In this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Hour podcast, host Julie Gunlock talks to Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak about his new book, Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey, everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to the program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom-tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and most importantly, their kids.
Today I’m excited to have on Luke Rosiak. Luke is an investigative reporter for The Daily Wire and he broke the Loudoun County school bathroom rape story. Luke has come on the show before to discuss the corruption within the PTA, that’s the Parent Teacher Association. That organization, very popular organization in the country, used to stand up for parents, but now is simply an adjunct for the teachers’ unions.
The PTA did nothing during the COVID shutdowns to advocate for the opening of schools. And subsequent to the opening of schools, the PTA did nothing to unmask kids. So I encourage all of you to go back and listen to that episode and get a sense of what the PTA stands for today. And frankly, I suggest y’all leave your local PTA. They are no good.
But today we’re not going to talk about the PTA. We’re going to talk to Luke about his new book on the problems in K-12 education. He has written a new book on the subject called “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” I think this is the most important book written about education since the COVID’s shutdown. Frankly, I think it’s one of the most important books on education. Period.
He uncovers this really dark side and the dark money that is associated with some of these left-wing political movements within the public schools. And every parent dealing with this needs to read his book. Again, the book details the effects of school shutdowns, teachers’ union influence, the politicized curriculum across the country, and shows how schools have long operated for the benefit of administrators, rather than students.
He covers such issues as the tricks they use to hide declining academic rigor. And he follows the money to reveal how special interests are inserting far-left content into schools. And he examines how parents can fight to restore schools to places focused on learning the basics.
Hey, Luke, thanks so much for coming on.
Luke Rosiak:
Thanks for having me.
Julie Gunlock:
I love the book. I recommend the book. Every parent in this situation needs to order and read your book and digest your book and memorize your book. But you’ve been studying this issue and writing about it for a long time. And your book covers a lot of issues, including CRT, school funding, foundations that are involved, math standards, the brainwashing of kids, even social engineering, and much more. I was looking through the book, reading the book, and I was like, how did you manage to have the self-control to stop? Was it hard to, one, stop? And also, two, how did you choose the issues to cover? Because I feel like you covered a lot, but there’s still a lot more.
Luke Rosiak:
Yeah. It was a big project. It took about two years. And I was working with Peter Schweizer, the guy that wrote “Clinton Cash.” So he really knows how to manage a major investigation, which is what this was. People kind of know me for the Loudoun rape story for The Daily Wire. And I’ve done so many other stories, some big, some small, for The Daily Wire.
People are always reaching out for help or to get exposure for issues in the school district. And it became clear that we needed to take a step back and try to get at the root of the problem. Because there are 13,000 school districts in America, we can’t kind of, in the media world, document everything. We’ve got to empower parents to figure out what’s going on in our school district and see what they can do about it.
So I tried to take case studies. And I studied 61 school districts across the country and tried to isolate themes of where something’s going on in each one that, okay, maybe you don’t live there, but you probably recognize the same phenomenon in your school. And I try to keep it focused on people, real people with stories that are interesting to read.
And then I try to get at the money issue. What are the special interests that there was a focus that’s like, look, schools are focused on anything but academics these days. There’s a couple different special interest groups that have all kind of hijacked schools for their own reasons. So yeah, you could write about the schools forever, the problems are major and it’s such an important area, but I think this book struck a pretty good balance of being timely and digestible and kind of easy to read without being too long. But I there’s more to be said and there’s more work for parents to do on their own as well.
Julie Gunlock:
There will be a sequel to your book, is what you were saying here. I want to delve a little bit deeper into those interest groups. But just a note here, how you describe your book, I think for people who are looking for an interesting read, sometimes people think, oh God, I don’t want to read a book that’s sort of academic or policy-oriented, but you’re right. Your book… Actually, it’s interesting. It’s like a series of small stories, because you do start each chapter with a story that a lot of people can relate to.
So I do encourage people who might think, well, I’m not sure I’m really going to enjoy a policy book. It doesn’t read that way. It’s almost like watching a documentary or a series of documentaries or reading a book that’s a series of short stories. Because the way that you open each chapter with a story about what’s going on in the schools is, I think, a really great way of writing about serious policy issues. So I want to applaud you on that and encourage people, again, who might not necessarily go for that genre of writing.
