On this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Podcast, Heather Hunter, visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum, sat in for Julie Gunlock and talked to IWF’s Center for Education Freedom Director Ginny Gentles about the rising parent revolution across the country. They explored Ginny’s decades of work in education freedom on the state, federal, and international level; her reflections on how being a mom changed her view on the education system; and whether the public school system is lost or can be saved by the brave parents who are utilizing social media to practice citizen journalism and speaking up at school board meetings.
TRANSCRIPT
Heather Hunter:
Hi! On this episode of the Bespoke Parenting Podcast, I’m Heather Hunter, a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum, sitting in for the great Julie Gunlock. The Bespoke Parenting Podcast is about and for parents who are tired of being told what to do. There’s no one way to parent and there are many ways as there are kids. Parenting styles, strategies and philosophies should be bespoke, tailor-made for you, your family, and most importantly, your kids. I have the perfect guest about parenting freedom and the parent movement today. Our guest is Ginny Gentles. She is the director of IWF’s Education Freedom Center. Hi, Ginny.
Ginny Gentles:
Hi, Heather. Glad to be talking to you today.
Heather Hunter:
Well, thank you. She is a contributor at Independent Women’s Forum, a women’s network and a long-time school choice advocate. I’m so excited to talk to you because I’ve talked to you before, we’ve done interviews before, but I want to get into your bio, what you’ve done. Ginny has done impressive work at the state level, national level, even international level, which we’ll get to as well. Everyone has a reason for their passions, what about education freedom and education reform made you go, “Gosh! This is what I need to do for my career?”
Ginny Gentles:
I actually got brought into the education freedom movement at an early age long, long ago, back as a college student. I ended up realizing that I was fortunate and that my parents chose a house in a school district that had “good schools” and I benefited from that public education system all the way through K-12. But you start volunteering in high school, in college and you realize not everybody gets to go to good schools. They don’t live in neighborhoods where those schools are really dedicated to serving kids. The injustice of it really bothered me, and so I started looking into what could be done.
This was, again, a long time ago and there were leaders out there like Jeannie Allen in the Center for Education Reform and other people who were really launching a school choice movement and I realized I wanted to be part of that, so I started looking into it and just figured out a way throughout the early stages of my career to be involved in education reform, yes, but specifically in school choice, what we now refer to as education freedom, that empowers families to not be stuck in the school district, in that school that their child is assigned to just because of residency, but have the freedom to choose the best school that meets their child’s needs.
Heather Hunter:
I know. I’ve personally, as a new mom, I’ve been considering all the education options and now I’m homeschooling as we’ve talked about before. I think as you were talking about with your parents choosing the right school and trying to find the right place to actually raise your kids, I think remote working and even the pandemic has had a huge, there’s been a huge shift in people moving and changing where they’re going because they are thinking about that. They want to get out of some of the bigger urban areas because of the crime, but also the schools are getting more woke. Did you see, as somebody who’s been following this for so long, do you feel there was a huge shift in the education dynamic of parents really being very proactive in taking on their kids’ fate in a school after the pandemic?
Ginny Gentles:
Absolutely. I feel I’ve been standing off to this side from a lot of parents for decades really with my school choice advocacy. Then, when the pandemic hit, we suddenly were all in it together, and parents who previously just thought, “School choice, I don’t know what that is,” or “I’m just reflexively opposed to that”, they thought, “Oh, it makes sense now. I get it. What’s coming through my child’s laptop, what I’m seeing as I look over their shoulder into Zoom school, I don’t like it. I’m recognizing that these schools are staying closed, they’re not prioritizing academic instruction, they are refusing to meet the needs of special needs kids, they were particularly mistreated throughout the pandemic, that’s wrong.” They’re continuing to ignore the pleas of parents. “Please open back up, please get masks off kids, so that they can learn how to form sounds and words and read, please stop with indoctrination and prioritize academics instead.”
Parents realize, “They’re not listening to me as I’m asking for that, and what I need instead is a different school altogether, so I’ll move.” You had referenced that some people just actually picked up and moved to a different area or state and then others said, “Well, I don’t want to move. I want the freedom to go choose the private school down the road that’s been open, that reflects my values, that prioritize academic instruction. Now, I’m on board for school choice. Now, I’m on board for education freedom.” I love hearing from those parents. Welcome, let’s work together.
