Georgia Howe (2:54)

Joining us to discuss the new report from her organization, Defending Education, is president and founder Nikki Neely. Nikki, thanks for coming on.

Nikki Neely (3:02)

Thank you for having me.

Georgia Howe (3:04)

So your organization, Defending Education, recently released a new report on the extent to which ethnic studies has grown and influenced on college campuses. First off, I want you to tell us what ethnic studies is. Our audience is very savvy, but still, that term seems pretty benign. So what do you mean when you say ethnic studies?

Nikki Neely (3:23)

Yeah, no, and that is totally what it is meant to do. It sounds like it's multiculturalism, it's social studies. Who could oppose that? But it turns out that's not what it is at. What it means is it actually wants to teach students how to be little social justice warriors. It wants to encourage activism, and it views the world through that oppressor, oppressor matrix. And so we're seeing children who are learning things about white supremacy, culture, settler colonialism, things that really set children up from a very, very young age to hate each other and put each other into groups based on collective identity, which is terrifying because as we know, children are impressionable. And those lessons that start at a young age are certainly we now see those reverberating in college campuses.

Georgia Howe (4:05)

Now tell us about the report. What evidence is there that these types of courses are becoming more ingrained in college campuses? I know we talked about this a lot in 2021, 2022, how we were seeing these trends in K through 12 and on college campuses. But we hear less about it now. So I think a lot of people may have thought that this stuff was being rolled back to some extent, but your report seems to indicate otherwise. What did you find?

Nikki Neely (4:32)

Yes. Well, we started to figure out where are these classes coming from? Because in states like California that have put ethnic studies curriculum mandates in place, you have to actually have a curriculum for districts for teachers to pull from. We're seeing a lot of those courses actually come out of universities. University of California, Berkeley, unsurprisingly, is one of the big drivers of this. You can be an ethnic studies major in college, but then they're Also then creating and selling and shopping this curriculum to school districts around the country. And so you have a place like cuny. You have a place like, yeah, Berkeley, where they're making money off of this. And when you think about, wow, Berkeley's a great school. This must be a really rigorous curriculum. It absolutely is not. And so the kinds of classes that are being sent out, I mean, you look at in cuny, their courses are about no justice, no peace, Third World students movement's radical challenge to reading for tolerance. You see them teaching about Chicanx and Latinx studies. One of the classes Berkeley actually recommends and shares with schools to adopt is something about drag pedagogy, the playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood. And so not only are the classes being put out there, but it's also teaching teachers how to use and put these lessons into real life for very, very young children. And then we started to look at like, okay, well, where is this coming from? This is so kind of crazy. Pants on his face. I mean, you can't imagine that like, you know, a university with its finite budget would decide to fund something like this. I mean, we certainly want to graduate or we should want to matriculate students who actually know how to thrive in a global soc. We then dug a little bit deeper and started to look at the foundations that were funding this. And so there are these marquee foundations that have been around in America for 100 years. The Mellon foundation, the Hewlett foundation, giving tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to these universities to create and then disseminate this information as well. And so the fact that there is this whole ecosystem behind the scenes that is pushing this as well is something that we found absolutely astonishing.

Georgia Howe (6:28)

So is this still growing in the K12 environment the way it was, especially post George Floyd? I know there were a lot of parents who stormed their school board meetings several years ago, and it seemed like there was some progress being made to root it out. Would you say that parents have had success, or are we still seeing this crop up pretty prolifically?

Nikki Neely (6:49)

We're still seeing it crop up. I mean, California is where it started, and then it has been metastasizing eastward from there, unfortunately. So Minnesota, under Tim Walls, has adopted this and is trying to codify this much like what we saw in California. The initial iterations that were put forward by the really radical extremist part of this, the liberated ethnic studies contingent, is pushing very hard in Minnesota. In Minnesota, actually, the first iteration of their ethnic studies curriculum didn't Mention the Holocaust when it talked about European history, which is something that, I mean, you think like, wow, that's like kind of a very salient thing that children should know about. And so, again, you sort of see these administrators thumbs on the scale about whose stories should be told and whose stories shouldn't be told. But we're even seeing it in red states. In Texas, there's ethnic studies with a focus on Latinx and Chicanx studies. We're seeing it in Vermont. So it is definitely making its way eastward. And so we tell families, this is very much a case of the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. When your school, when your state says that they're going to introduce or expand social studies programming, this is the kind of thing that people should be looking out for.

