Parents Need to Know Their Rights to Reclaim America's Schools

Rob Bluey : Jul 18, 2022
The Daily Signal

"...Parents just have to keep on being diligent, get the documents, get all of the textbooks, if your kids even use them. Many schools don't use them anymore. Get the iPads, log onto their Canvas and see what they're actually looking at in the classroom..." -Kimberly Hermann, Southeastern Legal Foundation general counsel

[DailySignal.com] Starting with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread school closures, parents got a firsthand look at their children's education through virtual instruction—and they didn't always like what they saw happening. (Screengrab image)

The parental revolt of 2021 toppled Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia's gubernatorial election after he infamously quipped, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

Frustrated parents propelled Republican Glenn Youngkin to the governor's office in Richmond. Across the country, concerned citizens ran for school boards—and won. And today, parents are rightfully demanding information from their schools.

The Southeastern Legal Foundation is stepping in to help parents. Kimberly Hermann, the organization's general counsel, spoke to The Daily Signal about parental rights and the resources available to them.

Rob Bluey: You've done some excellent work to give parents a handbook for what they can do to be engaged. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Kimberly Hermann: Actually, a couple years ago, it was pre-COVID, we started to see this issue of woke education pop up across our country. First, we started to see it in the colleges, and then once we as parents, I'm a mom of two littles, actually had a front row seat to what was happening in the schools through virtual learning, we saw that our kids were being indoctrinated with a lot of racial programming that actually was teaching them to pit each other or pit one another against each other based on the color of their skin. And we knew at Southeastern Legal Foundation that we had to get into action there.

And so, we started working with people to file lawsuits across the country and also to create things like a parent guidebook, so that parents can actually have the tools to educate themselves and to fight on their own when maybe a lawsuit isn't appropriate or the facts don't justify it yet.

Bluey: For many of us, we saw this firsthand in 2020, in part because kids were home or were spending a lot more time with them, maybe observing what was going on in the classrooms. Also, we had everything that happened in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, but this has really been going on much earlier, maybe it just wasn't on our radar. As you've done work on this, tell us about the history and how this came to become such an important part of public schools' curriculum, disturbingly so.

Hermann: To understand that, it really does go back to the 1960s when you look at the civil rights movement and there's a faction in the civil rights movement that really wanted to undermine our country and undermine our Constitution. And when their arguments didn't win the day, they went into the academy and that's really where you can take a stakeholder, right?

As you build it into the education system and you teach the teachers critical race theory, which really is the idea that our country is based on white supremacy and that the only way to end that is to undermine our Constitution, undermine our legal system. If you actually pick up the books that are called "Critical Race Theory," this is what they teach. And so, they've been building it into the schools for decades through the teachers. (Screengrab image)

So, teach the teachers this, then they teach the kids this. And like you said, it really didn't come to light where parents saw it until recently, but this is nothing new. It's just come in many different ways and now they've really dug in deep during the Biden administration and they're calling parents domestic terrorists. I mean, they are investigating parents that speak up and out against this, and it's not going to end until we start winning in court and changing their laws throughout the country.

Bluey: Let's come back to that in a moment. But tell us a little bit about, for the parents who are listening, what they should be on the lookout for if they have a child who's coming home and maybe there's certain questions they should be asking them. And I think, as you indicated, it's not just a casual conversation, it's embedded in other subjects. I mean, it might come up in math and history and English and all sorts of places.

Hermann: You'll see math word problems that say things about race specifically: There's 10 kids in the class and eight of them are oppressors, how many are white? Right? I mean, those are the type of word problems that you'll see.

But so they just need to be looking at all of the curriculum and a lot of times parents can't get their hands on it. And so, that's been one of the hardest battles, is fighting for transparency.

It's been great to see these laws change, but parents just have to keep on being diligent, get the documents, get all of the textbooks, if your kids even use them. Many schools don't use them anymore. Get the iPads, log onto their Canvas and see what they're actually looking at in the classroom... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

Continue reading this transcript HERE, or listen to the interview on podcast by Clicking Here and scrolling down.

Rob Bluey is executive editor of The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.