Heather Hunter:
I love the parents who still keep fighting the fight in the education system, as far as the public education system. I chose the homeschool route and a lot of parents chose the private school route, but I admire the tenacity of the parents who keep fighting for the public schools to be a proper education and teach their kids the right way. We have this education freedom that we have in wanting to give people all these options, do you think there is a way to change the public school system, so that it can get to some state of normal? Or, do parents just need to find what works for them and go with that?
Ginny Gentles:
Look, I totally understand wanting the option, wanting the freedom to send your child to a high-quality local public school. Our neighborhood elementary school is a 5-minute walk. Our neighborhood middle school is, I don’t know, maybe a 7-minute walk. Life would be easy logistically if everyone could just send their child to the neighborhood school. There’s something warm and cozy about that idea of going to school with the same families in your community. It’s what a lot of us grew up with and loved. The public schools that we grew up with aren’t here anymore. They’re not available for kids in most areas. They’ve been captured by activists, they’re prioritizing the wrong things. I, too, admire parents who are really fighting hard to change that. That needs to continue and I wish them well. I’m very confident, having been in this education space for a long, long time, that it’s not going to happen unless school choice is expanded.
Unless those school districts realize, “Hey, if you don’t listen to those parents who are at those school board meetings month after month and who are writing and pleading for changes, who are researching alternative reading instruction options, who are making suggestions on, hey, don’t shorten the school year, actually maybe lengthening the school year would be better. Hey, stop having all of these days off during in the school year, actually educate kids.” These parents have great ideas that these school districts are not going to listen to unless there’s a consequence, and so that’s where school choice comes in and can benefit public school parents, public school kids.
The school district can realize if there are robust education freedom options out there, that if they don’t listen to those parents and their suggestions and their requests, the parents are going to leave. They’re going to take their funds with them. Enrollment’s going to drop, funding’s going to drop, and all those central bureaucrats who’ve been hired in recent decades and are doing nothing for kids, they’re going to lose their cozy jobs, they’re going to be fired. I do want people to realize that school choice, education freedom empowers the individual family to go make a choice. It also empowers the public school parents so that they can be listened to. Everybody wins except for the unions and the bureaucrats.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. Well, you’re a mom, so how many girls do you have? How many children do you have, Ginny?
Ginny Gentles:
I have two daughters, ages 11 and 14. We’ve just started middle school, 6th grade and just started high school, 9th grade.
Heather Hunter:
After working in this space for so long and then having children, how did that change your view of the education system?
Ginny Gentles:
I remember before I had my first child someone asked, “Well, you work in school choice, what option will you choose for your child?” I was like, “I haven’t met them yet. I haven’t met my kids yet,” and a lot about school choice is about getting to know your child and their needs, so I had no idea before my child was born. In fact, my children started out in public … Well, my oldest daughter started out in public education in Canada, where we lived at that time. We even tried French Immersion, which was a public school choice in Toronto. We moved here and did a faith-based private school for a little while. Some things happened with our family, some things changed, so we switched to the public schools. The pandemic happened, we were done with the public schools and we’re happily back at faith-based private schools now. Yeah, we’ve been a bit of a school choice family not necessarily.
Heather Hunter:
You’ve had a journey.
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah. That wasn’t my intention, but that is what’s happened and I have to say, our experience in faith-based private schools, particularly right now, is just so positive. I wish everybody had the options that we have right now.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned that you were in Canada for a little while. It’s pretty impressive to me that you went to another country. There’s such, to me, such a learning curve to go to another country and to be involved in a movement and in the education reform movement, you were active in that in Canada. What was that like? When I look at Canada, I see Trudeau and I’m like, “How does anything get done there that’s rational?” Talk about what it was like in Canada working in education reform.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, let’s just say that Canada’s changed a lot, just like America’s changed a lot in recent years. Let’s not blame Canada for Trudeau necessarily. I lived in Canada twice, actually once before our kids when I was still working. I left a career on Capitol Hill sadly. I loved working on Capitol Hill. But wanted to continue working in government and work for the Ministry of Education, Education Finance branch for a couple years under a conservative government, and the way government works up there, whatever party is in charge, then the ministries are supposed to implement their agenda. They actually did have a little bit of a school choice agenda towards the end of the time that I was there. They had passed a tax credit that was quickly repealed when the liberal government came in after that. That was a great learning experience, not at all a good fit for me because education bureaucracies are not happy places.