Georgia Howe (7:52)

Now, when you say Latinx studies or Chicano studies, I'm assuming that's not just the study of Latin American history, right?

Nikki Neely (8:00)

No, it's a lot of the. You know, that America is a settler colonial nation. You know, who has been held down? Why have they been held down? This is a system of white supremacy and oppression. And so it's not actually teaching people to get along well with each other or telling the stories and uplifting some of the people who have faced adversity and moved through. It's very much a victim, villain mindset and mentality, which is something that when you teach to a child at a young age, I mean, as we're seeing on college campuses, these students that are, feel. Feel it's their moral duty to get out and be this on the front line. I think, you know, what we're seeing these studies in practice is turn our children into little human soldiers. And that's something that I think most parents don't want, because most of these kids, I mean, you look at the NAEP scores are reading. Our writing for children is abysmal in this country. And so you have children who are marching to oppose settler colonialism and can't spell the word colonial. What our schools are doing with the finite time they have with our children is something that is deeply appalling and should really concern every parent. The NAEP scores are commonly referred to as the nation's report card. And so it was the lowest reading, I think, that we have ever had for, I want to say, eighth graders ever. I mean, let's bear in mind that even before COVID America's proficiency rates for fourth graders, for eighth graders, for high schoolers was nothing to write home about to start with. And so these scores are really Showing and highlighting that our children are not performing well, they're not thriving, they don't have the skills to succeed in a global economy. And, you know, I'm a mom. I look at, you know, I send my kids to school for seven or eight hours a day. I. I expect them to master the basics. Reading, writing, mathematics, science. And so when they're spending hours and hours, you know, learning about grievances, talking about big feelings, being told that they're victims because of the color of their skin is something that's time that they can't get back. And, you know, it really, it's just. It's absolutely astonishing that this is not considered like a flashing red light for everybody. What the heck are our schools doing? And why has. Why have things gotten so off the rails? You look at the amount of money that has been poured into the US Education system since the foundation of the Department of education in 1980. I mean, it's approximately $3 trillion that have been siphoned off from state and local taxes. The price per pupil that public schools are spending on students is through the roof. Yet our achievement keeps falling off a cliff. And so clearly there is a failure of the system, and there's a real need to reimagine what and how our education is delivered to our youngest.

Georgia Howe (10:19)

Now, something you've talked about before is that despite these scores, the teacher trainings are not really geared towards improving outcomes anymore. Is that correct?

Nikki Neely (10:29)

Yes. I think one thing that I'm really concerned about is I as a parent, when my kids go to school at least once a month, there's something called a teacher in service day. And when schools are closed, you as a parent, you have to find a place to put your kids day camp or you have to stay home from school. I think many of us assume that these professional development days are days that our teachers are learning how to be better educators. But my organization has foiaed. We've come across a lot of teacher training materials. We have teachers who send us these things. Often the teachers are being taught things like, you know, it's the critical race theory, it's the gender theory. We got something from Eau Claire schools in Wisconsin a couple of years ago that talked about parental exclusion policies and that parents don't have a right to know their child's gender identity. That information must be earned. And so when our teachers are being taught those things, they're not actually taught what their responsibilities are under the law as an educator, they're not taught how to be a better teacher. They're being taught a lot of ideology. So that is, that's one thing that worries me. Then when our kids are in classrooms again, they're not focusing on how to be an excellent student. You look at programs like Equitable Math that has come out of Stanford. Again, this is something where getting the right answer in math class is considered white supremacy. Showing your work, I mean, very, very basic things. I think back a couple years ago when the push towards phonics and the idea of meeting students where they are rather than trying to encourage students to be better than they currently are, is astonishing. We have seen organizations like the national PTA partner with TikTok, and I have talked to people who have said, well, that's where the kids are. That's where they'll lear. No, we don't want kids to be on TikTok. We want our kids to be reading books and to learn how to focus. The Atlantic had a horrifying story a few months ago talking about how most kids don't even have the attention span to read a full book. And you think about the inability of students to perform deep work and how that is going to manifest in their adult lives later on. And so I think it's. There's so many things that are going on, but it seems like schools are pretty much spending, you know, our students class time at everything but educating. And then when you look at why that might be, you look at the teachers unions at their national conferences hold every year, they're voting on abortion on demand. They're voting on Medicare for all. They're voting on freeing Palestine and support for Ukraine. They're not voting on, you know, should students actually be well prepared for classes? They're actually, it's just a laundry list of demands. And so I think from beginning to end, the education system has been fully captured. And so it's hard to place the blame on any one person. But, you know, when parents throw their hands and say, you know what, I'm unhappy, they have every right to be.

