Nation Profile
THOUGHT LEADERS
The Ruination of American Schools Teachers unions, progressive school boards are destroying education, says author
I
n a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter at The Daily Wire and author of “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” The consequences of this destruction, Rosiak contends, “will be devastating for society, not long in the future, but over the next five to 10 years.”
JAN JEKIELEK: I just fin-
ished reading “Race to the Bottom,” where you say that people back in 2019 made you rethink your whole concept of politics. LUKE ROSIAK: I was a
MR . JEKIELEK: Some of 52 I N S I G H T June 24–30, 2022
MR . JEKIELEK: You
An empty classroom during a period of virtual online learning at Hazelwood Elementary School in Louisville, Ky., on Jan. 11.
these districts impact a huge number of people. The case you make in the book is that some people don’t realize the radical agendas at play.
gain access to children, to money, or to whatever. MR . JEKIELEK: You heard
from people because you were writing stories in other places?
MR . ROSIAK: I live in
Fairfax County, Virginia, which has 1.2 million people. In 2019, one thing that woke me was learning that none of the 10 Democrats on the Fairfax County School Board had kids in the school system. So why would you run for school board if you didn’t have kids? It turned out they all had their own political agendas and were using the schools as a vehicle, to
MR . ROSIAK: Yes, people
were contacting me about schools. I saw that schools mattered and that no one was paying attention to them. Because of that, special interests had started colonizing these schools in places like Seattle and Minneapolis, and then in places you wouldn’t expect. Once coronavirus hit, a lot of people began paying attention to schools. But
contend in the book that the teachers unions weren’t fearing for the teachers’ safety—that some other agenda was at play to keep kids and teachers out of school. MR . ROSIAK: I live in Vir-
ginia, where the lockdowns were bad, but you could go out to eat; you could travel. Everyone’s working. You go to Target and you’ve got cashiers there. The only ones refusing to do their job were teachers. We all know that kids aren’t vectors of this disease. They shut down schools to get money, and got $80 billion in one bill alone. They got more money than the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, and the schools weren’t even open. They were basically taking kids hostage. The thing to realize is, they’ve always operated these schools as employment centers for adults, as much as places to educate children.
FROM L: JON CHERRY/GETTY IMAGES, MATTHEW PEARSON/CPI STUDIOS
reporter covering Capitol Hill when people started contacting me about problems in schools and how it affected them. I realized then that local government has an impact. I also realized that because most people weren’t paying attention to local politics, things could go wrong. I began to focus on school problems, which occur across all 13,000 local school districts.
I started working on this book before then, and I found that a lot of what happened during coronavirus, and with CRT (critical race theory), was what some people had already wanted to do. They used coronavirus to ramp it up.