But let’s talk a little bit about something that you mentioned just a few minutes ago, there’s just a handful, a few interest groups who have really gotten involved in schools, in funding schools, in turning schools into these indoctrination centers. They really are not any longer teaching what, for instance, I was taught in schools only a few years ago, only a few decades ago. But they’ve really become a place for brainwash kids and turning kids into activists. So tell us a little bit about this handful of interest groups or organizations that you investigated for this book.
Luke Rosiak:
I think you can simplify down to four big buckets. The first is the billionaire foundation. It’s groups like the Ford Foundation, Kellogg, Rockefeller Foundation. So one of the first things I did is go through all the tax filings and all these groups that you’re seeing in schools. And there was hundreds and hundreds of them. It was a massive database, almost too complicated to wrap your head around.
But the underlying theme is they were almost always funded by these foundations. And the foundations seek them out and they say, we want to fund racial equity in schools or whatever. And so these nonprofit groups know what’s going to get them the grants. If they fall into line and do what the foundations want, they’re going to get money.
So I was kind of struck by that, because we don’t think about these people often. You’ll be like watching PBS and they’ll be like, brought you by the Ford foundation. Or maybe there’s some sense that, oh, the Rockefeller, they funded art museum.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. And they brought us Downton Abby. How can they be bad?
Luke Rosiak:
It doesn’t occur to most people that the Ford Foundation is a villain. But by the end of investigating schools, I was convinced that the people behind CRT are the foundations I named, they are profoundly radical and profoundly powerful. And so it’s like a lot of things in the school’s world. Radicals escape accountability through anonymity.
So it’s kind of like a whole lesson that I think a lot of us have learned over the last couple years is some of the guys that really impact your life the most, some of the bad guys that are kind of coming for your kids are really important to your quality of life are not household names. It’s not like someone like Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It really takes a lot more work to figure out who’s who.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
Specially in your town. So the second-
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, go ahead. I want you to get to the buckets.
Luke Rosiak:
I’ll just list the other three and then we can come back and go more into detail.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
But the second group is the consultants, the Charlottean Consultants that are pushing this racial stuff. And then the third groups are just the… This third and fourth groups are just the self-interested administrators that want the statistics to look good. And then of course the teachers unions.
Julie Gunlock:
It’s so interesting as I’m hearing you talk about this. In my own town of Alexandria, Virginia, the superintendent is super into CRT. He loves the 1619 Project. He wears his “I’m on an anti-racist journey” T-shirt all the time. He now has a podcast dedicated to equity, so-called equity. We know what it really means. So he is super on the grift train. He wants to get into this. And what’s so interesting is he recently wrote a book.
So he’s figured this out. It’s really fascinating to kind of track him. And he was already into sort of the racial grift, I think before he even came. Previous to being in Alexandria, Virginia, he was in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he started this whole racial stuff. He has not well liked in Shaker Heights, Ohio. But then he came here and then of course, George Floyd happened and the whole anti-racist movement started. And I think he saw his entry.
And it’s interesting he wrote a book. He’s now created an LLC, a consultancy where he’s going to now be doing this education consultant work. And he’s going on this speakers tour and promoting book. And as you’re talking, I can see, pretty soon he’ll be looking for funding from the Ford Foundation or the Rockefellers or the Kelloggs.
And so it all comes together when you start to see this web. And you’re writing about it, I think is really going to help parents see the bigger picture here, see that this is really a drive for money, if anything else. And again, those buckets, you make it so clear that the money comes from here, then there are these nonprofit groups, then there are the consultants, and again the self-interested administrators. My guy, my superintendent in my town seems to fit into all of those buckets. Maybe not the billionaire foundations, but he, he certainly fits into three of the four buckets.
So that is a really great way that you spell it out and explain it to parents. It really comes alive. I want to pivot over. And I don’t want to cut you off if you had more to talk about on the four buckets issue.
