-- Transcription of Fairfax GOP's 7/8/2022 podcast interview with investigative journalist Luke Rosiak (51:50)
Fairfax GOP's Srilekha Palle interviews Daily Wire investigative journalist Luke Rosiak on the crisis of American K-12 education. Rosiak is the author of Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying Public Education, a book that Chris Rufo calls "a road map for returning to sanity in our schools."
This podcast interview covers a wide range of timely educational issues, including those in Fairfax County Public Schools, where Rosiak cautions: "Stay focused on these test scores. When you show up at a Fairfax County School Board meeting, ask them about the SOL's. If they’re talking about a new policy -- say, they want to talk about 'menstrual equity' again, and how they want to put tampons in elementary schools -- ask them how that's going to affect test scores and what's the proof that."
Transcript of interview:
[0:16] Palle: Good evening everyone. I am Srilekha Palle, host of the 'Conversations That Count', that is supported by the Fairfax County Republican Committee. For those of you who are new to this program, I'm the Fairfax GOP Strategic and Community Engagement Vice Chair. On Conversations That Count, I strive to bring in speakers that are able to see through issues facing our communities and are able to help us navigate those issues and problems solve them for us.
[0:49] This session is focused on uncovering the issues our Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools, and all other local public schools are facing along with how best parents can be engaged in these schools to ensure parents know and understand what is going on in schools. As most of you know, I'm a mom and my kids have gone to Fairfax County schools and one of them is still in Fairfax County schools. So, I'm one of those concerned and engaged parents myself.
[1:21] So to discuss all of this, I have invited Luke Rosiak to Conversations That Count. Luke is not a very familiar face for most of you. He is an investigative reporter probing bias, fraud, and dysfunction in the federal government. He's an author and a computer programmer. Luke previously worked for the Daily Caller News Foundation and the Washington Post, and lives with his wife and children right here in our neighborhood. Luke, welcome to Conversations That Count.
[1:31] Rosiak: Thanks for having me.
[1:38] Palle: Hey look, as an investigative reporter for the Daily Wire, you broke stories that put Loudoun County Public Schools on the national stage. I know lots of folks that came to know that you're going to be on the show and are quite excited. They have personally told me that not only have you put Loudoun County Public Schools on the national stage to unveil all of the issues going on in the school district. But you also have made Glenn Youngkin win, so you gotta take credit for that. So tell me about it. I mean, what made you want to probe into Loudoun County Public Schools?
[2:10] Rosiak: Well, I started writing my book, Race to the Bottom, very early 2019, before coronavirus started, and basically no one was talking about schools at that time. People hadn't heard of Critical Race Theory. But I had seen a couple of things that really made me concerned.
[2:43] One of them was Seattle Public Schools starting to teach kids that math is racist; and Seattle is where Microsoft and Amazon are based. These companies desperately want to hire people who can do math. They want to pay them a lot of money and they're having to bring in people from other countries on H-1B visas because our schools are not preparing them. So here we had this lady, who I wrote about in my book, because she had just this whole crazy backstory where she moved her kid in with a convicted child molester and things like that. She was in charge of the equity program there and she started telling kids that if they were black, math wasn't for them.
[3:32] Another thing that I saw was a push for busing. That was coordinated here in this DC area -- meaning 1970-style racial busing. They did it in Howard County, Maryland. They took citizen feedback, where they solicited comments, and literally 98-99% of comments were against busing. But they did it anyway, and moved 6,000 kids away from their peers and their friends, really for no reason. It was based on this 'evidence' -- but they didn't have any evidence supporting that it was going to help in any way. And they were doing that in a very coordinated way, a very similar way in Montgomery County, Maryland at the same time, and then they tried to do it in Fairfax.
[4:04] And the final thing that really got me convinced that something strange was going on with these schools is just realizing that, at least at that time in 2019, there were 10 Democrats on the Fairfax County School Board, and not a single one of them had kids in the school system. And I was just so struck by that fact. I mean, maybe from time to time you'll have a school board member that for some reason doesn't have kids in the school system, but not a single school board member that was a Democrat had kids in schools. They were all there for their own reasons that had nothing to do with academics. And that caused severe consequences. And it was basically going on because people weren't pay attention. It wasn't that school board members were doing a great job; it wasn't that people genuinely supported what was going on. It's just that at that time no one was paying attention to schools or even local government.
