Central Bucks School District & Pennridge School District: Parents’ rights to keep agenda-driven outsiders away from our public schools.

Educators should be in charge
of educational decisions, not politically motivated national groups that want to take over
all education.

Who knows best what local schools in Central Bucks and Pennridge need? Warrior Moms in Sarasota FL? Charter school magnates/idealogues in Hillsdale MI? Lawyer/activists in Harrisburg PA? Or you, your children, your neighbors and friends, and the teachers in your child’s own school?

What those from Sarasota, Hillsdale, and Harrisburg have in common is a desire to spread their agendas nationwide, without consideration for what will help our kids, whom they don’t know. They disregard best practices and established guidelines for good policy and inclusive education to push a partisan take on identity and history for their own purposes.

Our friends in the Pennridge School District are fighting to ensure that local educators, who actually know the students, will guide what kids learn in social studies. A key part of this local control is the right for parents to weigh in on the underlying principles of their child’s social studies education and for those who write the curriculum to consult education experts and established principles.

The Pennridge school board, by contrast, recently moved to remove local control and recourse to good practice. When the superintendent pushed back, it appears the board edged him out on medical leave leading up to his October retirement, and they have reassigned the educators responsible for curriculum development (that decision is tabled for now.) Why the move away from pedagogy, professionalism, and from local teachers, who have our kids’ best interests and education needs at heart? So they can turn over the decisions about what will be taught in social studies to the creators of the “1776 Curriculum”, created by Hillsdale College, an avowedly Christian college that “maintains ‘by precept and example’ the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.” In public schools?! 

Meanwhile, Central Bucks’s school board majority has turned covertly and without any public input to the Independence Law Center (ILC) in Harrisburg. This group is affiliated with the influential national group the Family Research Council, which advocates for religious freedoms and against LGBT rights. We know from reporting that the Independence Law Center provided a brand-new athletics policy in November 2022, without any known need for a new one (this policy has not been introduced or voted on.) They also assisted in writing Central Bucks library policy 109.2 and Central Bucks policy 321. What exactly is the full extent of ILC’s involvement in our kids’ education in Central Bucks? Where is the transparency?

We want to know: why did we elect people who will privately outsource decisions about the education of our Central Bucks and Pennridge students to idealogues? Who would dodge their own responsibility to our students and instead invite not researchers who have studied what works but to strangers with agendas to institute their programs for our kids?

One side claims to represent parents’ rights, but where are our rights in all this? It appears that Central Buck’s district leaders, and Pennridge’s, are running into the arms of well-funded, partisan organizations with national ambitions that seek to turn schools to their own purposes.

The newsletter of an Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty makes their fears crystal clear:

The first version of the newsletter included the quote, “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future,” and cited Hitler. While the origin of the quote is not entirely clear, it has been attributed in numerous historical texts to a 1935 rally speech by the Nazi leader. 

… The quote has frequently been used by conservative Christian groups as a warning of “what they experience as liberal or left-wing attempts to indoctrinate children,” said Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.  AP News

Much has been made of the fact that Moms for Liberty quoted Hitler, but also important is what they were saying in doing so: that somehow our local school boards, administrators, and teachers are indoctrinating kids and M4L needs to indoctrinate right back at them.

What about NOT indoctrinating? What about making decisions locally, allowing our professional staff to write curriculum as they always have, without controversy and with input from established education experts in the field? Wouldn’t that pretty much indoctrinate-proof our district?

How is it possible in anyone’s mind for a concerted effort at indoctrination to take place locally, amongst overworked educators who know our kids and their families, who have no time to hatch devious, cunning schemes, who live amongst us and have no affiliation with any national group?

This is not to say that we ought to make decisions in a vacuum. Certainly there is a role for experts to play in local policy, where they can inform local decision-making by showing what is best for children according to research and the consensus of a community of experts.

But national groups with a lot of money and a stated agenda of privatizing school, creating charter schools, fighting against inclusive education, stripping LGBTQ rights from kids, and electing their candidates? These people have proposed a take-over. They want to control who kids can be and what they can learn. How can that not look like a power grab, an attempt at indoctrination?

Hillsdale is described by the Brown Political Review of Brown University as “an organization that sees public education as a ‘[battleground] in our war to reclaim our country from forces that have drawn so many away from first principles’”, which “cannot credibly claim to be objective.”

We don’t need this. Nobody needs this. No public school in this country needs a bunch of outsider interlopers dripping with cash to blow into town and tell us how to educate our young ones.

We encourage all our readers to learn more about Vermilion Education, closely associated with Hillsdale College and the “1776 Curriculum.”

We encourage all our readers to contact Central Bucks school board members and Pennridge school board members to insist that they do their own research by speaking to people in our community and experts in the field. Ask them to put our educators in charge of educational decisions, not politically motivated national groups that want to take over all education, locally, regionally, and nationally for the express purpose of inculcating their world view, disregarding everything researchers have learned about what serves students best.

This is indeed a matter of parents’ rights: Parents should have the right to know that local decisions are made by local people, people who know them, who know their kids, and who understand the context in which educational decisions are made and whose advice we’re taking.

Stand up and be heard. Keep profiteering, partisan, agenda-driven outsiders away from our great schools. Ask our school boards, administrators, and teachers to do the work they were elected or hired to do. 

We Believe

• Public community schools are cornerstones of democracy.

• People who do not want their children to attend their local community school always have the option of sending their children to private or parochial schools or homeschooling them. If they withdraw their children from their community school, they are not entitled to force others to pay for the choice they prefer. We do not allow people vouchers for other municipal services, such as fire- or police protection. Taxes are spent on municipal services and people are free to use them or forgo them, but not to create their own private substitute and expect others to foot the bill.

• Locally governed, locally administered local schools serve our children best. Taxpayers elect their school board, they can speak during public comment, they can write and speak to the board and to administrators, and they can serve on advisory committees that help determine policy and decision-making. This ensures that the community governs the school which in turn serves the community’s children.

• Children who attend community schools meet their neighbors’ children. They play together on sports teams, collaborate on projects, and forge bonds between families.

• They learn civic responsibility by meeting and sharing experiences with the other children in their community.

• Public community schools are cornerstones of democracy.

How much more partisan do our partisans need to be before we stand up and say no?

We can do it. We can return decision-making to local leaders and education best-practices. We got this.

For ALL the kids. E pluribus unum.