Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before It's Too Late

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

What Is Happening to Our Kids?

PART ONE

THE GAME CHANGER: THE GENDER CRUSADE

CHAPTER ONE

Redefining Normal

CHAPTER TWO

Schools: Preaching—and Enforcing—the LGBT Gospel

CHAPTER THREE

Turning Teachers Into Gender Evangelists

PART TWO

MORE TROUBLE

CHAPTER FOUR

Losing Religion—and Finding god in Science

CHAPTER FIVE

Cultivating Activists, Not Americans

CHAPTER SIX

Powerless Parents and Autonomous Kids

CHAPTER SEVEN

Getting Inside Our Kids’ Heads: Identity Politics, Safe Spaces, and Social-Emotional Learning

CHAPTER EIGHT

Fake Education—Failing Education

CHAPTER NINE

You Cannot Fix These Problems (Not in Your Child’s School Lifetime, Anyway)

PART THREE

THINKING IT OVER. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Notes

Index

To our families, with love

INTRODUCTION

What Is Happening to Our Kids?

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

—Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and statesman

This is a book about our children and their future. It’s also about America’s future, for the two are inextricably linked. It’s a story of two competing visions of the human person, of education, and of the purpose of life.

The millennial generation—roughly speaking, those born between 1982 and 2004—has largely replaced faith with religious indifference or practical atheism. Some of them don’t even know if they are male or female. They embrace progressive ideology with growing fervor. And the next generation—our most recent high school graduates—tilts left in even greater numbers. At what point does this spell disaster?

It’s time for an honest conversation about why we are losing our kids. Why are the children of patriotic Americans ready to believe the worst about their country? Why are the sons and daughters of committed believers becoming moral relativists and nones? Why are the children of well-grounded adults growing up unsure of who they are in the most basic sense—whether they are male or female—even as they embrace the mandates of identity politics?

Certainly the complex cultural and legal changes of the past few decades have had an effect. The sexual revolution undermined the traditional norms governing sex and marriage and led to the breakdown of the family. Religious commitment, particularly within fractured families, has waned,1 weakened by secularism and cultural hostility, while government at every level has constricted religious freedom.2 But general cultural trends don’t account for what’s happening in the hearts and minds of so many of our children. There’s something else at work. America’s high schoolers, college students, and young adults are storming the barricades of human nature on behalf of a gender revolution that denies the reality of sexual difference.3 They are embracing progressivism with a speed and uniformity beyond anything we have seen in past generations.

The cause of this crisis is something no one wants to talk about. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s the public schools.

Nearly nine out of ten children4 in America are educated in public schools—schools that woo, win, and launch the next generation of progressives. As Andrew T. Walker writes,

The modern liberal impulse is one that sees government schooling as the apex of citizenship, but also, more fundamentally, as a form of secular discipleship. Education is designed to be comprehensive in nature. It forms, habituates, teaches. Abraham Lincoln himself is quoted as saying that the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. Liberals see public schools as the fertile ground for Resistance training 2.0. . . .5

They are succeeding. Public education is the common thread in the childhood of most Americans. It has a massive influence, affecting over fifty million children each year,6 including those attending charter schools.7 By contrast, roughly seven million children attend private schools8 or are homeschooled.9

The problem with public schools is not the rank and file personnel. We won’t solve it by hiring teachers and administrators who are sympathetic to American ideals, including freedom of speech and religion. Many dedicated and talented teachers and principals work hard to educate, not indoctrinate, the next generation. Many of them are conservatives and religious believers themselves. As we’ll discuss in more detail, however, they are not calling the shots in America’s public schools. They have neither the leverage nor the authority to make America’s schools great again. And neither do ordinary parents.

Progressives know that parents have little influence over public education and even less power to shield their own children from erroneous or biased lessons and materials. Government schools are no longer accountable to the families they serve—at least on the big questions. In the view of progressive educators, concerned parents are the opposition to be resisted. School boards, superintendents, and teachers follow the lead of the activists, bureaucrats, unions, tech titans, academics, and litigators of the left and the courts that serve as their enforcers. The truth is that nearly everything in America’s public schools—the culture, discipline, curriculum, hiring practices, school policies, even the names of schools themselves10—is determined by progressive ideologues, both inside and outside the school systems.