[4:53] Palle: So Luke, you bring up so many great points. Let's talk about this busing. Isn't that one of those 'One Fairfax' things, where they wanted to bus kids? Are you aware of that also?
[5:09] Rosiak: Yeah, I have a whole chapter in my book about One Fairfax and how it came from these philanthropic foundations and was laundered in a very manipulative way to make it seem like it wasn't coming from hardcore political activists. Basically, they had all this totally false data, and they were doing things like saying Fairfax could gain $4 billion if they do One Fairfax, and they just kind of stating that as a fact. Like, what does that mean? How do you get $4 billion? And the county supervisors were like, "we want $4 billion, that sounds great."
[5:42] Some group wrote a paper that says, we'll get $4 billion if we do this. And you look into it, and they're like, wow. ...[inaudible]... If every racial group made the same as what? You call it for accounting, would be higher. And it doesn't make any sense. It's just basically stating "if people made more money, then they would make more money." It's like a totology, it's a total logical fallacy.
[6:14] They didn't set out any way that they would achieve this, and they used it to justify this policy. That was really remarkable because it's one of the only policies -- I think the only policy -- that applies to both a county government and the school system, and it governs every subsequent policy. It's like this umbrella policy. And so what you have is the superintendent was basically saying we have to do busing. We don't have a choice because One Fairfax is already passed, and it obligates us to do that.
[6:37] So there's all this data showing very clearly that busing kids based on race will not improve their academic performance. There's just no one who can make that sincere argument that if there's a lot of kids in a poor neighborhood, then you just move some. Academic success is not contagious. You don't become smarter by sitting near a smart kid. You can show that very clearly, because there are -- right now in Fairfax County -- schools that have various demographic makeups. And what they can see from Fairfax's data, is when you look at kids who have free lunch, that kid is going to have the same test scores -- whether he's in a school that's 10% free lunch or 90% free lunch. And so they know full well that this isn't going to work. It's not going to help anyone, but it's going to cause severe social consequences. It's going to cause massive instability for our whole county. And they became obsessed with moving kids around based on race, way back in 2019 when really no one was paying attention.
[7:36] And I still think that 1970-style race-based busing is on the horizon, and I do think it's one of the most destructive things that can happen to a community. People who are a little bit older than me lived through the 1970s, and that was the conclusion those people came to at the time. So local politicians are trying policies that, objectively, we know don't do the things they're claiming they're going to do. It's dishonest, and there's a human cost. It all is designed to make the statistics look better for school system administrators.
[8:08] Like right now there are schools, especially in the Mason district I think, where huge portions of kids can't even read, and so what they want to do is to scatter those illiterate kids all over the county so that it can kind of fly under their radar. And they're absolutely still going to be illiterate. It's just that there it's not going to be popping out on a spreadsheet that makes you go, "oh my gosh, the Fairfax County School Board is totally failing at what they're supposed to be doing."
[8:41] Palle: Absolutely. Look, you brought about 2019. We had several school board candidates that were excellent. If you look at their issues, they were very focused on academic achievement, bridging the academic achievement gap. But now that you've said the current school board members never had any kids in the school system, I really want to go back and look at those palm cards to see, "then what did they run on?"
[9:14] I guess where I'm getting to is, Luke, if I consider I've been living in Fairfax County for the past 15-16 years and the colleagues that I work with, community partners that I work with, are all very smart people. So why do you think voters are not thinking it through, saying that if I am going to go and vote for a Congresswoman or Congressman, I want to vote for the Congressman that has a record of working within my district and has worked for the policies? I wouldn't go and vote for somebody that comes from New York yesterday. So what do you think is going with these so-called educated and informed voters? How did the 2019 school board even happen?
[9:46] Rosiak: It is really frustrating because it wasn't long after the election that coronavirus happened, that a lot of other bad things happened with the schools, and people started talking about like can we do a recall, and it's like, "No, we just elected these people, you had your chance and you voted for these people without researching that." You know, they may be educated but they're also highly partisan, and they didn't research these people at all. They just elected whoever the sample ballot that the Democrats handed them said.