Georgia Howe (12:59)

Now talking about this being kind of a root and branch problem, the Trump administration has talked about abolishing the doe, the Department of Education. There's been a lot of hand wringing about what that would mean, some of which may be overblown. So what would that do if the Trump administration were to actually dismantle the Department of Education? Right.

Nikki Neely (13:19)

Well, of course, education is not going away. The Department of Education only was created in 1980, and I'm pretty sure we educated people very well before that. We were able to put, you Know, men on the moon, we won back to back world wars without a department of education. Education is still fundamentally a state and a local issue. And so the power will devolve back to them. And it's funny because I think about when we see a lot of the problems that are taking place in schools now, the fact that people go and they just, you know, they, they raise issues before their school board. I think it's the kind of thing where if you are closer, you know, geographically, policy wise, you have to see a school board member or state legislature in the grocery store, then you're better able to convey your concerns as opposed to just going to Washington and having them skim money off the top and then send it back to the states or the or, or districts with strings attached. And so I think that's actually a very, very healthy thing. Programs like idea that help students with special needs students, that programs like Title 1 funding that are supposed to help low income students, those programs will still exist. They will just be administered through the state. And so I think these are all very, very good things. And I think one thing that we never hear from the mainstream media that people forget about, is that these programs, again, are not being administered effectively. We look at the grant funding that the Biden administration gave out. My organization in December identified a billion dollars in grants that went out through the Department of Education that were tied to DEI funding that is not helping students learn better, that is helping students learn to hate each other. And even programs that were supposed to help prevent gun violence that were administered by the Department of Justice, we saw that money being used. I mean, the GR priorities and some of the things that went out were for knitting circles, for yoga circles. These are not helping our children learn. These are not helping keep our children safe. And so for a state legislator to be the one where the buck stops with, for a local school official to be the one the buck stops with, those people know, if my constituents are mad, I'm going to be voted out of office. Whereas in Washington, you know, the deep state education bureaucrats who are there for their entire careers, they don't care. They're never going to have to take that hit. And so I think to have things be at a lower level is a much, much better thing.

Georgia Howe (15:24)

Now, broadly speaking, would you say that modern education has shifted from an outward focus of learning about the world, reaching certain external benchmarks to more of like an inward focus on identity and feelings?

Nikki Neely (15:41)

Yes, absolutely. And it's the kind of thing where when you look at child psychology, when you look at things like cognitive behavior theory. That's where actually it's really dangerous because individuals, even adults, kind of get into their own head and they spiral. It's me, it's me, it's me. Whereas you want a child to feel tied to their broader community, to be part of a church group, to be part of the Boy Scouts or something like that, and realize that they're part of something greater. That's why I'm so excited about all the America250 initiatives is it's really reminding us, e pluribus unum, right out of many one, that we're all part of this broad, beautiful, ongoing project to make a more perfect union. It's not about you and how your grandparents were hurt or the, you know, many generations ago, something bad happened by somebody with the same skin color as you. It's that today, together, we're all stronger as a unit. And so as of right now, you know, I think obviously this has been taking place in schools for 40 years, right? We have been talking as conservatives about how bad universities have been, how bad K12 schools have been for decades. I mean, going back to God and man at Yale. But I am excited because we now finally have administration that really wants to focus on solutions and moving forward and giving children and families what they need. Even just the mere idea of thinking about families as stakeholders in this, as opposed to just the special interest groups and the activists who want their money, their handouts and their contracts from the federal, state and local governments, is something that is just an absolute sea change.

Georgia Howe (17:01)

All right, well, just the fact that we talk about this in mainstream discourse, or perhaps just conservative mainstream discourse, seems like a major step forward. And I appreciate organizations like yours for doing the legwork to actually rooted out and shed some light on it. Nikki, thanks so much for coming on.

Nikki Neely (17:17)

Thank you for having me.

Georgia Howe (17:18)

That was founder and president of Defending Education, Nikki Neely. And this has been a special episode of Morning Wire.

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