While sitting in carpool on a Friday afternoon at the beginning of the school year, I received an email from my son’s prominent private school in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. It informed me that on Monday my child, along with all Pre-First through 5th grade, would be asked several questions about identity. One of those questions would ask children to stand up when prompted to indicate whether they identify as a boy or, at the alternate prompt, as a girl.
Mind you, these are five- to 11-year-olds. The question posed was not “which gender are you?” Instead, it was an identity question, loaded with all the sexual intrigue and gender confusion that the vocal left force-feeds children. With no way of inquiring or responding to the email, I had to wrestle with this madness that was about to take place on Monday.
That afternoon began the moment for this mama who said, “Game over.” We gathered parents, had conversations and gathered accounts that spanned 20 years of creeping “progressive” influence. What we began to realize was that we had been asleep at the wheel, allowing all of this to happen right under our noses.
To make things worse, Covid’s influence on campus access and classroom protocols enabled administrators and faculty to push their radical agenda with greater latitude than ever. Classroom aid materials and campus conversations made it clear that critical race theory (CRT), appearing in a number of clever guises, had invaded our respected “Christian” college preparatory school. The avenues for its messaging included everything from sports to foreign language instruction. Our school had slowly fallen prey to the designs of educators passionate about a woke social agenda.
Christianity and educational excellence took a backseat as the new woke religion gained traction among faculty. The administration tossed traditional (and demonstrably superior) methods of churning out scholars and leaders to satisfy the demands of increasingly radical norms. On the front end, its hiring process favored candidates sympathetic to leftist thought; to complete the transformation, its admissions and grading practices sought ideological complicity as well. As a result, the traditional soul of our campus has been twisted into something unrecognizable: Color now matters more than character. White people are inherently racist. Equity trumps equality under the law. If you’re not actively being anti-racist, you’re a “racist.”
As parents shared stories, many quietly coalesced to form a response. Scattered efforts to push back against the steamroller of progressivism included everything from letters and lunches to anonymous social media accounts detailing the educational carnage on campus. Yet, the vocal dissent and pleadings with administrators did nothing to slow the march of our zealously woke administration. As weary parents, most of us felt that our resources were outstripped by the faculty and leadership. They were strategically positioned to silence or ignore opposition. Even the board was stocked with left-leaning sympathizers with little desire to challenge our politely radical headmaster. Many of our school’s parents were concerned that speaking up could hurt their children, their community relationships, or even their livelihoods.
I discovered that on my own child’s campus, parents are being deceived by school messaging that paints a rosy picture of dark ideological programs. Acronyms boast trendy-sounding programming such as SEL (social and emotional learning) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). However, the real programming behind these efforts—CRT– is never mentioned.
Elite private schools like ours once prided themselves on academic rigor and inquiry. Once upon a time, education included mastering a catalogue of mankind’s great discoveries and history’s timeless lessons. Now, parents find their children learning more about the glories of sexual experimentation and socialist thought. When did our schools become our opponents? How have generalization and presumptions— once frowned upon as racist, sexist, or biased— become enshrined as academic facts?
We have created a platform to address these questions and empower parents to engage in the battle for their children’s education. We hope to expose the academic mismanagement and rampant decay of critical thinking in school; at the same time, we aim to encourage parents to challenge these teachings and battle for honest, rigorous, and noble education.
Education Veritas helped host an event recently in North Carolina teaching parents how to spot CRT and related influences in their schools, and we explained how to defend against educational assaults on their children. These parents were hungry for more. They were instantly empowered and fueled for a fight that they now understood better.
The progressive education agenda was now visible in literature assignments, classroom conversations and political messaging coming out of the most prominent private schools in Atlanta. Our city has a growing army of parents who are ready to reclaim education, and we’re thrilled to join them in this battle.
Kate Hudson of Atlanta is the founder and president of Education Veritas, Inc. For more information go to educationveritas.org
