The Truth Schools Don't Want You to Know: Parental Rights at Risk | Sarah Perry DSH #835

Summary

Digital Social Hour: The Truth Schools Don't Want You to Know: Parental Rights at Risk | Sarah Perry DSH #835

Release Date: October 27, 2024

In episode #835 of Digital Social Hour, host Sean Kelly engages in a profound conversation with Sarah Perry, a passionate advocate for parental rights in education. The discussion delves deep into the current educational landscape, exploring the intricate balance between governmental influence, educational content, and parental authority. This comprehensive summary captures the essence of their dialogue, highlighting key points, insightful analyses, and compelling conclusions.

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1. The Push for Progressive Agendas in Education

Sarah Perry opens the discussion by expressing concern over the increasing incorporation of sexually explicit and gender-critical content in early education. She remarks, “There’s been a huge agenda push for all of this sort of sexually graphic and gender critical instruction” ([00:30]). Perry highlights the abruptness with which such topics are introduced, even in kindergarten, causing anxiety among parents about parental rights and the appropriateness of the curriculum.

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2. Public Education Funding and Government Overreach

The conversation transitions to the financial aspects of public education. Sarah Perry emphasizes that public schools have always been supported by taxpayer dollars, ensuring accessibility for all families. She states, “Public Education was always ours, right? Taxpayers pay for public schools” ([02:27]). Perry critiques the Department of Education, labeling it as the “biggest, funded, the most bloated of all the federal agencies, more than $111 billion a year” ([02:27]). She advocates for returning educational governance to the states and the people, aligning with the founders' vision of self-governance.

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3. Teacher Salaries and Union Influence

Addressing the state of education quality, Perry links inadequate educational outcomes to administrative inefficiencies and union influences. She asserts, “Until we see turning around of some of our math and English literacy scores... $111 billion a year. That is entirely unexcusable” ([03:56]). Perry criticizes teacher unions for prioritizing political agendas over academic excellence, claiming they focus on “woke progressive agendas” instead of fostering reading and math literacy ([03:56]).

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4. The Impact of Progressive Agendas: Critical Race Theory and Gender Identity

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the infiltration of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender identity topics in the curriculum. Perry shares her personal experiences, stating, “It's a violation of parental rights, you're automatically dumbing down these kids” ([06:27]). She criticizes the focus on these subjects at the expense of foundational skills like reading and math, arguing they result in “future Marxist workers” and assembly line education ([07:00]).

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5. Legal Battles Over Student Expression

Sarah Perry brings to light recent legal challenges faced by students expressing their gender identity. She references a case where a middle school student was expelled for wearing a T-shirt stating, “there are only two genders” ([09:59]). Perry draws parallels to historical First Amendment cases, lamenting the current judicial trend that sidelines constitutional rights in educational settings ([09:59]). She praises the Supreme Court for upholding the plain text of the law and resisting ideological reinterpretations ([11:05]).

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6. The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Toll on Education

Reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, Perry discusses its detrimental impact on student learning. She shares her family’s experience, noting that her son was assessed as being “two years behind” after a prolonged period of online education ([08:11]). Perry criticizes the educational disruptions caused by the pandemic, attributing learning losses to the shift away from traditional, in-person instruction focused on core subjects ([08:11]).

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7. Surge in Gender Identity Issues Among Students

Perry addresses the alarming rise in gender identity issues among young students, attributing it to social media and cultural elites. She states, “This soaring increase in biological girls who identify as biological boys... completely manufactured” ([15:37]). Discussing her personal struggles, Perry recounts how her family had to pull their children out of public schools due to the proliferation of gender dysphoria and related policies ([12:03]).

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8. Accessibility and Affordability of Private Education

The conversation touches on the challenges of accessing private education. Perry acknowledges that while moving to more conservative areas with high-performing public schools initially seemed beneficial, the subsequent shifts in educational content compelled her to opt for private schooling ([12:03]). She expresses concern over the affordability of private education for the majority of families, especially as federal policies like loan forgiveness for college students exacerbate financial burdens on previous generations ([15:37]).

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9. Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

In wrapping up the discussion, Sarah Perry directs a poignant question towards former President Donald Trump, emphasizing the importance of valuing and supporting girls and women in education. She states, “Girls have come too far. They have worked too hard... How much do you value women?” ([16:34]). Perry underscores the necessity for comprehensive educational reforms that prioritize academic fundamentals over progressive indoctrination, hoping for a resurgence of traditional education values under future administrations ([17:16]).

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Notable Quotes

• Sarah Perry on Progressive Agendas: “There’s been a huge agenda push for all of this sort of sexually graphic and gender critical instruction” ([00:30]).

• Sarah Perry on Public Education Funding: “Public Education was always ours, right? Taxpayers pay for public schools” ([02:27]).

