Parents of all political stripes are organizing to push back the growing tide of woke education.
Nicki Neily was furious last year when she learned a school district in her home state of Illinois would give priority for returning to class to students based on their race and sexual orientation.
To the superintendent of the Evanston school district, the effort was “about equity for black and brown students” and other “oppressed minorities” who have long been held down by the pandemic of “inequity and racism and classism.” He would later explain, trying to defuse the brewing controversy, that black and Latino students were struggling during the actual coronavirus pandemic, and it was that struggle – not their skin color – that justified the priority.
But to Neily, the effort was blatantly unconstitutional. She was mad. She had to do something.
For three years, Neily, a libertarian-leaning conservative “policy nerd,” has been a free-speech warrior fighting censorship on college campuses through her Speech First nonprofit. Maybe, she thought, it was time for a similar effort in the nation’s K–12 schools. But if she was going to do it, she had to go bigger. Many parents of school-aged children don’t understand their rights, and they don’t know where the lines are. She needed to help educate them.
That was the genesis of Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that launched at the end of March to fight classroom indoctrination and activist-driven agendas in U.S. schools.
The organization intends to be on the front lines, fighting back against progressive outfits and actors whose vision of diversity and equity in school involves dividing children by their immutable characteristics – their race, their sex – and labeling them oppressors or oppressed. They’re standing up against what they see as the spreading cancers of critical race theory and so-called “anti-racism,” that promote race-based discrimination to achieve racial equity. And they’re pushing back against a war on boys that views masculinity as inherently toxic.
“So many people feel so beat down, they’re so disenfranchised,” Neily told National Review about the founding of the group. “They feel that their schools don’t care about them, like flagrantly in many cases view them as the enemy, like we need to un-program (students) from the values you’ve been taught at home. This is not the role of public education in this country.”
“We used to send our kids to school, and you would learn to read and write, and it was a partnership,” she continued. “And now, it’s like that trust has been broken.”
In addition to engaging with parents and providing them with resources to fight back against school indoctrination, Parents Defending Education also publishes an “IndoctriNation Map.” The map includes state-by-state data and news accounts of school districts that are teaching illiberal social-justice programs to students and staff. The map also includes listings by state of parent organizations that people can engage with locally.
Among the “woke” issues they’ve highlighted so far: An Oklahoma school district facing a $6 million cut in state aid that paid almost $23,000 to left-wing advocacy groups for diversity-and-equity training, a Utah school that had ninth graders write essays about their “white privilege,” a Minnesota school district that urged teachers and staff to examine their “whiteness,” and a Virginia school district that is revising its policy about teaching controversial topics and establishing a new anti-racism, anti-bias education policy.
“One of the things we want to show with the map is, this is more than just a California and New York problem,” said Neily, a mother of two young children who lives with her family in Northern Virginia. “This is in red states. This is in private schools. This is in parochial schools. This is everywhere. Everybody should care about this issue.”
Meeting of Minds
Last June, Asra Nomani resigned from her volunteer position with the Thomas Jefferson High School parent, teacher, and student association, where for three years she’d served as the Virginia-based school’s newsletter editor. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author, viewed the newsletter role as an opportunity to contribute to TJ, often ranked as the nation’s top public school and where Nomani’s son is now a senior.
But in the wake of nationwide protests after George Floyd’s death, Nomani said the school’s principal and the association president started using the newsletter as a vehicle for their activism on race. “Not a peep from them on the issue of race before that,” she noted.
The school’s principal wanted to rethink the school’s merit-based admissions policy, which required prospective students to score well on high-stakes tests, and resulted in a disproportionate number of students of Asian descent. The school’s mascot, the Colonials, also was viewed as problematic, Nomani said. Parents and students were instructed to check their “privileges,” said Nomani, an immigrant from India who moved to the U.S. as a child.
Nomani became a vocal opponent of the move away from merit-based admissions, arguing that it was a naked effort to discriminate against high-performing Asian students. Then she started fighting what she saw as the school district’s embrace of illiberal anti-racism ideology.