But didn’t the election of 2016 promise change? Whatever changes may be in store for America’s domestic and foreign policies, the sad fact is that no president can loosen the left’s grip on public education.11 The Department of Education is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy with money to spend and regulations to implement. It has no vision. It has no heart. It’s an agency, not a parent or grandparent. It doesn’t care deeply about whether a child understands who he is (a boy or girl), believes in God, or loves America. Parents, grandparents, and pastors do. No matter who is at the top, the federal government simply can’t solve the deep-rooted problems plaguing our public schools—certainly not for our children, right now.12 The problem-solvers will be found not in the faceless educational bureaucracy but in our homes, churches, and local communities.

Public education has been incredibly successful in one area: churning out youthful progressives—growing numbers of men and women in the grips of existential confusion, perpetual victimhood, and political intolerance. Our children’s shift toward progressivism begins well before college. The system takes full advantage of their most formative years in early elementary school, and the indoctrination continues through high school. Thanks to America’s public schools, they show up to college already prepped and ready to play on the progressive team.

Every philosophy of education begins with a vision of who we are and why we are here. What does it mean to be a human person? And what is the purpose of our lives? Traditionally, education in the West was ordered to children’s moral, spiritual, and intellectual development, helping them learn what is true and what is good. The child who has a sense of what is good and true is better equipped to take everything learned in the classroom and use it to pursue a good, happy, and productive life.

The progressive educational philosophy, based on the theories of John Dewey (1859–1952), is radically different. Dewey believed that objective truth is unknowable. All we can say is that an idea is warranted (as opposed to being true) if it has practical utility, and the only question is whether something is socially useful, rather than whether it is objectively right or wrong. An atheist and a materialist, Dewey rejected the idea of human nature, believing instead that the child is socially constructed, shaped by experiences and the social context within the school. The school, then, is the ultimate instrument of social reform, able to shape future generations according to whatever society deems to be socially desirable goals.

The teacher, according to Dewey, does not instruct children in a body of knowledge but acts as a gatekeeper over the social influences in the classroom and facilitates children’s correct responses to those influences: The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.13

What would you expect an educational system based on this philosophy to look like? You would expect it to be run from the top down by the progressive elite. You would expect a reliance on experience as the primary source of knowledge. You would expect peer instruction, with teachers as facilitators. You would expect parents to be marginalized, while their children are formed according to the values and norms of the prevailing culture. You would expect moral reasoning to be governed by social utility, with a heavy dose of relativism to boot. In short, you would expect our current system of progressive education.14

We write as cultural observers, professionals working in policy and academia, and moms who care deeply about our own children’s well-being and that of all children. We believe that the damaging ideology now deeply embedded in America’s public schools has made public education an untenable choice for any child. The game changer is public education’s appalling surrender to the gender revolution. Immersing impressionable children in an imaginary world—sanctioned by authoritative adults—that pretends boys can become girls, girls can become boys, and some children will be neither or both is a serious distortion of reality. It is already inflicting incalculable damage on our children and teens—not just on the vulnerable children suffering from identity confusion but on all the rest who are forced to speak and live the lie, fed bogus science, silenced in the name of tolerance, and marginalized by institutional practices that favor transgender claims above all else.

The gender revolution has conquered the public schools and rules them tyrannically. Our country is already reeling from the divisive, sometimes violent, nature of identity politics, which pits Americans against each other. Imagine the instability of a nation whose children are at war with their own bodies, their very selves. Abraham Lincoln’s famous words carry a warning in this context as well: A house divided against itself cannot stand.15

The gender revolution is by no means the only problem. We shall turn the spotlight on public education’s indifference to parents’ rights, as schools muscle parents out of the most private areas of their children’s lives—identity, sexuality, and emotional well-being. We shall show that secularists have been hard at work transforming government schools into God-free zones, where secularism and practical atheism enjoy official favor.

