(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) A national parental-rights group sounded alarm bells this week over the Biden administration once again trying to weave its radical leftist agenda into public schools.
Falling in line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s educational power grab in the wake of pandemic school closures and horrific learning losses triggered largely by the administration’s misguided policies, the School Superintendent’s Association, representing upward of 120 districts across the country, is launching its Learning 2025 plan that calls for a “holistic redesign” of the United States’ public education system.
The initiative, and its equity-based curriculum promoting social counseling for far-left DEI initiatives, is a direct assault on parental rights, said Melissa Jackson, chief operating officer for No Left Turn in Education.
Jackson and other critics of the association’s Learning 2025 program and the CDC’s “Whole Community, Whole Child” educational template contend both initiatives are “aimed at manipulating students’ values and beliefs to replace parents as the primary moral authority in their child’s lives,” Fox News reported. The values and beliefs being peddled by both programs rely heavily on the dogma of critical race theory and gender-identity theory.
Public school systems have increasingly funneled those agendas through what officials have dubbed “social-emotional learning” programs, what NLTE referred to as “socially engineered learning,” that focus on defined beliefs and behaviors instead of traditional education.
“Our schools no longer teach reading, writing, and arithmetic,” Teresa Mull, a research fellow in education policy at The Heartland Institute, wrote in The Hill. “Rather than be taught how to think and problem-solve, children are thought what to think and how to feel. All these money-making and money-spending schemes tend to sound nice, of course, but they inevitably fall flat.”
The Learning 2025 is a perfect example, NLTE’s Jackson argued, noting that the curriculum is basically a CDC-rehash that works to instill the same pandemic social policy guidelines.
“I have a problem accepting a program from the very same people that caused the problem,” said NLTE’s Chief Research Officer Apryl Dukes. “That’s what I want parents to know, is that these organizations were part of it, and now they’re offering you a solution to the problem.”
Biden regime officials claimed that the Learning 2025 initiative being adopted nationwide by the public school districts “is not a CDC program.” An agency document reviewed by Fox News told a different story.
“AASA is using the new model with our superintendent cadre,” the CDC boasted of its Whole Child program. “We’ve updated all of our coordinated school health training materials to include the new model as the model for coordinated school health.”
The expanding parameters of “coordinated school health” are designed to indoctrinate educators, starting with superintendents, on how to “shush us and push us [parents] out of the picture, so they can do what they feel is best for our children,” said NLTE’s Holly Terei, who as the group’s Teacher Coalition national director, attended a Learning 2025 conference last summer.
“Through what I’ve learned at the conference, there’s an intentionality of bypassing parental rights by not being transparent about the implementation of the program, the data collection that goes into it, the fact that it’s not a proven educational program and that our children, who have been signed up as demo districts with Learning 2025, are literally a part of a social educational experiment,” Terei said.
The correlations and similarities between the national superintendents’ association and CDC agenda were glaring, she said, and cause for concern.
“If you put Learning 2025 and the CDC Whole Child model side by side, it is exactly the same. They tweak some of the wording like whole learner and whole child,” she said.
“It’s kind of like, let’s put lipstick on a pig and call it a lady. With Learning 2025, we can kind of gloss over it with a lot of this fluffy, flowery language and kind of mask the true intentions behind it.”
