DISMANTLING THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ISN'T ENOUGH

National Review

 

Dismantling the Department of Education Isn’t Enough

By Chad Williams

November 30, 2024 6:30 AM

 

State institutions that violate parental rights must be held accountable.

 

Parents across the country were among the many diverse constituencies that delivered a historic victory for President-elect Donald J. Trump. Many of those parents have grown cynical about politicians of all stripes, but now have hope that Trump will pursue policies that edify, rather than undermine, the nuclear family.

 

Among those policy initiatives is the promise to dismantle the United States Department of Education (DOE). While that would be a good start, it isn’t nearly enough. Specifically, the administration must take a close look at the anti-parent movement and direct the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights and other federal laws to hold institutions and individuals accountable.

 

There are many recent high-profile stories that highlight the extent to which the anti-parent movement has metastasized within the public-education system. At the national level, consider the still-uninvestigated and unexplained Garland Memo, which targeted parents as “domestic terrorists” for showing up to school-board meetings and, well, parenting. Likewise, at the local level there are stories in just about every state in the nation illustrating how public-education officials have become the embodiment of the Somali pirate meme — “Look at me. Look at me. We’re the parents now.”

 

School officials are adept at manipulating Byzantine education laws and their relationships within captured state agencies to make sure that parents rarely get a fair shake. For example, last year, the Washington Post reported that public schools have faced a “deluge” of state-law FOIA requests from parents seeking details about what is happening in our schools. The reality, though, is that those school districts use taxpayer resources to ensure that the “open records” process is as opaque, expensive, and time-consuming as possible. Understandably, most parents eventually give up.

 

I have not. Last year, I wrote about my experience as one who has relentlessly pursued answers from my school district about its enforcement of unlawful Covid-era policies against the will of parents. Although I am a lawyer, I am admittedly not an expert in constitutional or education law. But I know when I am on the receiving end of an inexcusable violation of my family’s civil rights.

 

This pursuit of justice has cost me hundreds of hours of personal time and thousands of dollars. I have made countless attempts to sit down with my school board — my neighbors — to try to resolve this matter in good faith. In return, I have faced threats and retaliation, including from the school district’s massive law firm, which represents dozens of school districts in Pennsylvania and has cozy connections with the public-education establishment throughout the state. Those lawyers have turned my battle into an all-out war and have enriched themselves to the tune of tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars in the process.

 

In April of this year, as I prepared an educator misconduct complaint against the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District superintendent, I discovered that the school district allowed a third-party advocacy group to conduct surveys of 14-year-old children on prohibited sexual topics, all without ever providing the required parental notice or consent. Nevertheless, even though I compelled the school district’s written admission of its multi-year violations of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), not a single school official has been held accountable by any local, state, or federal agency.

 

Laws were broken, but the problem is no one wants to enforce them.

 

In July, the Office of Chief Counsel of the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) acknowledged that the allegations in my complaint are “legally sufficient to warrant professional discipline” against the Unionville superintendent, who is also a past president of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators and one of the highest paid superintendents in the state. Yet, despite this determination of statutory misconduct, I still have not been given an opportunity to meet with anyone in the PDE to present the evidence supporting the allegations in my complaint. In fact, just last week, a lawyer from the Office of Chief Counsel confirmed that the PDE will not explain the reason for the extraordinary delay, and will not provide any transparency regarding the status of its investigation.

 

In September, a senior official in the DOE’s Family Policy Compliance Office also acknowledged receipt of my complaint against the Unionville school district, months after it was initially submitted. While that official confirmed that the school district’s admission of multi-year violations of the PPRA and FERPA warrants enforcement action under federal law, still no one has been disciplined and no remedial action has been taken.

 

Until recently, I have been fighting this battle alone. Fortunately, I am now represented by the Pacific Justice Institute, a public-interest legal organization focused on defending parental rights. But there are thousands of parents across the country who do not have the experience, time, or resources to take on the monolithic education establishment. The bottom line is: No parent should have to fight battles like this simply to have their voices heard and their fundamental parental rights respected by public institutions.

 

Dismantling the DOE is a good first step, but it is not enough. At a minimum, parents deserve complete transparency and accountability for those who abuse their authority and undermine parental rights. We deserve federal policies that favor comprehensive, nationwide school choice. Most importantly, we deserve a meaningful voice in what comes next.

 

Parents like me, who have been marginalized and mistreated by the “leaders” in the public-education system over the last four years, showed up for Donald Trump on Election Day. We are counting on him to show up for us and deliver fundamental education reform.