[10:19] And there were situations like the prosecutor's race, where Ray Morrogh was a long-time Democrat prosecutor. He lost his primary by 1%, and he said, "Guys, don't vote for Steve Descano, who beat me in the primary. I'm a Democrat; he's essentially an anarchist. This isn't the Democrat Party that I know; Steve Descano is not part of that." But most people never heard that. That was a very low-turnout primary, and when the general election comes around, a lot of those people don't even know if Steve Descano was new or if he's the incumbent. They're just checking the name with the 'D' next to it.
[10:51] So I think there's some really destructive things that happen when you have a very homogeneous and partisan electorate, because we have a political system with checks and balances and partisan tension for a reason. Neither party is right all the time, and it's good to have people with different perspectives in the room so that they can prove it, present competing visions, ask probing questions, and hold people accountable.
[11:08] And I think even prior to the 2019 election, when you had two Republicans on the school board, they couldn't control any votes, but things functioned a lot better just because they were there. They could say, "excuse me, can you go into detail on that policy a little bit, because this part doesn't make sense to me?" And as soon as you ask a couple of probing questions, a lot of what they're trying to do falls apart. And so they were very insistent that there not even be one Republican on the board, which to me indicates that they don't actually believe that their policies can stand up to scrutiny.
[11:56] Palle: Absolutely. Luke, I was also part of 2019. I was running as a supervisor, so I've kind of seen the entire thing. I have to give credit for school board members, especially Vincent Palathingal -- I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He was pretty much predicting what's going to happen with TJ literally in 2019 like it is unfolding right in front of us, and it's kind of strange to see that every word kind of came true.
[12:13] Luke, when a few parents heard that you're going to be on the podcast, they actually texted me and wanted me to ask you about a book you wrote on the problems in K-12 schools called Race to the Bottom. I found the subheading actually very interesting, where you said "Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying [American] Public Education". Can you talk to us about that? I mean, I'm sure by now you realize I'm an immigrant; I have a thick accent. And as an immigrant, I think I know now better to kind of understand that just don't take the word for it. We all thought public education was the best education. I think it still is. However, I absolutely agree with you that there are some secret forces that I can't even fathom that are definitely trying to destroy what American education was built on. It was meritocracy; it was inclusive. So what do you think is happening? I mean, I want you to talk about your book as well.
[13:18] Rosiak: Well some of the secret forces are funny, because among conservatives you hear a lot about George Soros and things like that. The story is a little different when it comes to schools. It's actually the Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, you know, these are actually at least as radical as George Soros. At times, they literally fund groups that espouse promoting Communism and overthrowing capitalism, and those are the groups that essentially control K-12 education.
[13:50] K-12 education costs nearly a trillion dollars a year. It's not the kind of thing anyone can just waltz in and get serious influence over, because it's so big and so decentralized. But if you think back to Common Core 10 years ago, that was a big education controversy around 2012 or so. And the Gates Foundation was almost entirely behind that -- that's been well documented, and it was at the time.
[14:07] So the same foundations are now doing things like CRT, and I think it's interesting that the Ford Foundation has flown below the radar to the extent that it has, because it has a frightening history -- they've always been obsessed with race and they've always been wrong. And then it goes for all these other foundations too, that came about in the early 1900s. They were initially pushing things like eugenics, and the Kellogg brothers would get together at their compound with the Rockefellers and the Fords, and they would plot essentially to get rid of the 'undesirables', by which they meant essentially minorities.
[14:55] And so you fast forward 100 years, and particularly didn't you know the Kellogg brothers, and this is of course the family that went on that made billions of dollars selling breakfast cereal. So 100 years ago they're sitting around saying, "well we know that the Negro is inferior, but we also know that we can't let the Asians succeed or they're going to push whites out of the way." And it's a horrifying thing that he said, but then you fast forward 100 years and that's essentially what places like New York City were doing at the time with their magnet schools. They were saying, very overtly, we need to put more blacks in there through affirmative action because there's too many Asians, and they're making the rest of us look bad.
