Government school districts across America spent a staggering $3.2 billion of taxpayer money last year fighting against parents and school board members concerned about the indoctrination and sexualization of children, according to a new study that examined costs nationwide. Critics blasted education officials over the news.
The study, headlined “The Costs of Conflict: The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflict on Public Schools in the United States,” examined the financial impact of what leftist researchers described as “heightened conflict over culturally divisive topics.” The subjects included race-mongering as well as homosexual and transgender propaganda.
Led by leftwing researchers at the University of California and other academic institutions, the final report suggested that it was concerned parents who were to blame. Government “educators” peddling racial hysteria and sexual deviancy were portrayed as innocent victims merely facing an onslaught of attacks from unhinged parents.
The report demonizes parents, taxpayers, and even school board members using an array of smears including “activists,” “agents of disruption,” “conflict entrepreneurs,” “extremists,” and more. Their concerns, meanwhile, are dismissed and belittled as “disinformation” or “misinformation” that is a threat to the government schools.
Among the alleged horrors perpetrated by these supposed evildoers are things like speaking out at school-board meetings, seeking public records, publicly reading excerpts from obscene schoolbooks, promoting parental rights legislation, criticizing school administrators on social media, and much more.
To get the results, academics surveyed hundreds of school superintendents from across the country. Creating a “conflict score,” the researchers found that about two thirds of the school superintendents reported “moderate to high” levels of conflict and division in their districts over racial and sex indoctrination being foisted on students.
That “conflict” resulted in spending billions on legal work, fighting “disinformation,” “security,” and more, according to the superintendents. For perspective, a district with 10,000 students and “moderate” level conflict would spend about $500,000 taxpayer dollars, researchers said. The same district with “high” conflict would drop over $800,000.
“This research makes clear that culturally divisive conflicts in the nation’s schools are generating fear, stress and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them,” said lead researcher John Rogers, who leads UCLA’s “Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.”
“Sadly, as superintendents have told us, the cost of these conflicts not only has a financial impact but is also eroding teaching and learning and undermining the trust between schools and the communities so essential to our democracy and civic life,” continued Rogers, who also serves as a professor of “education.”
Fellow co-author of the study Joseph Kahne, a professor at UC – Riverside, also blamed parents for hurting children by resisting the brainwashing. “It’s important for the public and policymakers to be aware of ways culturally divisive conflicts are harming the schools our children attend,” he said. “These conflicts come with a very real cost.”
According to the surveys, half of superintendents reported experiencing at least one incident of “harassment” in the last school year. One in ten reported receiving at least one “threat of violence” linked to the “conflict.” And more than 10 percent experienced at least one incident of vandalism.
The report from UCLA starts with the story of one anonymous Midwestern superintendent. After smearing school board members seeking to rein in woke indoctrination as “extremist” school board members, the tax-funded edu-crat also slandered Moms for Liberty and other organizations advocating for parental rights as “special interest groups.”
Among other complaints, the far-left superintendent complained that the new “extremist” school board members were using social media to “challenge” the district’s “LGBTQ+ policies.” Apparently, school board members are just supposed to shut up, ignore the desperate pleas of parents and constituents, and rubber-stamp perversion.
Nationally renowned attorney Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and now a strong advocate of Christian education, argued that government schools were now “fighting against” families. “The only way to keep children from becoming casualties of this well-funded war against families is to get them out of the government-run schools,” he added.
If the price were not so outrageous and the stakes so high, the unhinged report might almost be funny portraying parents protecting their children as bad. These superintendents are supposed to be public servants, and their salaries are paid by the public. It is time to deal with this systemic crisis before it destroys more tax money — and more children.
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist and the Founder of Liberty Sentinel.
Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
The assertion that parents and state teachers share partial ownership over children caused Ken Ham, the founder of Answers In Genesis, to pen an important article titled, “Who Owns Children?”
“Who ‘owns’ the children—parents or the government? In our day and age, many involved in western government believe it’s the government that owns kids,” he described. “Many believe they know what is best for children and think they should get to dictate what children learn—and parents are just in the way of accomplishing the state’s goals.”
“And that shouldn’t surprise us because how you answer the question of ‘Who owns the children?’ depends on your starting point and the worldview you build that’s based on that starting point,” he explained.
“If you reject God and his Word, then anything goes—there’s no absolute standard on which to base your thinking. In this view, children are just biological machines, the product of millions of years of evolution. They aren’t given to parents—they are just a ‘choice’ parents made,” Ham continued. “But when we start with God’s Word, we learn that children are a gift from God—given to parents. He has given parents authority over their children and the responsibility of training, teaching, and raising children. They are not just “choices,” nor are they the government’s responsibility—children are parent’s responsibility because God gave children to their parents to train them up for him.”
“You see, the family unit didn’t evolve. God created the family when he created marriage (Genesis 1:27 and Gen. 2:24) and told the first couple to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28),” he underscored. “He entrusted children to parents to raise them in accord with the principles he has laid down for us in his Word (e.g., Psalm 127:3).”
