For each human couple, the drive to care for their offspring is fundamental. As the world became increasingly complex, humanity developed schools to help parents provide children with the skills their society would demand. Unfortunately, over the last century, the schools have gradually forgotten that they were instituted to be the parents’ servants, rather than the other way around.
Two news stories, surfacing at about the same time, drove home this point.
Failure of Anti-Racist Ideology
The first story has a tragic sense of irony that has prompted much comment. It springs from a massive 8300-word article in the New York Times Magazine by the author of the infamous 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones. To put it mildly, the article is a masterpiece of evasion and woke-inspired double-talk from someone who can be justifiably accused of harming American education as much as anyone alive. In it, she bemoans the poor education that her daughter received because she put her ideological preferences over the welfare of her own child.
Many journals have commented on the article at length. However, quoting the last paragraph of this remarkable combination of mea culpa, self-aggrandizement and petty justification will suffice to expose the fallacies behind her reasoning.
“But for all of our justifications, including mine, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.” (Emphasis in the original.)
A False “Truth”
Mrs. Hannah-Jones’s “undeniable verity” is demonstrably false. Failing schools don’t fail because some mythical racist cabal wants to deny a good education to large groups of American children.
In fact, for at least the last five decades, American society has striven to accomplish exactly the opposite. As National Review pointed out in a recent article, the woefully substandard elementary school to which Mr. and Mrs. Hannah-Jones sent their daughter “spends a whopping $52,000 per student each year—more than three times the national average of $16,526. The school also benefits from a smaller-than-average student-to-teacher ratio of 9 to 1, and teachers make more than $100,000 a year on average.”
Those (taxpayer-provided) dollars and that extra teacher time are not wasted because of racism, but because they adhere to several basic falsities inherent to the “anti-racism” agenda that all but obliterates real education. Unfortunately, no force on earth, even the failure of her only child, can force Mrs. Hannah Jones and her ilk to abandon them. In fact, they double, triple, and even quadruple-down on these errors.
The second story illustrates those errors.
Promoting Radical Ideology
This story centers around the new president of the National Education Association (NEA), Princess Moss. Miss Moss has climbed steadily through the ranks of the roughly three-million-member union. Upon taking the union’s top position on September 1, 2026, she lost no time in proclaiming that her presidency would center around the phrase “From Resistance to Renaissance.”
Miss Moss explained her hopes and challenges to the leftist journal, 19th*.
“What gives me hope is that I know that educators are doing all that they can do to ensure that their students have the best possible education. I have hope that we will come out of those attacks with flying colors because we’re doing the work for the right reasons.”
Until roughly 1980, everyone defined the last phrase in that declaration in similar ways. The work involved teaching children an agreed-upon set of skills and content. The reason was to enable children to lead fulfilling lives as part of a common American society.
Shattering the Common Understanding
The NEA always leaned left. Cast in the flawed mold of John Dewey, it saw completely secular schools as a social necessity. It constantly begged for ever-greater resources to achieve radical social goals. However, it went to great lengths to appear middle-of-the-road, casting their programs as “reforms,” designed to help all of America’s children. Largely through its influence, their goals were largely accepted nationwide.
However, Miss Moss’s wildly radical “From Resistance to Renaissance” agenda is far more subversive than even the most “reform agendas” of the sixties. This becomes all too obvious in her published comments about a book titled The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy: Empowered Educators on the Front Lines. In her review, printed on the Barnes & Noble page dedicated to the book, Miss Moss gives it what can only be described as a wholehearted endorsement.
The book, Princess Moss states, “brings together stories of educators who refuse to separate teaching from their fight for justice—teachers who understand advocacy isn’t extra, it’s essential. From organizing against privatization to building Black Lives Matter at School movements, from fighting for immigrant students to challenging harmful systems, this book captures what it means to show up wholly for our students and communities. It honors educators who organize, challenge power, and build the world our students deserve.”
For those unaccustomed to the parlance of the far left, a bit of “unpacking” may be necessary. In this context, advocacy is not seeking out an especially unfortunate student and giving them the extra time and attention they may need to learn. It is openly advocating for far-leftist policies and training children to take part in that effort. Society is the enemy; its power must be challenged at every opportunity. What’s more, fighting against these enemies is not just good, appropriate or desirable; it is “essential.” In Miss Moss’s opinion, no teacher worth their position can decline to engage in this fight. Merely teaching children basic skills is not enough.
The Price of Surrender to Radicalism
Lest readers think this assessment overly strident, consider the book’s first paragraph.
“At this moment in history, when educators are criminalized for teaching truth, book bans proliferate, and public education itself is under political siege, the stakes of teaching extend far beyond the classroom. We are living through an intensification of structural inequality, and because schools do not exist in a vacuum, these oppressive systems follow students wherever they are. The conditions we face… demand that we recognize that schools and the communities in which they are situated are under attack.”
The author of these strident words is Bree Picower, Ph.D., a full professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is also the author of Reading, Writing and Racism, Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets. Her faculty profile informs readers that “Across her writing and teaching, Dr. Picower examines the role of racism in education and how to prepare teachers to disrupt Whiteness in order to advance social and racial justice.”
It is not difficult to imagine the mental state of children who spring from a system where ideas such as these predominate. Far from being prepared to support themselves and make a solid contribution to the society in which they live, they are inoculated with an anger so deep that many will likely never escape it. They became the mobs that surged onto the streets of America’s cities during the summer of 2020, camped out on Columbia University’s campus in 2024, and took over Minneapolis streets in 2026. They will become exactly what they were so carefully trained to be, revolutionaries in the thrall of an ideology they barely understand. If that ideology succeeds, they will become putty in the hands of their collectivist masters. If it fails, they will grow ever angrier, nursing artificial injustices they can never placate.
Society must summon the strength to reject the NEA, Princess Moss, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Bree Picower and their ilk. The only alternative is a disintegration ever more violent and deadly.
First published on TFP.org.
Photo Credit: © Andrii Gorb – stock.adobe.com