concerned parents to “domestic terrorism” have already been exposed.

Around the nation, parents are waking up to the radical leftist content infiltrating their kids’ schools. They’re seeing the evidence from the public school teachers and administrators willing to speak out as classrooms turn into hotbeds of political indoctrination. And parents are making a simple, yet crucial, demand: transparency. They don’t want to be bullied, harassed, sued, and charged tens thousands of dollars to find out what their kids are being taught in taxpayer-funded schools. They want schools to stop keeping them in the dark.

But as parents urge state lawmakers to pass academic transparency reforms, media outlets are coming to the aid of a public education establishment that wants the status quo to remain unchanged. It’s a coordinated effort to gaslight parents and mislead the public about the very nature of academic transparency legislation.

Read the rest of the op-ed in The Washington Times.

Joe Setyon is a Digital Communications Associate at the Goldwater Institute.

Matt Beienburg is Director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy and Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.