Luke Rosiak:
No, I think you’re on the right track.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. Yeah. But again, I think that if parents read this, they can see this actually happening in their own communities. It’s sort of this like light bulb goes off in their heads and they’re like, oh, oh, I see what’s happening. It’s actually not that hard to understand once you laid out in the book.
Luke Rosiak:
Yeah. And all you need is, there basically like this hydra, like this multi-headed monster. And you just have to trace it back to one of the central nodes. And it’s usually not that… You don’t have to do that much research to get from something in your district to the nest, the central node where they’re all operating out of. But there’s just a mentality of failing upwards.
Like Shaker Heights is like this infamous failure in terms of equity, because it’s a super liberal place that’s super racially diverse. And they have busing long go. And the schools are exactly equally distributed. And they’ve been spending so much money and so much effort for decades and their results are not very good.
And so Shaker Heights is like this laughingstock, or if anything, this proof that equity programs don’t work. And then here, this guy goes and he’s creating a whole career out of saying, see how I ruin Shaker Heights. Let me do it elsewhere too.
Julie Gunlock:
Exactly. Exactly. It’s so funny because some of the things I’ve heard out of Shaker Heights are, oh, he, he really was the most despised man in the town because, if anything, he created racial hostility and racial division. He came in there and claimed that he was going to shake up Shaker Heights. And boy, did he ever and made it a place of great racial division while he was there. His tenure there was just fraught.
And actually the Washington Post actually did a really interesting piece on him and how he was really despised in how he treated teachers badly. He treated… It was interesting how he really had no patience for women. There was a part in the book where a group of fathers went in and talked to him. And he at least could have a meeting with them. But again, he didn’t really care what they had to say.
So we are now blessed with super superintendent, Greg Hutchings, but it really… I thought I had a good handle on things, but then again, reading your book really helped me understand in a much clearer way what was going on here. And I like the idea of the node. It’s all very sci-fi, tracing it back to the central node.
I did want to pivot really quickly to say something about your dedication of the book is really wonderful. You dedicated the book to your children, which is very nice. But I have to say, I’m not going to lie, I got a little teary eyed. You’re next… You say, I dedicate this to my children, but I also dedicated to the accidental activists, you say the parents who had no choice but to fight for their kids when they realized that no one else was.
And I felt that really personally. I feel like an accidental activist. I know that my colleague… You know Carrie very well. You helped Carrie recently reporting on her situation when she unmasked her kids and her little kids were suspended for goodness sake. I know you were there with are reporting. You kind of got yelled by a police officer who amusingly had to pull down his mask to yell at you.
But I feel Carrie also fits in that category of being an accidental activist. Tell us a little bit about the accidental activists that you’ve met while covering this issue.
Luke Rosiak:
Well, I want to credit Asra Nomani for possibly creating that term. I think I may owe her for that clever turn of phrase because she’s really good at that. And she’s a great example of an accidental activist. But I would say that it’s been so amazing to watch this resurgence of, I don’t know if resurgence is the right-word, because I don’t know if it’s ever happened before, but parents are getting involved for the first time.
And there’s been so many of them. And that’s the great thing, is yeah, they may not be household names, just like the bad guys aren’t household names. Some of the most important heroes and also some of the most nefarious villains are all kind of just regular people when you’re talking about the local level. A lot of them have traditionally thought of themselves as Democrats, and they may still.
And what was interesting is that people, there was this recognition that the ideology that was in school systems, it wasn’t about… That’s kind of the ultimate hoax that what’s going on here is Democrat versus Republican. It’s not. It’s this cartel with special interests. And then these people with really, really bizarre, not even progressive, but like weird illiberal beliefs.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
And they’re just kind of tricking people who aren’t paying attention into thinking that it’s Democrat. And so that’s why we have Glenn Youngkin and it’s because most of my neighbors here in Fairfax County are probably Democrats. And most of them would agree with every word of the book. And so I wrote the book with all those regular parents in mind.
But what really struck me, and that’s why I started writing this book in 2019 before coronavirus, is I was a national reporter. I was covering Congress and things like that. And I just became convinced that kind of everything I knew was wrong. It’s not this fancy we’re so important because we’re in Washington and the federal government is what matters and local is like lame or on important.
