Parents aren’t the ideologues in fights over school boards. Woke educators are.

Nationwide, we’re seeing parents rise up to take back their local school boards and schools.

COVID allowed parents to see virtually what was being taught to their children. Many were awoken by the indoctrination that was occurring. Add in the mask mandates put in place in many schools, and you now have parents nationwide demanding accountability and change in leadership.

From Loudon County, Virginia, to Fort Worth, a revolution is happening in the public education landscape.

For decades, the left dominated school board meetings and education politics, but now there is pushback from the right and middle America to remove wokeness such as gender theory and critical race theory.

Parents in districts including Keller ISD have pushed to remove library books such as “Gender Queer,” a comic-book style book that features sexual scences. They’ve exposed the use of critical race theory in Fort Worth ISD in teacher training and an equity summit where outgoing Superintendent Kent Scribner said anti-racism would be embedded in the district.

Every month, parents and taxpayers expose the true problems with our public education system. And with that exposure and pushback, school boards nationwide are being flipped politically as a result. Florida saw conservatives win major victories in several school districts. In Dallas-Fort Worth, conservatives won majorities on the Carroll, Keller and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD boards, and superintendents from Clear Creek ISD to Fort Worth ISD resigned from their positions.

Schools should not be fixating on race, critical theory, gender fluidity and social-emotional surveys. A child’s parents should deal with such sensitive topics.

In a recent forum sponsored by the news site Fort Worth Report, Scribner described the parents holding him and the district accountable “ideologues.” He suggested that attacks on public education threaten democracy itself.

But Scribner and similar superintendents across the nation are the true ideologues. An ideologue creates controversy with a transgender restroom policy. An ideologue says that critical race theory is important in Fort Worth ISD. An ideologue helps create an equity department with a handbook that endorses anti-racist classrooms and woke concepts.

When you echo a lie in the classroom, such as that police are systematically racist and oppressive, you’ll ultimately see that fear manifest in the streets, as we did with the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. And on college campuses, cancel-culture protests target conservative speakers, all because differences of opinions are not tolerated.

Ideologues are the ones being voted out of office and forced to resign over the gender and racial politics and division they promote.

America’s education system is finally getting the change it so long needed. A system that will listen to parents and remove all wokeness in the classrooms. One where the bloated bureaucracy is shrunk, where teachers are actually supported by leadership, where parents’ and taxpayers’ concerns are heard and taken into consideration, and one where the parents are in charge.

We are entering a new era of the culture wars and the effects will be felt for decades. It’s the era in which we finally take back our schools from the indoctrination machine that for decades has been corrupting our schools.

And it is the era in which we finally have a chance to put students and parents first.

Clarification: This column has been updated to reflect the writer’s activity leading a conservative student group.

This story was originally published September 10, 2022 at 7:03 AM with the headline "Parents aren’t the ideologues in fights over school boards. Woke educators are.."