• Sarah Perry on Teacher Unions: “They don't care about reading and math literacy. They care about woke progressive agendas” ([03:56]).

• Sarah Perry on Gender Identity in Schools: “It's a violation of parental rights, you're automatically dumbing down these kids” ([06:27]).

• Sarah Perry on Legal Rights: “We're not paying attention to that right now. That's why I think these school board candidate races are so important” ([06:27]).

• Sarah Perry to Trump: “How much do you value women?” ([16:34]).

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Conclusion

In this episode of Digital Social Hour, Sarah Perry provides a compelling critique of the current state of public education, highlighting the tensions between progressive educational agendas and parental rights. Her insights shed light on the challenges faced by families navigating a rapidly evolving educational landscape, marked by increasing governmental oversight and ideological shifts. Perry's passionate advocacy underscores the urgent need for educational reforms that prioritize core academic competencies and honor the foundational principles of parental authority and local governance.

For listeners seeking an in-depth understanding of the intricate dynamics shaping today’s education system, this episode offers valuable perspectives and fosters a critical dialogue on safeguarding the future of American education.

Transcript

[Announcer]

Hey, music fans, there are some great concerts headed this way. Don't miss out on all the shows in your favorite venues like Deftones at Madison Square Garden, Eagles at the Sphere, and Foster, the people at the Ryman Auditorium. Tickets are going fast, so don't wait. Head to livenation.com to get your tickets. Now that's livenation.com.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

There'S been a huge agenda push for all of this sort of sexually graphic and gender critical instruction. Literally kindergarten suddenly having decide between are my parents right and whether I'm a boy or a girl or is my teacher right on whether I'm a boy or a girl. So here I am, a mom of three. Like the hair on the back of my neck goes up. Suddenly went, oh my gosh, we have a ser them.

[Interviewer]

All right, guys, here with Sarah Partial Perry. Thanks for coming on today.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. We're at the Heritage foundation in D.C. yep, first time here, and it's been a blast for me.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Good, good. I'm glad. I mean, the energy here in D.C. i think, is unmatched. You know, I think people who are cultural elites know what they think is going on in D.C. and then people in Central America think they know what's going on in D.C. but when you're actually here, you realize the energy of how much transpires here and how much what happens affects the rest of the country. So I really do love working here. Hate the traffic, but do love working here.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I felt that energy immediately, especially when I walked into Heritage. Everyone's doing big things over here.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Yeah, I love it. I think this is really a moment for the entire conservative movement to kind of coalesce around the same ideas that we've been pushing for years, really since the Reagan era. And we've just gotten to a point where we finally gotten about 120, 130 conservative organizations to buy into the exact same vision for economic prosperity and the flourishing of the American family and strong national defense. Just solid ideas that have always worked for conservatism and ideas that are ultimately going to, I believe, ensure the future flourishing of America. And those are ideas that shouldn't be controversial. But I think right now, this political moment, they suddenly are.

[Interviewer]

They are. Especially your ideas on parenting.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Which shouldn't be controversial, but these days they are. Right.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

They really are. You know, it's very interesting. I just saw an article in Slate, and they characterized far right school board candidates as suddenly deciding that they were going to sort of take back public education. Well, I have news for you. Public Education was always ours, right? Taxpayers pay for public schools. Most parents can't afford to send their kids to private or parochial schools. And that's because, especially for me, my kids had to go to public school for the majority of their educations because my son has an IEP and my other son has a 504. So those special education services provided in a public school format. But our taxpayer dollars pay for essentially all of the education that transpires in the public space. And they also pay for the Department of Education salaries, which by the way, Department of Education is the biggest, funded, the most bloated of all the federal agencies, more than $111 billion a year. So we know education should be local. Unfortunately, right now we have a lot of big government, especially so in the administrative state has kind of taken off running. And I think we at Heritage, including some other conservative organizations, are really keen to return the power of self governance to the states and the people. And that's honestly what the founders wanted in the first place.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely. So do you feel like these principals and teachers are overpaid, underpaid or at the right level?

[Sarah Partial Perry]

So I think at this point, until we see turning around of some of our math and English literacy scores and generally our national average right now runs 30% for math and English literacy. That puts us in about the middle of the pack for all developed nations in the world for $111 billion a year. That is entirely unexcusable. So I honestly believe until we see teachers producing students who can read on grade level, who can perform math on grade level, no salaries need to be adjusted. Because right now one of biggest problems is that we've got the unions involved in creating political agendas, but not creating future learning successful individuals. They don't care about reading and math literacy. They care about woke progressive agendas. And that's a major problem.

[Interviewer]

It is.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Wow.