I just became convinced that local government matters so much more than anything else that impacts our life in such a personal way. And when people don’t pay attention, a vacuum is created. And that’s when special interests build that vacuum. I think it’s really important to stay focused on academic achievement when we’re talking about schools. Everyone wants to talk about race and things like that.
But I think the main issue here that the schools have only one job. It’s not to employ teachers. It’s not to create weird racial beliefs. It’s to help kids learn math, science, and writing. And they’re doing a horrendous job. It’s embarrassing, the teachers should be deeply embarrassed that they’re failing to teach these kids.
And so, as it relates to the other are ancillary issues that we have to hear about all the time, I look at them as cover up mechanisms, CRT, equity, race, whatever you want to call it. There’s a reason why it’s such weird ideas. It’s very specific what these consultants say. They’ll be like, there’s no such thing as objectivity. Wanting the right answer is an attribute of whiteness. Worship for the written word is an attribute of whiteness.
It’s total cult stuff. It’s bizarre. I’ve never heard a black person say anything like it. I’ve never heard a Democrat say anything like it. It’s like super specific. And there’s a reason why they say the things they do because all of them serve to say, hey, you know how all of our kids are failing tests, it doesn’t matter because there’s no such thing as objectivity.
It’s a complete hoax to excuse the administrator’s failures. So what they do in these school rules is designed to make themselves look good rather than be good. And so they don’t care who they have to harm. They don’t care if they have to lock your kids out of school for two years. They don’t care if they have to let a child be raped. And as a result, a second child goes on to get raped. They will conceal problems rather than work to fix them.
And so the test scores are bad. They need to fix them. And instead, they’re saying, well, let’s get rid of the exam, the entrance exam to get into some of these magnet scores because tests are not a valid way. A math test is not a valid way to figure out whether someone is good at math. It’s also stupid and it’s so obvious that they’re doing it just to cover up the fact that they have failed at their jobs. And it is their job to teach our kids. And they have failed at doing that.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, you look at the people running for school boards now. You talk about when there’s a vacuum created then organizations and activist organizations will fill that vacuum. You have a chapter dedicated to school boards and how those school boards have become politicized. And again, that’s how it leads to them not doing their jobs. Because at that point, politics is the only thing that matters. Teaching kids the basics no longer matters. You do write about man named Carl Fresh. Can you tell us a little bit about this guy?
Luke Rosiak:
Sure. So he has no kids and he ran for school board in Fairfax County only a couple years after moving to the county. He also never went to college himself. He went to community college for a year or two. But who he was, was a national political activist. He was hanging out with all these democratic big shots in D.C. being a schemer to help them win elections and things like that. And he was actually so radical. He worked for like David Brocks.
Julie Gunlock:
Media Matters.
Luke Rosiak:
I forgot his name David Brock.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
Media Matters.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
He was like kind of-
Julie Gunlock:
[crosstalk 00:20:33] is dedicated to harassing Conservatives and Republicans.
Luke Rosiak:
And he was like too radical for them. He proposed these ideas to follow people around with secret cameras for being conservative. Because he said, quote, “Simply put the progressive movement is in need of an enemy.” So he’s just out there finding enemies just to raise money and seize power. And even the people at Media Matters I think were like, hey, Carl, you got a little too far, man. You seem a little nuts.
And so what did he do next? He ran for school board. And he is like, he’s raising money from all across the country by sending out issue like LGBTQ issues. Like if you want to support gay activism, give to me. And so there would be like little ladies in California who would be donating to him.
And so we’re here in Fairfax County just trying to care about our kids, and it’s pretty hard to get people to even watch a school board meeting, and then here this guy is, there are people in California who are donating money to get some guy with no kids on our school board. And it is so creepy. And it was all about kind of this gay right stuff, which is… I had no opinion on. It doesn’t matter anyone’s opinion is on that issue. The point is it has nothing to do with education.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. It’s funny, I think “Gender Queer” and some of these other sort of pornographic books that are in the schools, it’s so funny because if you talk about it on Twitter, people are like, “Oh wow, you just don’t like it because it’s got graphic gay sex.” So I don’t want-
Luke Rosiak:
I don’t want straight sex for the kids either. What is wrong with you people?
