The trend towards equity in academic performance has whittled down school standards, performance, and erased rigor from curricula nationwide.

We believe that the best civic foundation for every child is a classical education in the liberal arts and sciences. No other kind of curriculum can engage students in the principles of truth, justice, virtue, and beauty. These essential ingredients have fallen by the wayside on the road to crafting curriculum around “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and critical race theory.

A refocus on classical education - a system that focuses on developing core literacy and logical reasoning skills, will develop a foundation for our children to engage meaningfully in their academics and the world at large.

Parents have a right to know what their children are being taught and are doing at school. The classroom is no place to discuss sexual identity, pronoun usage, and other progressive social movements.

The school board, also, has a responsibility to be accountable to parents for mishandling safety & academic decline. Radical transparency is the only way to keep teachers and administrators on notice on behalf of our children.

Schools are becoming less and less safe.

A Florida teacher’s aide was assaulted by a student over a video game. A 15-year-old student brutally beat a Georgia high school teacher. A mob of students attacked an assistant principal at a Texas high school. In Las Vegas, one high school student was beaten to death by his peers after he stood up for a friend. All these incidents occurred this year. But it’s not a new problem.

School boards and administrators across the country have relaxed disciplinary policies, leading to an outpour of bullying, harassment, and even violence. Many students feel even less safe, and struggle to avoid the psychological impact of those environments.

A study published by the National Center for Education Statistics in June 2022 found that 84 percent of public schools agreed or strongly agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic had negatively impacted students’ behavioral development. Classroom disruptions and disrespect toward teachers and staff, among other things, were worse in 2021 than in 2019.

Ensuring kids, staff, classrooms, and campuses are safe and secure is paramount to better learning outcomes. To that end, we support a comprehensive approach toward school safety.

Education is not constant. Parents that remember their teachers scratching out lessons on a blackboard now must contend with their children using computers, phones, and other smart devices in the classroom.

Technology can be a useful tool to engage students and customize learning, but it may also serve as a detriment to proven models of learning. It’s important that school boards learn which technologies show promise and which are simply a waste of time and resources.

Children should be taught how to think, not what to think.

Parents learned during Covid-19 lockdowns exactly what teachers and administrators felt comfortable teaching children at school.

Progressive pedagogy is reliant on impressing the minds of young students in intersectional, identity-based political movements.

Children are not activists, nor should they be, and our schools ought to be a center for debate and learning, not a training ground for partisans. Schools need to take the politics out of the classroom and focus on real academic achievement.