[Interviewer]

I didn't realize our academic scores were so low in comparison to other countries.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Really, really low. And I think it's a disappointment for me as somebody who served in the federal Department of Education. You know, when I was in the last administration, I was a senior attorney at the Office for Civ, Civil Rights. We really tried to do everything we could to make sure that we divested public education of all of these super progressive ideals because they are not doing anything to enhance the reading and the math literacy and the learning capabilities in any of the social sciences or math or scientific research. What they're doing is they're creating future Marxist workers. And this is assembly line education. Right we get them through K through 12, where the teachers unions are involved, and then we get them into higher education, where all of academia has been taken over by the far left. And then we get them into graduate school and the, for example, American bar associations beholden to the left. So even when I was in Law School 26 years ago, we were already hearing things about critical race theory, focus on the education. All of the scores will increase. A rising tide just lifts all boats. But we're not paying attention to that right now. That's why I think these school board candidate races are so important. And of course, you know, Slate categorizes that as far right maga, agit props. But in reality, these are just parents who want better education for their kids.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely. So that being said, what topics do you think schools should keep and what do you think they should get rid of?

[Sarah Partial Perry]

So I got to tell you, they're not doing anyone any good when we go into these extensive diversity experiences. Right. There's been a huge agenda push for LGBTQIA++, give it your acronym for all of this sort of sexually graphic and gender critical instruction that has kids in literally kindergarten suddenly having decide between are my parents right on whether I'm a boy or a girl, or is my teacher right on whether I'm a boy or a girl? And in fact, a federal court just determined that these poor six and seven year olds who were literally being instructed by a teacher, now we're talking kindergarten and first grade. Being instructed by a teacher that sometimes your parents and the doctor are wrong when you're born and you're not actually what you think you are. So here I am, a mom of three. Like the hair on the back of my neck goes up, and I automatically think, wait a minute. Not only is that a violation of parental rights, you're automatically dumbing down these kids. When you can be talking about instructional fundamentals, whether it's colors or shapes or reading, you're instead focusing on sexually explicit and gender critical studies. What is that doing to enhance the level of education in America? And the answer is nothing. But this is a nod to the teachers union and unfortunately, the fact that we're seeing people who go into the teaching profession more and more affiliate with left wing interests, I think that's a disservice to American education.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely. I'm glad they didn't teach that when I was in school. Yeah, that's crazy.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Yeah. And I think it's something that's relevant, relatively new. Listen, Covid does something very uniquely beneficial, and I won't say there was much beneficial about COVID but when we had kids coming home to essentially attend online classes and I was holding down a full time job and overseeing three kids on their computers, one it did not work for, the other two it did work for. But here's what we did learn. I think some of the parents who were not clued in to what was going on in public education suddenly went, oh my gosh, we have a serious problem. Because we were hearing discussions of critical race theory, we were hearing discussions about gender identity, and we're thinking these kids are not on grade level. In fact, my son who was online educated for the better part of a year and a half, we had him assessed before he went into his freshman year of high school. And they said he is not only one year behind, he is two years behind. Yeah. And we say you should keep him back and homeschool him until he gets up on grade. That is how bad the loss was just in my family. Well, when you're too busy instructing people on sort of woke cultural Marxism and you don't really care about, oh, I don't know, the fundamentals of American governance or history or science or math, those things become preeminent. And the kids are no longer being judged on their ability to reproduce information, to think critically. Instead they're being judged on how closely they align with liberal agit. Props. That to me was I think a real eye opening moment.

[Interviewer]

And public schools for the most part criticize critical thinking. So if you do critical think, they'll put you in detention or punish you with raids.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Listen, we had a federal appellate court, the first circuit appellate court just ruled against a young man, a middle school student, who wore a T shirt that said there are only two genders. And his school expelled him for wearing a T shirt stating a biological fact. Now I can send you all the way back to West Virginia vs Barnett. In the 60s and during the Vietnam War, there was a group of kids who were in a high school who wanted to protest the war. They wore black armbands, nothing else symbolized, they spoke nothing. But it was a form of symbolic speech. And the Supreme Court said, listen, they don't shed their first amendment rights at the schoolhouse door. But this kid Liam, who was living up in New England, was just ruled against by a federal appellate circuit who said, sorry, that's a disruptive T shirt. He didn't say anything, but the T shirt was considered disruptive. And I think some of the Supreme Court justices from the 60s would be rolling over in their graves that's crazy.