Julie Gunlock:
Exactly. I actually don’t want straight sex. Also depicted, like you just said, folks, we’re not talking about what kind of sex it is. We’re talking about sex, period, on display. And it’s amazing… I took some screenshots of those pictures and they were on my phone. And then I realized, oh my God, I got to get these off my phone because you give your kids your phone [crosstalk 00:22:38] scrolling through and they’re going to be like, mommy’s totally creepy here. Mommy’s a little kinky. So I had to race to my phone to get them off before my kids were scrolling.
Luke Rosiak:
What it is there’s a very cynical… A lot of this is just about seizing power for the sake seizing power. That’s basically what critical race theory there is. This about a virus that exists to destroy entities and then take them over for the sole purpose of spreading itself. CRT has no solutions. It doesn’t do anything. It just takes over in order to take over.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
And some of these activists that try to use national politics to see local school board slots are the same way. There’s another lady on the school board who did the same thing with gun rights here in Fairfax County. Like hanging on to like Michael Bloomberg with this different gun. None of that has… Those are national issues. But it’s like if you can… It’s a way to raise money and to create this tribal mentality that takes the focus off kids but it helps you win elections.
If you think about in Loudoun County, one of the craziest people on the school board is this lady, Julie Briskman, who was known… She was just a regular person who worked for a tech company. And one day she was riding her bike down the street and Donald Trump walked by or drove by. So she flipped him off with her middle finger. And someone happened to take a picture. And she became-
Julie Gunlock:
[crosstalk 00:23:55].
Luke Rosiak:
It happened that HuffPost wrote an article. So she became nationally famous for this issue. She started to raise money off of it. And now she’s using this Trump issue to raise money from people all over the country. And then taking this national level funding and just jamming it down the throats of people on a local race.
And I think that’s important to say here, as far as all the money stuff with the foundations and all that or campaign funders. Your money goes… The people behind these foundations are very savvy. If you have a certain amount of money that you want to use to get some influence, you can spend it on like a U.S. Senate race where you could spend millions of dollars and it wouldn’t even mean that much or you can spend it at the local level.
Julie Gunlock:
Yep.
Luke Rosiak:
And so it’s really… The amount of money these people are spending is very large, but then it’s especially astonishing when you consider how far money goes at the local level.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
So there’s been a very national and strategic takeover of local government that I think… The first thing I learned is that local government is very, very important. And then the second thing is like it’s kind of been taken over by this really network of national interests who I look at it as, we’re all looking in one direction, meaning we all think like federal politics in Congress and the president is the most important thing. And then these really savvy operators just kind of sneak in the back door, which is local politics and school boards.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, it’s so interesting too, because the… I think nationally, it’s something like… I’ve heard Inez Stepman who I work with at IWF. And she’s sort of on the education bit. She always talks about how I think the nationwide, only like three or four percent of voters show up for school board elections. Nobody gives a crap. Right? I mean, now they do, but they certainly didn’t for years and years and years, and you’re right, because there was no interest. You could sneak in these insane candidates who would just kind of win because only their friends and family showed up to vote for them anyway. And so they could sort of get into office and then cause so much destruction.
But I do want to just talk about this idea of the money and how it’s funny you you’re talking about like these massive foundations, right? Kellogg, Rockefeller, Ford, these massive found that are funding CRT. And again, like you said, this disease, this virus that just is there to destroy and gain power. So they’re funding all this. And yet you read in the newspaper, like you read in mainstream media that it’s all the right-wing, right? The right-wing that gets all these astro… And these parent movements, it’s just AstroTurf. Funded by these… I know.
Luke Rosiak:
There’s no reason a parent would care about their own kids or they must be paid by someone to pretend they care about their kids.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. It’s astonishing. And it’s so funny because at one point the Washington Post reported on the IWF because we put up a letter advising parents like, hey, here’s a sample letter you can write to your school district. This was way before the mask mandate was lifted in Virginia. And masks was sort of like, okay, everybody has to mask. And so we put up this letter like, hey, this is a nice letter you can send.