[15:47] And so these foundations are highly partisan in a generally liberal way, but a lot of times they attack the Biden administration because they're further to the left than even the mainstream Democrat Party. But there's also this continuity of the racism that's been in sort of one of the defining attributes of the philanthropic foundations for 100 years, and so they're injecting huge money into the public school system for all these initiatives, whereby you pick any kind of activist group that you're seeing in education. It typically tracks back pretty directly to funding by one of these foundations.
[16:17] It's not like the foundations are funding existing nonprofits. What they do is they'll say, "well, we want to put our money into a new topic, say racial equity and education", and then what happens is every nonprofit in the country suddenly wants to get into that sector because that's where they can be successful in getting a grant, 'cuz they know that's where the money is being offered.
[16:33] Palle: Look, as much as I think I know, the more you speak, the more I am like, wow. So, I know that most people who are listening, or at least myself, I can say we are very familiar with these philanthropic foundations such as Ford, Kellogg, Gates, et al. So if you can just talk to me a little about Annie E Casey, MacArthur, or Surdna. I'm sure they are also in their element in moving this Critical Race Theory from academic papers to society. And I also think that Americans really need to pay attention to these philanthropic foundations, which I think are the most powerful and least understood in American politics. So can you talk to me about those three foundations? I don't think people are familiar with them, and it's important that people get familiar with those foundations?
[17:22] Rosiak: Yeah, the people who control this money, they're essentially giving away other people's money, right? The philanthropic executives really just hijacked the huge pots of money.
[17:38] For example, the Surdna Foundation is the word Andrews spelled backwards. There was a Republican Congressman about 100 years ago named John Andrews, and before he died, he dedicated his money to help orphans. But later on, philanthropic executives took control of it, and his family said they started spending it on these groups -- I have the quotes in my book, I don't have them in front of me -- but the quotes are remarkable, because what they're spending, a group they're sending the money to almost explicitly says, "what we need to do is take control of all the major industries for the state and get rid of free markets." It's basically talking about enacting Communism in the U.S. It's totally a fringe group, and this Surdna Foundation gave them a ton of money. And that was kind of what it all was -- basically giving grants for these fringe groups left and right.
[18:27] And so this Congressman that long ago made his money as a capitalist, etc., came to this foundation and said, "you're totally betraying what our grandpa, whoever, wanted this money to be for." And the philanthropic executives retort, "well, he may not like this, but there's nothing he can do about it. He's dead, what's he going to do about it?" So, they're really kind of radical and aggressive, and they pollinate from foundation to foundation, and so, one of the things that I show in my book is how these specific policies, and this weird language they have, will migrate from the Ford Foundation to the Casey Foundation to the Surdna Foundation as the executives jump from one job to another.
[19:16] The Casey Foundation is similar. Casey was, I believe, the guy that started UPS, and he was as you know, it was originally controlled by conservatives, and far leftists took over the foundation by using this fancy language that is kind of how the woke talk, and how the social scientists talk, and they use these crazy long words that no one's ever heard about. No one knows what the heck they're talking about -- it's like this weird language. And so they were using these fancy academic words to obscure what they were doing, and some of the board members are like, "oh my gosh, I'm conservative and on the board of this foundation, and I just realized that we hired a CEO that's extremely far left.
[20:05] The final foundation you mentioned was MacArthur, that's an important one. They're the ones that funded the 1619 Project. But what's so interesting when you lay it all out is, it wasn't like the 1619 Project just suddenly appeared in the New York Times. For like 10 years, MacArthur was every step of the way with Nicole Hannah-Jones. They were investing in her career, subsidizing what she's going to do next. A lot of people were involved in 1619, and every single one of them traces back to the MacArthur Foundation. And then Hannah-Jones somehow got paid by the New York Times without writing an article for like two years, and went on to become a college professor. That was because of the MacArthur Foundation too.
[20:37] So they play a role behind the scenes deliberately, because that's what they do. They don't do things on their own. They fund things, but they're like a puppeteer. They're very strategic and they play the long game. A lot of things we're seeing now -- like CRT in schools -- these foundations have very deliberately been implementing over a very long period of time.