I reached out to the Fraser Institute, which is the free market or at that time the free market think tank in Canada. It turns out that they were launching a school choice program, and so I got to be the program director of a privately-funded school choice program and started from the ground up, which was a wonderful entrepreneurial experience and a great opportunity to work directly with families in Ontario and empowering them with scholarships to go choose the best options for their children. Really, Canada is just across the border. I didn’t live in Quebec. Where I lived, everyone was English-speaking, so it was pretty straightforward to navigate. When you’re part of the free market world, you really are part of an international community. People, they’re very much grounded in similar values, so that was a great opportunity to find that community north of the border.
Heather Hunter:
Well, I’m sure a lot of the work that you did in laying the ground in education reform is still having an impact now, so thank you for the work you’re doing up there. We need as much help in making sure that people have a choice in freedom up there. You’re also, you lived in Florida, you’re a Florida girl, so I’m a Florida girl, and you worked in the Department of Education in Florida under Governor Bush. Then now, you’re seeing what’s happening with DeSantis and a lot of education freedom. How would you contrast some of the leadership styles, or at least, did you see a school choice, an education freedom movement starting under Bush? Or, was it always there or has it just exponentially grown under DeSantis? How do you view what’s going on there?
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah. A school choice at the state level has to happen with strong leadership, and that’s what was absolutely in place when Jeb Bush was governor. He had founded a charter school in South Florida. He had traveled around the state talking to parents. He personally knew from listening to parents and their stories and from all these conversations, the importance of school choice. He came in with a mission to, number one, increase the accountability of public schools, and that’s where he put a grading system in place so that the public schools themselves were graded A, B, C based on a number of measures. Then, part of his vision was implementing school choice in very specific ways. Initially, through an opportunity scholarship program that was targeted for students that were relegated to failing schools. If these students were assigned to a school that had received two F grades, they received scholarships to escape, which was a wonderful thing and a great way to marry his two visions, accountability for the traditional public schools and freedom, school choice for families who were not being served well by those public schools.
He went on to oversee the creation and expansion of a special needs scholarship program, at that time called the McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities and a program for low-income kids, a tax credit-funded program for low-income kids that grew quickly and spread throughout the state and has morphed into what was probably the biggest school choice program in the country until Arizona has now overtaken that with the Empowerment Scholarship program, ESA program that Arizona now has, which is universal and has the potential for being the biggest school choice program in the country. Governor Bush’s leadership was tremendous in this issue. Enough years have passed that people might have forgotten what a strong leader he was at the state level. Thank goodness Florida has a strong leader again with Governor DeSantis, who has a very strong commitment to education freedom, to empowering parents and to ensuring that students are served well by the schools and the education options that their parents find for them.
There’s a great opportunity under DeSantis’ leadership, as well as the commitment and leadership of the Florida legislature to continue expanding school choice in Florida. I was there, I guess at this point over 15 years ago, I loved leading the Florida School Choice office. It was a really exciting time. We knew that we were creating a model for the country and I’m so proud of what Florida’s done and excited about the potential for the future there.
Heather Hunter:
Well, you’re a pioneer, Ginny.