And it was written… If you know Hadley, Hadley Manning, she’s IWF policy director. She could not be a nicer, more polite person. And her letter reflected that. The letter was incredibly nice. It was very polite, but it was also… At one point, she said in the letter, I have a tremendous sympathy for what you’re having to deal with.
So it was also sympathetic to the school administrator who’s having to go through all these different rules. And the Washington Post did not link to the letter, didn’t show the letter, didn’t give any actual quotes from the letter, but characterized our letter as fomenting violence and telling parents [crosstalk 00:27:48] scream at school board members. It was insane. And again, they then reached back and found a Koch donation from 2007 and were like, oh, it’s Koch. Fight back. Right?
And so this idea that the right is incredibly well-funded, paying off parents to like get upset at their school boards is so insane when… And also, and I want you to comment on this, is this idea that it’s all white women, right? It’s all just a bunch of white women that are upset about CRT or something. That’s not true.
You mentioned Asra Nomani. I watch school… I have no life. So I do watch school board meetings. And it is not all white women. There are an awful lot of people from all different backgrounds that are concerned about their kids. How do you react when you hear that kind of stuff? And tell me a little bit about the parents that you dealing with. Are they all just a bunch of white women with their coffee cups filled with wine and their Lululemon yoga pants? Luke, is that all you [crosstalk 00:28:51]?
Luke Rosiak:
You just described the people that are making the hit list to destroy and hack the Mexicans who love their kids. There’s this… Yeah. They hate the fact that really the Asians are the main group that is harmed by all these equity things. They can’t stand when minorities are not just falling in line to do their bidding. But it’s not Democrat versus Republican. It’s special interests who want to get money from working at schools and things like that. Trying to hide their failures. The main people that they’re failing are the minorities.
So basically, the teachers’ unions are willing to go to any length just to get easier work conditions or to get a pay raise. They will harm your kids to get it. It seems insane. I’ve been working from home lately instead of going into the office. I prefer it, but I wouldn’t kill people to get it a slight benefit. It’s crazy. They will do anything to get their way.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
And it’s been that way for a long time. They don’t care who they have to fail, who they have to harm. And obviously people saw it coronavirus where they’re like, if I have to go to work, people are going to die, I’m going to die. Coronavirus is just murdering everyone. But I’ll work from home. But I’ll only work from home if you have a daycare [crosstalk 00:30:15] watch my kids.
Julie Gunlock:
Yep.
Luke Rosiak:
So they want someone else to die.
Julie Gunlock:
Yep.
Luke Rosiak:
It is so sick. And they had these in Fairfax County. The teachers wouldn’t go to work. So they paid these people $15 an hour with basically no benefits to show up and watch the kids in the classroom.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. It happened in Alexandria, Virginia, too. And it was funny because a lot of these people, they were totally untrained. And they’d sit the… I remember one parent texted me that the minder, they called him the minder, was in the back of the room eating, apparently had endless supply of Doritos, was eating these Doritos. And was like [crosstalk 00:30:50]. They only had the mini pack. So he’d open a bag like every 10 minutes. And it was like crunch, crunch, crunch. And then he was eating really loud. And he always had a Sprite, which he would… All the kids are like, I want a Sprite. Right?
Luke Rosiak:
Yeah.
Julie Gunlock:
And he would do nothing. And he read his phone. He literally… A kid could have been murdered and the guy wouldn’t have got out of the desk.
Luke Rosiak:
I know. They have just completely given up on educating our kids. What they want to do is take the focus off of objective measures like test scores and replace it with things like SEL, blah, blah, blah. And so one of the… What they do is they confuse parents with all this fancy terminology. And they make you feel like you’re not smart enough to know what’s going on. Or they at least make you feel like they’re so smart. They’ve got it all figured out. They’ve got a whole system. It’s not a system, it’s just complete mumbo jumbo.
