On Wednesday, President Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud about children in classrooms while speaking at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ 2022 National and State Teachers of the Year event at the White House.
During his remarks, Joe Biden told teachers in attendance that school children are “like yours when they’re in the classroom” and “not someone else’s.”
“You have heard me say it many times about our children, but it is true, they’re all our children,” Biden said. “And the reason you are the teachers of the year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”
Biden’s comments come at a time when relations between parents and schools are deeply strained, especially when it comes to topics such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender or sexuality.
For example, in 2021, the National School Board Association (NSBA) called on the Biden Administration in a memo to take action against parents speaking up and defending their children at school board meetings by labeling them “domestic terrorists.”
The NSBA later apologized, however, Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the memo, and the DOJ even went as far as releasing its own memo which stated, “threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values.”
According to the National Homeschooling Education Research Institute, in the spring of 2019, there were only 2.5 million homeschooled children in the U.S. in grades K-12. Just one year later, in the 2020-2021 school year, that number jumped to 3.7 million. While this jump happened during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dramatic shift may also be a sign that parents are done with woke curriculums and educational overreach when it comes to their children’s education.
