Interview: Schools Place Equity, Anger Above Excellence

Parents across the nation are frustrated at the low academic standards and lack of choice for their children, expressing their complaints directly to lawmakers and school boards. Particularly for academically gifted students, opportunities are eroding.

Millions of parents, desperate for quality education and in-person learning, are opting out of the government schools and enrolling their children in private or charter schools. Options to innovate and explore new ways of teaching, however, are continually blocked by teachers unions, which have much more power when children are locked into the schools the union teachers and administrators control. In part 2 of our exclusive interview with California author, education freedom advocate, and former teacher Rebecca Friedrichs, we discuss the reduction of standards and the current treatment of children in the union-dominated education complex.

Heartland Daily News: Parents and taxpayers have long assumed the schools are teaching children what they need to know and be able to do and are accurately evaluating students’ academic accomplishments. What is the general approach to teaching today?

Friedrichs: They’re basically telling kids you don’t have to work hard anymore. You know some districts are trying to remove grades. Some universities want to throw out any kind of testing.  You don’t have to earn your way. You’re just going to be accepted because you’re a certain color.

They are undermining the virtue of hard work. They’re also teaching our children to be angry, teaching them to protest. They’re also teaching our kids that we should get everything for free that we shouldn’t have to work hard to earn things. That’s teaching envy.

Heartland Daily News: What is all of this doing to children? You’ve taught kindergarten. If they come in innocent and happy and joyful, how do they go home after they’ve been taught hate, anger, and envy?

Friedrichs: I taught kindergarten first, second, third, and fourth grade. I never would have taught these nasty things that are being taught in some of these classrooms.

There are great teachers in our public schools who would never do anything to damage a child and who are doing amazing things in their classroom, but activists have been put into our classrooms. Planned Parenthood has been put into many of our classrooms. Our schools have been hijacked by a very corrupt and corrupting people.

I didn’t teach that way. I can tell you my students left with smiles on their faces and they’ve learned many things that day and they were excited to come back the next day. They loved school. They loved school because their teacher loved them and they had a safe place.

These kids were coming from everywhere. They were every color. I never noticed their color. So, we would always say we’re living Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. We’re all these different colors, and we all love each other, and we have a happy time together every day.

And then this evil invaded our classrooms.

Heartland Daily News: What changed?

Friedrichs: As soon as the Obama-era discipline policies came down, which the teachers unions were behind, all of a sudden I would send a child to the principal to get support with severe discipline issues, like I couldn’t teach because the child was interrupting the lessons so much. The child would be back in five or 10 minutes with a note to me. “Dear Mrs. Friedrichs, I’ll never do it again,” and then two minutes later they do it. This happened over and over.

I had children come back from discipline with a lollipop in their hand. That’s Obama-era discipline policies.

Decent parents and outstanding teachers understand how to have boundaries and discipline in a classroom so that everyone can learn, everyone can thrive, everyone can be happy, and everyone can want to be there.

These outsiders are the government unions and special interest groups. They came in and they destroyed something very beautiful that teachers and parents had developed in our schools, and it just needs to be stopped.

Heartland Daily News: What is this doing to the nation’s children?

Friedrichs: How do those children feel when they come out of those classrooms? My guess from what I’m observing: they’re learning to be angry. They’re learning to be divisive. They’re learning to have a chip on their shoulder. They’re learning that some colors are bad and other colors are good.

They’re regressing; they’re going back in time.

Why would we want children to be angry? Why would we want them not to be virtuous? It’s disturbing. It’s horrific, and that’s a perfect example of children that come to school happy, joyful, wanting to be with their friends and loving their teacher, and then you make them hateful and angry.

The discipline policies under Obama—written by the teachers unions, funded by the teachers unions, pushed by the teachers unions—have destroyed discipline in the schools, have turned decent children into bullies, and have caused sweet, innocent children to be in dangerous situations.

Teachers are terrified, and it is 100 percent the fault of their union, and they don’t know that. They keep funding their union, thinking their union’s going to protect them, and it’s not.

In part three of our exclusive interview, Friedrichs describes critical race theory as a symptom of a far bigger disease facing the nation’s schools.

Look for the upcoming documentary, Whose Children Are They?, in which Friedrichs and many other education experts share their insights and concerns about the current state of the American public school system.

Friedrichs taught in elementary schools for 28 years in southern California. After years of frustration with the California Teachers Union (CTA), she filed a lawsuit known as Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association, aimed at eliminating the forced unionization of teachers. The case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016, which affirmed a lower-court decision against Friedrichs, because the court was deadlocked after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The goal of Friedrichs’ suit was accomplished two years later in the landmark case of Janus v. AFSCME.

Friedrichs’ book, Standing up to Goliath: Battling State and National Teachers’ Unions for the Heart and Soul of our Kids and Country, documents her battles with the unions and the details of the lawsuit. Friedrichs is a Prager U host, was a panel participant for the Fox Nation series The Miseducation of America, and is the producer for the upcoming documentary Whose Children Are They?, available in select theaters on March 14. Friedrichs is the founder of For Kids and Country, an organization working to “unite, educate, engage and empower parents, teachers, students and citizens in the fight to restore America’s schools and culture.”