And I can say I got paid to read about all this stuff from long time. I had all time to read all the academic papers, read about all these policies. And I don’t think I need to bore your listeners by summarizing anything. I can just say, honestly, it’s all BS. It’s like kindergarten-level ideas that they have wrapped in these unnecessarily wieldy descriptors to hide that it’s complete emptiness.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. Well, I-
Luke Rosiak:
The point is that none of them are objective. They don’t care about kids’ social or emotional… They wouldn’t have kept them out of school for two years if they cared about that.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Luke Rosiak:
The point of SEL is, who can know whether you get an A in all this stuff? With math test, you either get the right answer or you don’t. And you can quantify it. And you can measure over time when the kids are heading in the right direction or the wrong direction. All this other stuff is subjective mumbo jumbo. And there’s no reason to think they do any better at that than they have at math and science and all the things that are measurable. It’s all designed to deflect from their measurable failures.
So I think it’s important to stay focused on… If you’re going to school board meetings in your town and they’re talking about all this weird stuff they want to do, first, think of time as a budget. If you want to take time out of the day to do something new, what’s it taking away from? If you want to do like SEL, well, what are they not going to learn about math today?
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
And then the second thing you can do is just ask, every time they introduce something, how is this going to increase measurable academic performance? And what’s your proof.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
Because they’re the test scores… They do this thing where they say, there’s high stakes testing. We shouldn’t just test. Teachers are having to teach to a test.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Luke Rosiak:
It’s all made up. Like, well, you have a test for one day a year that asks if you do math? And then if you know how to do math, and then the teacher would have to teach to the test. Like, shouldn’t the teacher be teaching you how to do math? If the test is about math, why wouldn’t she be teaching to the… Teach the kids math. What are you doing all year?
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Rosiak:
And they get so mad at high stakes. This test had literally no bearing on the kids. If you refuse to take it, nothing will even happen to the kid.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Luke Rosiak:
Because it’s designed to measure the teacher. But they go completely psycho and they have all these well-funded groups, that are bank all by the teacher’s unions, trying to make it seem like your kids aren’t going to be getting creativity in school if there’s too much testing. There’s not too much testing. It’s like one day a year. So it’s really…
What I saw at the end of this book is there’s all these special interests, blah, blah, blah, all the racial stuff, but what it really is, is a schemed move numbers on a sheet of paper so that the schools can look good, even though they’re just completely failing our kids year or after year. And the teachers get to keep getting pay raises and a lifetime pension while a lot of these kids just had for a lifetime on the welfare roles and the teachers are just, they will do anything to keep you from finding that out because they just want to keep the gravy train rolling.
Julie Gunlock:
It’s so interesting to me, Luke. I hear some of this stuff and it’s funny. I always say that… At the beginning of COVID, if you had asked me about what’s the solution to public schools, and I would’ve said, oh, well, we have to keep pushing for reforms, and we have… I was very kind of milk-toast about it. Probably because I didn’t really understand the issues as much as I do now.
And I always like, oh yes, we definitely need School Choice to give parents more. Which of course I still believe to this day, even stronger. But as far as reforming the public schools, I have now gone into the camp of, nope, there’s no reforming it. They need to be shut down. I’ve sort of gone into the like, get rid of the Department of Education camp, right? Get rid of everything.
Do you even think it’s possible to reform this? This is not a broken system. This is a system that has been obliterated. You almost can’t see what public schools used to be or what they were designed to do anymore. Where are you, after doing this book, after writing about this for years, after uncovering gruesome, gruesome details, like that rape in Loudoun County, the follow-up rape. You broke those stories. You have an entire major media outlets ignoring this stuff. And you broke this story. Where is your head in terms of… Is reform possible or do you just need to get out?
Luke Rosiak:
I think every parent should get their kid out. But I’m reluctant to say that. I mean, I felt the same way as you that… Well, I think that… When I started this project, I thought Republicans made a huge mistake by talking about just like School Choice. Because anytime they were asked about public schools, they were just like, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t pay attention to that. We should just do School Choice.
And so you create that vacuum again, where you just seeded it to the crazy people. But realistically, they are so entrenched, as you said. It is like a deep state where it’s not just the school board. I mean, you can elect an all-Republican school board, but then where are you going to find a superintendent? Even if you find a good superintendent, what about the teachers that are getting their… There’s groups like the National Council of Teachers of English.