Ginny Gentles:
I’m a helper. I help.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. Well, take some credit. It’s okay. You’ve seen all these movements happen. What you did in Florida with the governor, incredible. What you’ve done in Canada, incredible. Even on the state level, you and I chat about what’s even going on Northern Virginia, and a lot of people think that even the Northern Virginia, Loudon and Fairfax movement happened in 2020 or even during the pandemic, but I remember as somebody working in the media, I was following what was going on in Fairfax in 2014 with Elizabeth Schultz and how she was just like this solo, one-person on a school board trying to fight the fight over so many issues about fiscal responsibility. They were using the school board as a way to start a lot of social change in Fairfax. Did the pandemic suddenly shine a spotlight on movements that were already bubbling up? Or, is it just parents having realized, “Maybe I need to seize this moment and taking on the school board who’s not doing what they should be doing and actually listening to me. They’re civil servants, they should be listening to parents who are concerned”?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, Heather, you probably have a much stronger history and much more information on the parents’ rights, parental rights movement in Northern Virginia, because back when Elizabeth Schultz was on the Fairfax County School Board, I was a stay-at-home mom with youngish kids and then transitioning back to working. Honestly, I was not paying attention to what was going on in Fairfax County. The years that you mentioned, my kids were safely attending a faith-based private school. Any of that stuff that was happening out in the school districts, that didn’t have to do with us, was my thinking at the time. But I heard Elizabeth Schultz say recently that she’s realized her role sometimes is to be the tip of the spear. She recognizes when something’s amiss and I think we’ve seen a number of other parents emerging in recent years who are those same parents who are like, “No, something’s up and I’m going to call it and I’m going to fight it.” Then, the rest of us have to wake up to what it is that they’re talking about.
Sometimes these things are just so strange that it takes us a little while to wake up. Sometimes these things are just so awful that once we wake up, we have to fight too. Specifically, the gender ideology, which again, Elizabeth saw it coming in Fairfax County. There’s another mother, Maria Keffler, in Arlington County where I live, saw it coming, saw the activists putting these policies in place that keep secrets from parents, that actively push children down this road of social and then medical transition even before society, parents, kids themselves realize the harms of what’s going to happen if that continues. Maria in Arlington, Elizabeth in Fairfax, they recognized what was going on with gender ideology.
A lot of the rest of us, again, looked over the shoulders during Zoom schools, started seeing a lot more materials coming home from schools. When schools opened back up, suddenly saw the flags and the signs and the advocacy happening in schools at the expense of academics, and we’re all saying, “No more. This has to stop.” I’d say, there are others who very much have been tips of the spear and leaders, but I’m with them now and I think a lot of parents are as well.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. I think a lot of people feel that way and that they were starting to hear it, but they weren’t quite aware of what was really being activated in the school districts. Really, working in the media, as somebody who has worked on the TV level and radio and even print, there is a bias in what people will pick and I will see what even local news coverage is on these issues. It’s so rare to even see a reporter sometimes before all this movement started to really get a lot of attention, it was rare to see anyone really cover it. Maybe there was one print journalist covering some of the stuff, maybe there was a local news reporter there, but if there’s no coverage of it, it’s almost like it didn’t happen. I think God bless a lot of parents who started to become citizen journalists and doing social media and some of them would actually grab clips from the school board meetings, they’d roll on them and then they’d post clips of it on social media.
There’s times where parents would tell me, so and so said this in a school board meeting and I’m like, “Is there a video somewhere of it?” Because working as a journalist you’re like, “Okay, I need to make sure it actually happened and if there’s no documentation of it, I don’t know. I’m just hearing hearsay.” I love how parents have taken off with really being proactive in getting that information out there and grabbing clips and even transcribing what people are saying. Do you think social media had a really strong impact in helping build this movement as well?
Ginny Gentles:
It did for sure. Not just with the gender ideology, but going back to school closures and then masks and then CRT and then gender ideology. The social media was a way for parents to signal to each other, “Hey, you’re not alone. I also think that schools should be open. I also think that schools should prioritize academics over indoctrination.” We were able to find each other and there are these groups like team reality groups where parents feel really connected. We’re able to inspire the formation of community groups and now there’s Moms for Liberty chapters all around the country. There’s Independent Women’s Network chapters popping up around the country. Then, it also allows parents who might be fearful of consequences of speaking up to expose, to shine the light on what’s going on. Otherwise, that fear would just take over everyone because those of us who weren’t finding each other and speaking up and forming groups wouldn’t have been able to do that.
The people doing these things and implementing these policies and saying these crazy things at school board meetings, no one would know about it. Nicki Neily from Parents Defending Education, I regularly hear her talk about sunlight’s the best disinfectant. Her organization is shining light on this thing, Independent Women’s Network shining the light on these things. To your point, individual parents are flagging things for you and individual parents are flagging things for me, that happened just this week. A parent who absolutely could not speak up for fear of losing his job was able to flag a number of different just nutty school board speeches in Arlington County, including one from the school psychologist that was working with the state delegate to get a law through the Virginia legislature that would make it illegal to not affirm a child’s new gender identity.