[21:10] Palle: Luke, I have to commend you for doing all of this research, because regular moms and dads like us would have no understanding. We would just think they are great foundations. But let me also talk to you about consultant groups, Luke, that are pushing this racial stuff that I have read in your book. But I have also read that quite a bit in some other books. What incentives do you think they have as a consultant group? I mean, you would think they would stay away from these topics.
[21:42] Rosiak: Well, it's a huge industry now to come in and do equity audits, and basically, you hire a company like the Equity Collaborative in Loudoun, and it's their job to find if Loudoun County Schools are racist. And then, what do you know, the answer is always yes, because once they say yes, the next step is to give another contract to the same people that audited it to fix the problem that they say is there. But some of these groups do things that are patently racist on their own.
[22:15] That group Equity Collaborative in Loudoun, they were called in originally to address -- there was this claim that kids were being asked to pretend to be slaves as a PE exercise, and that showed that Loudoun County was racist. So they hired a firm to fix Loudoun County's racism. Well, guess what? The firm had ties to consultants who ran that very same exercise as an anti-racist exercise. They would have kids pretend to be slaves because it made them, you know, understand racism or whatever. And so there's really obvious interest in these consultants claiming that schools are racist, because it brings in big bucks. And there's just millions and millions of dollars being shelled out to these people.
[23:04] One of the things I was most struck by is how much of all of what we're seeing now in the schools traces back to just one consultant named Glenn Singleton. He has this firm called the Pacific Education Group -- more commonly known by its trademark 'Courageous Conversations'. And so you'll hear that term in Fairfax County because they hired him long ago, and he kind of set them down this road of equity. But whenever you hear 'Courageous Conversations', they're talking about Glenn Singleton.
[23:36] Glenn Singleton is the guy who even in the 1990s was distributing worksheets to teachers to train them that "the written word is racist; showing up on time and working hard is white attributes; black people like joking, not working hard" -- kind of crazy racist things. And, just as I looked into the lady in Seattle who was in charge of the equity stuff and found some really crazy things in her background, I looked into Glenn Singleton and his background. He's a black guy; that's his whole thing. He is hired by white administrators at school districts to teach kids what it is like, what it means to be black. Which is a weird thing to do, right? Because like schools in Baltimore have a lot of problems, but the kids not knowing what it's like to be black isn't one of them. That's just their race; they don't need someone to teach them what it's like to be their race.
[24:09] But this guy, Glenn Singleton, he went to a Jewish day school where he was president of the Horseback Riding Club, and then he went to an Ivy League college, and then he worked on Madison Avenue in this fancy job. And so he was like the most privileged person imaginable. He was never like, from the streets, knowledgeable about the inner city. And precisely because he knew nothing about what he would call black culture, he developed this chip on his shoulder, and decided, "well, I'm going to tell everybody what it means to be black," and this became his business idea. Go from Madison Avenue where he's making big bucks, to now has got this new job where schools will pay him to come in and teach everybody what it's like to be black. And it was clearly just him reenacting or dealing with some adolescent identity issue where he always felt like he wasn't black enough.
[25:14] And that's where a lot of these ideas come from, and people say, "oh CRT isn't real." When you're telling kids that there's no such thing as the right answer, and that hard work is a white thing and not a black thing, that's CRT, and that's on those worksheets, and Courageous Conversations is one of the biggest consultants in the country. It's been hired by a ton of school districts in this area as well as around the country. And that's kind of how this stuff spread, beginning in the 1990s.
[25:47] Palle: Look, I think being a hard worker is not a white or a black thing -- it is just a human trait. In fact, I was driving home today and I was listening to some of the contrast between various countries. Switzerland has no resources but is the richest country because the people have that work ethic. I don't think it has anything to do with white, black, or Asian. In fact, I think minorities, when they come to this country, realize that they have to work very hard to get ahead. So I don't think it's a white thing.
[26:19] Rosiak: Right. And another thing. Critical Race Theory is always about only black and white, and that's such an outdated paradigm. It's because it comes from the 1980s, 1990s academics who are all black, and at that time Hispanics and Asians were not as numerous in America. But in this day and age, when you look at the demographics of K-12 schools, Hispanics vastly outnumber blacks, and Asians are the fastest-growing population.