So if you’re like a teacher, you kind of get, to some extent, your guidance or your professional training from these groups. They’ve all been taken over. And they’ve just operated really for… I think it’s important for people to understand that what we saw over the last two years was a symptom of a deeper rot. There’s same dynamics.
And that’s why some of my stories in my book will go back to like 2014 and share the story of this dad who exposed that his school district was breaking the law. And in exchange, they banned him from school property. They tried to get him arrested. They tried to get him fired for their job. They tried to get child protective services to take his kids away. They even called his 93-year-old dad to tell on him. These people are insane.
And it’s been going on for a long time. It’s not about race. The dispute back then had nothing to do with critical race theory. No one had even heard of CRT at that time. The same thing they’re trying to do now is just racist parents. They’ve been doing that to anyone that threatens their self-interested cartel for decades. Because they are failing our kids. It is so frustrating to know what to do because if we just give up completely, it feeds the whole thing to the bad guys.
But at the same time, look, you got to look after yourself. You got to look after your kids. And it does hurt them to withdraw your kids. Because if we all withdrew or many of us withdrew, they lose out on money. So I think you’re probably right that just getting out, if you can. Of course we feel bad for the people that can’t afford it.
It’s important to say that private school is not for the privileged. Private school costs less than public school, it’s just that taxpayers are paying it on the public side. It doesn’t cost more though. If private schools are better, it is not because they have more money. They have far, far less money than public schools. It’s just public schools do a remarkably bad job at getting results.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s right. That’s right. Look, we’re coming up here on time, but I want to encourage people to really read all your stuff, follow you. I think this is probably the most… I think your book is the most critical book that parents can read right now because it really puts it all together in what we’re seeing, as you said, this bigger rot. You’ve exposed the bigger rot that really is hard see. I think it’s not hard to see right now. I think parents in the public schools see it daily.
And frankly, with some of the woke stuff that we see, you see that stuff in private schools as well, but at least private schools at least have some incentive to actually teach children. We might not agree with some of the social engineering going on, but they actually still try to attend to the reading, writing, arithmetic.
But I want to… Where are you? What’s your Twitter handle? But there’s a lot of parents that aren’t on Twitter. Do you have a Substack? I know you can be found, obviously, at Daily Wire, but where are the other places people can find you?
Luke Rosiak:
I’m on Twitter at @lukerosiak and at Daily Wire’s where my articles are. And then the book, “Race To The Bottom,” is probably the most… I spent two years figuring out what to say about schools there. So everything I want to say, I said it best in that book. And you can pick that up at any bookstore or Amazon or whatever. It’s called “Race To The Bottom.”
Julie Gunlock:
Well, we’ll definitely have a link to it and I’ll be tweeting it out as well. Again, the book is called “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” It’s funny you say destroying. I think it really is destroyed. I think parents have to get out. But I will tell parents as well, there is a reason why people like me and people who really have a look into the rot of the public schools… And I don’t want to speak for you Luke, but I think you’re probably also a supporter of School Choice.
This is the reason why I was able to get all three of my kids out. They’re now in private schools. And I home-schooled for two years. And I was able to because I work from home. But there’s a lot of people that are not able to get out of the schools, and those kids are often the most vulnerable.
So yeah, I think one of the lessons from all of this, when you listen to Luke talk about it, when you read the book, “Race To The Bottom,” I think the solution is, fine, and if you want to think about ways to reform public schools. But the way in which public schools will start to reform is when parents have a choice, when there is a marketplace where they can choose the best school for their kids.
So Luke, I don’t know, know if you have any partying or ending thoughts or wrap up thoughts about that?
Luke Rosiak:
I actually think you said it so well that it’s best to leave it right there.
Julie Gunlock:
Aw. Well, look, see, see. That’s so great. I guess that’s why I’m the host. Well, Luke, listen, you know I’m a huge fangirl of yours. I appreciate all the work that you do and all the things you do to support parents. You are often one of the first people I tweet to if I see some new outrageous thing out there in the school. So thanks so much from a very tired mom who has been fighting this battle for a long time, personally for my kids. I appreciate everything you do to shed light on this really serious problem. Thanks for coming on, Luke.
Luke Rosiak:
Thank you, Julie.
Julie Gunlock:
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