Defending Education

Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas from elementary school to graduate school. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom — and promoting the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.

We believe our children’s education should be based on scholarship and facts, and should nurture their development into the happy, resilient, free-thinking, educated citizens every democracy needs. Our classrooms should include rigorous instruction in history, civics, literature, math, the sciences, and the ideas and values that enrich our country.

Yet in recent years activists have targeted public, private, and charter schools across the country with a campaign to impose ideologically driven curriculum with a concerning and often divisive emphasis on students’ group identities: race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender. Many school districts and private schools have spent large sums of money on these efforts and many more are preparing to do the same.

This new educational mission is not only at war with basic American values, but also with childhood. Couched in vague slogans about “social justice,” the new curriculum divides our children into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups. To one, it teaches guilt and shame. To the other, grievance and resentment. More broadly, throughout the school, it sows distrust, unhappiness, confusion, and fear.

Schools are adopting this illiberal mission at the behest of a narrow group of activists, union leaders and high-priced consultants— without the consent of the students, parents, and communities whose interests the schools are supposed to serve. Those who dissent risk being called ugly names and shamed into silence.

This must stop. If you are disturbed by these destructive practices in our schools, you are not alone. If you want our schools to return to teaching our children all that they need to become the best version of themselves, please join us. We come from diverse races, religions, economic backgrounds, and political orientations — but we all agree that it is time to join together and stop this madness in our schools.