We shall reveal how in many schools a false portrait of America as shameful and oppressive has displaced an appreciation of our rich history and constitutional form of government. We shall show that public education has failed to make good on its promise to educate America’s students, compromising their futures and the prosperity of our nation. We shall lay bare the frightening reality that children in public schools—especially the most vulnerable—are caught in the left’s powerful riptide and are being pulled rapidly beyond our reach.

We must face facts: change within the system, even if it were possible, would come too late for our children and yours. The long-run solution is meaningful educational choice for all families instead of a rickety seat on a sinking ship. But such changes will not happen while your children are still in school. It is time to channel our precious energy and resources into finding (or making) better options for everyone.

It’s time to get our children out of public schools now. Before it’s too late.

PART ONE

The Game Changer: The Gender Crusade

CHAPTER ONE

Redefining Normal

This is one of the most important trans rights cases so far in Minnesota. Our experience shows—from start to finish—what can happen if a school caters more to the parent community than to a [trans] child’s human rights.

—David Edwards, father of a transgender girl, after winning a settlement against Nova Classical Academy for alleged human rights violations and gender identity discrimination

Nova Classical Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, was, by all accounts, the sort of school that most parents seeking a first-rate education for their children can only dream about.1 The K–12 public charter school offered a rigorous academic and virtue education program in the classical tradition,2 attracting an educated, diverse group of parents who valued the school’s commitment to training students for a virtuous life of duty and ideals.3 Parent partnership was a core value at Nova, where a majority of the board of directors were parents.4 Thanks to shared educational ideals and an atmosphere of respect, the school community peacefully comprised families of varying political and religious views.

Until the gender crusaders rode into town.

In the fall of 2015, parents of Nova’s younger students (K–5) were informed that the school was welcoming a gender-nonconforming student (a kindergarten boy who liked girl things).5 Gender expression, the parents were told, was ever-changing as students are constantly exploring many different aspects of their identity. To ensure a welcoming environment, the children would be introduced to the concepts of gender identity, diversity, and acceptance through a transgender-themed children’s book, My Princess Boy.6

Reaction was swift. Some parents protested that their children were too young to be introduced to gender fluidity. Besides, the school’s procedures for approving curriculum innovations had not been followed. Dave and Hannah Edwards, the parents of the gender-nonconforming child, pushed back, accusing Nova of failing to protect their child, in violation of state and federal law. Dave Edwards is (not so coincidentally) an educator who specializes in helping schools be more trans-inclusive. He is also a representative of and trainer for Welcoming Schools, a spin-off project of the leading LGBTQ pressure group, the Human Rights Campaign.7 Edwards pressed his complaints against Nova with help from the lawyers at Gender Justice, an LGBTQ legal advocacy group.

In a matter of months, Nova Classical Academy was riven by bitterness and distrust, wrote Katherine Kersten in an article about the school’s troubles.8 The once friendly atmosphere of the school vanished:

School board meetings at Nova, once sleepy affairs, quickly became scenes of conflict. LGBT activist groups such as Transforming Families (a support group for transgender families) and Gender Justice (a nonprofit law firm) mobbed the meetings, brought their lawyers, protested, and compelled their sobbing transgender kids to talk about bullying and suicide attempts, according to Emily Zinos, a longtime Nova parent.

Parents who questioned the proposed policy changes were branded as bigots. We were ridiculed, mocked, and accused of hatefulness and ignorance, despite our doctoral degrees, said Tom Lynn, parent of four Nova students.9

By February 2016, the Edwards family had grown impatient, demanding a gender inclusion policy without further delay.10 The school worked with the Edwards family, but the day before the plan was to be implemented, the school announced that parents would have the right to exclude their children from classroom conversations about the Edwards child’s transgender identity and transition.11 Fed up, the Edwards family pulled their son (daughter) from Nova, enrolled him elsewhere, and filed a discrimination complaint with the city’s Department of Human Rights.