[Interviewer]

So it's even penetrated the courts at the highest level.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Oh, 100%. In fact, one of the few courts, we see a couple of appellate courts that are really good, that have sort of toed the line on what the Constitution says, on what the plain text of federal statutes say. And thank God the Supreme Court, I mean, they're willing to say, listen, this is gonna be an uncomfortable decision, but we're gonna hold fast to the text of the law. We're not gonna read into it our political agendas or our ideological agendas, and we're gonna make sure that we don't create new law whole cloth. That's not our job. That's the job of Congress. It's not our job to make law. It's our job to interpret and apply law. And that's it. So I think I've been really. And I think we're gonna, we're gonna see more of that this season. But I've been really gratified by so far what the Supreme Court has been willing to stand firm on.

[Interviewer]

That's good, at least. Has anyone at your kids schools tried to change their gender?

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Oh, multiple. Multiple kids, let me tell you. Yeah. So we live, we actually live in Baltimore County. So I've got about an hour, 15 hour and 30 minute drive. So we actually moved into that area because Baltimore county public schools were considered blue ribbon schools under George W. Bush. And these were the highest performing schools in the country. Great, right? So you move in, you buy a house, you think, I'm sending my kid to a public school, but it's a blue ribbon school. During the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, Darrell Williams, who was our superintendent of schools, his oversight of all Baltimore county public schools, not only were we the last to open after Covid in the entire state, so almost full two years before we opened, but we were actually one of the greatest learning losses in the state when you compared population per population. And that's when I went, that's it. My kids are out of public school, can't do it anymore. But part of that was this contagion. And listen, Abigail Schreier, who's a great journalist, writes for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a book called Irreversible Damage, the transgender Craze Seducing our daughters. For some reason, that particular contingent, age 12 to about age 17 in high school, middle school and high school, has now expressed in record numbers this soaring increase in biological girls who identify as biological boys. She writes about, and I've spoken about this A little bit. The fact that these aren't organic increases, they are actually completely manufactured. It's social media, it's cultural elites, it's what their friends are doing. It's what social media influencers are doing. And suddenly, because they don't want to be different, if a gym teacher or a best friend expresses sudden sort of gender dysphoria and says, you know what? I thought I was a girl. I feel most at home being a boy. God bless these young girls. And listen, I have. I am parenting a child through these teenage years. It's not easy, but it's exploded all around my kids. And thank God they understand right is right and wrong is wrong and biology matters. They have enough accuracy in their scientific interpretations to recognize that you can't change your chromosomes, but it's taken off all around them. Before I pulled them out, finally, we were hearing reports of students identifying as furries, identifying as animals. Right. I mean, these are the conversations I'm having. Like if you had said to me 25, 26 years ago, do you think you're going to use your law degree to talk about furries and transgender boys and girls bathroom, I would say absolutely not. Here are the conversations I'm having. We had heard reports that there were now litter boxes in both boys and girls bathrooms. And I went, that's it, I'm out. I'm entirely out. So we pulled the kids out. I am really grateful that we can send them to private schools. My son is now in college. He is a marine biology major at lsu. So that's really great. But I have to tell you, I'm hoping and praying that public education is not completely lost to us. But there are times and I think, I don't know if we can salvage it unless another administration absolutely smashes all of the woke indoctrination and goes back to the basics.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I hope we can. Because private school is unaffordable for most families.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Yeah, it really is. And that's, you know, that's a whole separate discussion. I mean, we know now that all colleges are making money hand over fist. And we've got on the other side of the equation, the president and his vice president excusing millions and millions of dollars of loans. So people like me who paid off six figures in loans for graduate school or something, going, wait a minute now what you're doing is you're excusing loans of these young people who are gonna be foisted on to the previous generation. Cause we're gonna have to pay for it. So I'M looking at my son right now. I have paid. I'm now paying for 90% of his college education. He's paying for 10% because the federal government has put limits on what college students can now borrow. So it's a completely different landscape.

[Interviewer]

Crazy. We'll end off with this. We're gonna send this next question to Trump's team. We're gonna compile all this. If you could talk with Trump right now and ask him anything or tell him anything, what would you say?

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Oh, how much do you value girls and women in education? And I know that he has made specific remarks about ending the participation of biological males in women's sports. And that is a great start, but it's got to be in every aspect of American education. Girls have come too far. They have worked too hard. It's been 52 years of progress. It is what made possible my graduate degree. It's what is making possible my daughter's college volleyball scholarship, scholarship at a D2 school. How much do you value women? Mr. President, you have been great on the sports issue. It's got to follow through with all of education because these are women who care very much about the future of our country.

[Interviewer]

I love that. Thanks for coming on, Sarah.

[Sarah Partial Perry]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Interviewer]

See you guys.

[Announcer]

Hey, music fans. There are some great concerts headed this way. Don't miss out on all the shows in your favorite venues, like Deftones at Madison Square Garden, Eagles at the Sphere, and Foster the people at the Ryman Auditorium. Tickets are going fast, so don't wait. Head to livenation.com to get your tickets. Now that's livenation.com.