A friend at City Journal, where Nomani wrote, connected her with Neily. Nomani describes herself as a “bleeding heart liberal” – she’s pro-choice, pro-gun control, and a supporter of a robust social safety net – but she and Neily, the libertarian-leaning conservative, saw eye-to-eye on issues involving classroom indoctrination and reverse racism in schools.
Nomani signed on as Parents Defending Education’s vice president for strategy and investigations. The role allows her to use her journalism skills to expose school indoctrination efforts through Freedom of Information Act petitions. Neily focuses her efforts on fundraising and management issues. A third full-time employee, Erika Sanzi, a former teacher, dean, and education writer, is Parent Defending Education’s director of outreach.
To Nomani, the progressive attack on the American education system – with its focus on equity over merit, and tribalism over unity – is nothing less than a national-security issue. How the country educates its kids is critical to the nation’s international competitiveness, she said.
“The beauty of America is that we have not devolved into sectarianism that destroys so many countries,” Nomani said. “I’ve seen that happen in Lebanon, in Bosnia, where people from a very young age are compartmentalized into what they’re supposed to be, and who they are, and who they can marry, and who is acceptable, and who’s not, who’s to be hated, who’s to be loathed. I’ve seen it. I came out of the caste system in India. I’ve seen the sectarianism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we can’t become divided like that, in the name of progress.”
For two decades, Nomani has been fighting for reform of Islam, her faith. She has been spurred by the killing of her former Wall Street Journal colleague, Daniel Pearl. The Muslim extremists who killed Pearl believed he was a lesser human because he was Jewish and had Israeli roots, she said.
“Why this idea of critical race theory is so repulsive to me is because it perpetuates that same separation of people based on identity,” she said. “What I reject in Muslim supremacy is what I reject in this leftist supremacy.”
‘Nefarious Things Taking Place’
Sanzi joined Parents Defending Education in mid March, just two weeks before its public launch. For ten years she was a Spanish teacher and dean at schools in California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, before working for the last five years as a writer at an education-focused website.
Sanzi, who considers herself to be a non-partisan political moderate, was shocked at how fast critical race theory and other social-justice curriculums have permeated U.S. schools. When she was a teacher, there was no talk of “whiteness” in schools, she said. Boys weren’t shamed as oppressors. There were no pre-meeting land acknowledgements – statements that the land the school building is on was stolen from Native American tribes.
She worries that young kids are too often being forced to grapple with topics that not only should be out of bounds for a school, but are developmentally inappropriate.
“You’re asking little kids about pronouns. They don’t even understand that question. You’re telling them to use non-binary language,” Sanzi said. “You’re literally talking about kids who believe in Santa Claus and hide their teeth under their pillow.”
Sanzi said a lot of the legal framework is already in place to combat what’s taking place in the schools. The key is to expose it, and to give the parents the tools they need to fight it.
“What questions do I ask of the principal? What questions do I ask of the school board? How do I file a FOIA request? Are there parent groups in my area that I could join to meet other people who have similar concerns?” she said.
Neily said she believes Parents Defending Education will complement a couple of other groups already fighting in the same territory, including the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) and No Left Turn in Education. She believes there will be more groups popping up in the next year for two, and “the more the merrier,” she said.
Neily, whose paternal grandparents met at a Japanese internment camp, said she has no intention of whitewashing American history. Rather, she said, much of American history can and should be taught better, “but I don’t think as part of that lesson plan you have to go and tell some kids, you have the same skin color as George Custer, you’re a bad person.”
So far, the number of tips Parents Defending Education has received from parents across country – typically more than 100 per week – has been “orders of magnitude bigger” than Neily ever expected, she said. Many are coming from first-generation Americans who tell her they didn’t come to the U.S. because they think it’s a bad or racist place.
“There are some really nefarious things taking place,” Neily said, “and the fact that this is all being done under the guise of inclusivity, it kind of blows my mind.”
Is your school implementing a ‘woke’ curriculum that emphasizes immutable characteristics over character? National Review would like to hear your story. Send your contact information, details regarding the curriculum, and, if applicable, documentation to wokecurriculum@