Sixteen months later, Nova Classical Academy and the Edwards family settled their dispute, agreeing on substantial changes to the school’s gender-inclusion policy.12 The Edwards family’s daughter has not re-enrolled at Nova, but the new gender-inclusion policies remain, affecting the school’s entire student body. The ordeal destroyed friendships,13 caused dozens of families to leave the school, and demonstrated that even the best public school administration—and charter schools are public schools—can be brought to heel by powerful ideologues.

It’s a troubling story and an eye-opening example of the new normal in public schools. The settlement agreement, including a new gender-inclusion policy, shows how progressives intend to indoctrinate every public school student in America in gender ideology. As the Nova story demonstrates, public schools have become the worst educational choice for the children of America’s hard-working, faith-filled families.

The New Normal

School districts in nearly every part of the country have adopted gender inclusion policies like the one imposed on Nova Classical Academy.14 These policies, which bake gender ideology into the school experience of every child and demand conformity from the entire community, point to a new normal in our neighborhood public schools—the transgender normal.15

According to Gender Justice, the goal of the Nova settlement is to create a generally trans-friendly environment instead of one determined on a case-by-case basis. Specifically,

[Nova’s] new Gender Inclusion Guidelines include specific language around name and pronoun changes, changes in appearance, and differences in associations such as gendered groups; providing a safe, welcoming, and affirming environment; supporting the child’s timeline for social transition.

It will also include the Minnesota Department of Education’s Toolkit in its staff resources; set clear expectations for respectful, nondiscriminatory dialogue in board meetings, provide professional development to staff, and will not allow students or families to opt-out of following the gender inclusion policy.16

Ostensibly intended to protect particular transgender students, gender-inclusion policies force everyone else to change, in speech, thoughts, and attitudes, even in schools that have no transgender students enrolled. The controversy at Nova began with the Edwards family’s complaint that the school wasn’t supporting their son’s transition from male to female, but the focus quickly shifted to changing the educational environment. To make Nova a safe, supportive, and fully inclusive school, the policy had to change the thoughts and beliefs of teachers, staff, and all students—even kindergarteners.

Boys Are Girls. Girls Are Boys. It’s 1984.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought, wrote George Orwell.17 Gender ideologues know that too, and they have been remarkably successful in dictating the correct gender language and required vocabulary in public schools.

Nova’s gender-inclusion policy, like such policies everywhere, begins with a set of official terms that redefine the human person,18 an attempt to embed the premises of gender ideology in students’ language and assumptions. The new vocabulary includes terms such as assigned sex, gender identity, and gender expression.19 In brief, a person’s assigned sex is described as how others categorize him based on body parts (genitals) observed at birth.20 Gender identity is who I am, defined as a person’s deeply felt, interior sense of being male, female, both, or neither.21 Gender expression describes what’s on the outside—how a person expresses that inner gender identity in mannerisms, hairstyle, clothing, and interests.22 A transgender person, though born with a normal male or female body, experiences a disconnection between his physical body and his feelings.23 This deconstruction of the human person is taught to schoolchildren, often with the aid of cartoon characters like the Genderbread Person or the Gender Unicorn.24

The Gender Unicorn shows the person not as a unity of body and soul but as a conglomeration of separate dimensions: gender identity, gender expression, sexual attraction, romantic attraction, and sex assigned at birth. Each dimension of the person is described as falling somewhere on a spectrum and is unrelated to the other dimensions. For example, a person might self-identify as assigned female at birth, assert a male gender identity, be sexually attracted to both men and women, be romantically attracted to men, and exhibit an androgynous gender expression. Taken together, these different aspects constitute the person’s gender. And gender is the person.

Notice what’s missing: the reality of biological sex. The body. Nova’s policy is typical in failing to acknowledge the biological reality that a human being has either a male or a female body. Instead, it compels students, teachers, and staff to affirm the invented concept of assigned sex:

Graphic by TSER. Design by Landyn Pan and Anna Moore.