This school psychologist had just an awful speech at the school district that now I’m able to share with somebody like Billboard Chris, who has a huge school following, and then a lot of eyes get on that speech and more people around the country realize what’s going on, what these school employees are doing, the secrets that they’re hiding from kids, their plans to push kids down these paths. That particular school psychologist in her speech used air quotes around so-called parental rights. That’s what they think of parents and that’s what we have to expose. Yeah, absolutely, social media, the way it helped us find each other, the way it helped us inspire each other to fight the communities that it created and then the protection that it gives to people who want to shine the light on what’s going on, to share it through this pipeline of people who might have bigger platforms, I think it’s a really positive thing.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. I think that that psychologist, you have been all over that story and covering that and you should really follow Ginny’s Twitter account. Ginny, your Twitter … I’m sorry, what’s your Twitter account?
Ginny Gentles:
It’s @ginnygentles, which is gentle with an S.
Heather Hunter:
Okay, that’s great.
Heather Hunter:
I highly recommend following that. I follow it all the time, and that’s how I actually discovered that development about the psychologist because we were covering, I work on a morning drive radio show and we were covering this story about how a local congresswoman in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, was hiding from doing a debate with her Republican opponent, Yesli Vega. She refused to do the debate after she found out the host I worked for was going to be co-moderating it. Then it came out more and more that we discovered that she also was hiding because she didn’t want to answer questions about one of her top surrogates who was a Democratic lawmaker, who was pushing this legislation that would punish parents for not affirming their child. Now, there’s even the Washington Post and other places have tried-
Ginny Gentles:
George Will wrote a column about this, Heather. Yeah, we’ve gotten a lot of attention on this issue.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. Then you’ve highlighted, you’ve done amazing work in bringing a lot of light on this issue, especially that psychologist because that audio from a podcast she did, she talked about how this was about punishing parents and if they don’t affirm their child’s gender. Even Guzman is on tape from ABC-7 saying that there’d be punishments. They keep trying to change the language and how this is. The radicalism of that psychologist, you really brought that forward and explained that to a lot of people and what is going on in these schools. This is an Arlington school psychologist and they keep talking about let’s put more and more money into mental health, which I think is important, but it does concern me though that these kinds of people work in the mental health profession, so where are you sending your kids to? Are you getting psychologists like this in the schools?
My child’s dealing with some issues from the pandemic, so let me see if we could help maybe some depression issues, and then if she went to this psychologist, what would happen? She’s got one-on-one time with your child and it’s scary to think that those kind of people would actually have access to your children and you’re just trying to do a good thing for your child.
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah. Heather, I think that you bring up a really important issue and it’s something that all of us should be paying attention going forward. Congress passed a bill recently and then appropriated, I think close to a billion in funding for mental health in schools. They’re going to be funding quickly, trying to quickly hire and fund all of these new mental health programs and mental health staff, and the philosophy, the way that these individuals are trained is very anti-parent, is very much about this culture of keeping secrets, it’s very much steeped in radical ideology. I wish that wasn’t true. These kids absolutely deserve true mental health support. We’ve hurt them so much by policies in recent years and we’ve hurt them by giving them access to a really lousy education even before the pandemic. They absolutely deserve wonderful mental health care, and that’s not what’s going to happen. It’s going to be a real problem if parents aren’t paying really close attention to what’s going on with the school counselors and the school psychologists in their public school districts.
Heather Hunter:
Yeah. You got to do even more research on even who’s talking to your child. It’s a lot of work for parents to have to constantly do research on, who’s my teacher? What’s the curriculum? Obviously, we should be proactive, but there should be a certain level where you have a comfort that you can trust the people that your children are spending time with each day too. Thank goodness for what you do in pushing economic freedom and shining the spotlight on what’s going out there, what’s going on in the education system. I hope more people check out Ginny’s work at IWN and also even at IWF as well. Thank you Ginny Gentles for joining us. Please go and support Education Freedom Center and check out their work and you’ll be glad you did because it’s great work that they’re doing there, and God bless for what you’re doing. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Bespoke Parenting podcast.
Ginny Gentles:
Thank you, Heather.
Heather Hunter:
Thank you.