Assigned Sex: The biological, genetic, and anatomical makeup of a body. In the United States, individuals are typically categorized as male, female, or intersex (i.e., atypical combinations of features that usually distinguish biological male from female) at birth based on physical attributes, and an individual’s assigned sex is then used to assign a gender.25

Instead of describing the person as male or female according to his or her anatomy, Nova describes assigned sex as the result of a body that in the United States is typically categorized as male, female, or intersex—as if the male and female binary were an American idiosyncrasy and as if the body had no intrinsic connection to the person.26 The creators of the Gender Unicorn go even farther, rejecting as harmful the term biological sex, for which they substitute sex assigned at birth:

Biological sex is an ambiguous word that has no scale and no meaning besides that it is related to some sex characteristics.

It is also harmful to trans people.

Instead, we prefer sex assigned at birth which provides a more accurate description of what biological sex may be trying to communicate.

TSER asserts sex assigned at birth is [t]he assignment and classification of people as male, female, intersex, or another sex based on a combination of anatomy, hormones, chromosomes. It is important we don’t simply use ‘sex’ because of the vagueness of the definition of sex and its place in transphobia.27

Other activists similarly reject reality. In a 2017 report, a coalition of influential advocacy groups, including the Movement Advancement Project, the Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the National Education Association, and the National Center for Transgender Equality,28 defined transgender persons as those whose sex assigned at birth is different from the gender they know they are on the inside.29

The New York City Department of Education’s gender policy mentions only assigned sex at birth, defined as the sex designation recorded on an infant’s birth certificate should such a record be provided at birth, treating sex not as a physical reality but merely a record of the doctor’s judgment, at the time of birth, about the child’s genitals.30 Gender, they say, is much more complicated and subjective—and much more important.31

Minnesota’s gender Toolkit32 treats biological sex as irrelevant, referring only to gender assigned at birth or sex assigned at birth in the context of defining gender identity and transgender. Consequently, everything about the child is up for grabs. The state instructs schools not to assume a student’s name, gender identity, or pronoun. . . .Teachers could address students as ‘students’ and ‘scholars’ to be inclusive as opposed to ‘boys and girls.’ 33

Going even further, the Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland have eliminated the idea of biological sex entirely, replacing it with Legal Gender Marker, defined as the designation of the student as ‘male’ or ‘female’ appearing on the student’s Evidence-of-Birth document on file in the student’s record.34

The result of this ideological crusade is that the state will no longer take account of biological sex, an existential reality in the life of every person.35 To quote Orwell again, It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.36 The destruction of words, however, is easier than the destruction of biological sex. Every cell in the human body is male or female, a physiological reality that will not change, ever.37 A male may wear makeup and a dress, he may even undergo plastic surgery and hormone treatments, but he can never be female.

Gender ideologues want to abolish biological sex because it testifies to the reality that we cannot choose whether we are male or female. We are created male or female, which, of course, implies a Creator—another reality banished from public schools.

Nova’s gender-inclusion policy defines as transgender those "whose gender identity is different from what is generally considered typical for their sex assigned by others at birth."38 In other words, to call a child transgender is to say that the parents, doctors, or nameless others got it wrong when the child was born. They assigned the child the wrong gender based on an arbitrary, mistaken assumption that the child’s body determined its maleness or femaleness. According to gender ideology, no one but you can discover your authentic self, your internal, invisible deeply held sense of being male, female, both or neither. Only you can say for sure who you are.

This is ludicrous. If a four-foot-tall child who can’t swim wanted to jump into five feet of water because he had a deeply held sense that he was six feet tall, would you let him jump? Of course not. You would hold him back because his feelings can’t change his height or the depth of the water. That’s reality. But when it comes to the protected categories of gender identity or sexual orientation, we act as though feelings trump reality—and children are drowning in confusion as a result.

What Difference Does It Make? Does Sexual Difference Matter?

The premise of gender ideology is that sexual difference does not matter. Progressive educators are indoctrinating children in the new truth that differences between men and women are constructed and that a person’s gender and sexuality lie somewhere along a spectrum. The gender binary—the maleness or femaleness of human beings—is merely an oppressive narrative, the poisonous fruit of societal