[26:52] So the people who come in there and want to lecture you about how they care about diversity but you don't, they're harping on what in Fairfax County is the smallest minority groups -- blacks at 7% -- and they never really talk about Hispanics or Asians. And so, yeah, they're not really even sincere in their valuing diversity. It's this very particular worldview that developed decades ago, has no solutions, no track record of solutions, and doesn't even apply to the world of 2022.
[27:08] Palle: I think you bring up an excellent point. I hope people that are listening can comment on that or kind of make a mental note of it. I mean, we do have only 7% African Americans. So the focus should be on Hispanic Americans, who are about 16%. and Asian Americans who are on 19% -- especially in Fairfax County.
[27:41] Rosiak: But there is really no mention of that. Once you realize that, once I think we put that into people's minds, it's going to shock them. Like wait a minute, they never really mentioned Hispanics. You know, the Democrats in Fairfax County never mentioned Hispanics, 'cuz they don't care about minorities -- it's just this weird CRT thing. Equity is about finding the lowest-performing group when it comes to statistics, and then making sure that everyone is that low. That's really what equity is -- bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator so that we can say that everyone's equal.
[28:13] And so a lot of times the blacks have lower aggregate test scores than Hispanics. So even though they're the smallest minority, that's the reason they focus on them, "that's the level we gotta bring everyone down to. We gotta bring Hispanics down to the black level. We've certainly gotta bring the Asians down. And then we'll have achieved not Utopia." Everyone's going to be miserable, but at least we'll all be equal.
[28:46] It took a long time for people to figure out that equity is a horrendous thing. A lot of times they would say, "yeah, you know, it seems like something's wrong in Fairfax County. They talk about equity but the results are not very good for minorities. Maybe they're implementing equity wrong." And that's kind of like when people say every time a Communist country fails, they say, "well, it wasn't real Communism. Real equity has never been tried; real Communism has never been tried."
[29:02] No, this is equity! All the results we're seeing with the school shutdowns -- and now we're seeing the blacks and other poor minorities being harmed the most in terms of academics because of the schools being shut down -- those things were all predictable. People were saying them at the time. But why did the Chicago school teachers union say advocating for opening schools is racist and sexist and all that? Equity is something that, for everyone who wants believes in meritocracy and believes in the power of technology and the power of hard work and the power of the ability to improve things, is something that I think they just need to be able to say, "I oppose equity; equity is a bad thing." Because it's not that they're doing it wrong, equity is inherently basically malicious.
[29:51] Palle: So look, I'm a healthcare professional by background, so I'm always skeptical when somebody says a consultant is coming to help us out. One thing I say is, consultants create the problems and then they want to solve the problem too. And what about what the consultant says, after taking a million dollar contract and writing it down? I could go and survey my team of 50, or talk to 50 patients, and get the same conclusion. So I think that portion of consultants just doesn't make sense to me.
[30:23] Rosiak: And the other reason they hire consultants is to force them to do something that turns out to be unpopular, and then say,"oh, it wasn't us as a school board, our consultant told us to do that." And people that traditionally have voted for Democrats in Fairfax County, they don't really don't think that the TJ math test is racist, they don't really want their kids to be bused. The elected Democrats want to do things that are not supported by the voters who generally see themselves as Democrats. These initiatives are deeply unpopular. And so that's where the consultants can come in, and basically they're willing to take the fall in exchange for money. And the school board members then claim it wasn't up to them.
[30:56] Palle: Absolutely. Look, let me kind of divert you a little bit to one of your books. I think you are the author of "Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risks National Security to Protect the Democrats", and I must admit you've been held as one of the most diligent reporters in Washington, and a bulldog for uncovering what is possibly the largest scandle and cover-up in the history of the United States House of Representatives. Can you briefly summarize that?
[31:29] Rosiak: I'd rather stay focused on schools, except to say that I spent a lot of my career focusing on Washington, and no one was paying attention to the local government, and in some ways local government is at least as powerful or more powerful than Congress, because they're dealing with crime and public safety. They're dealing with the zoning, whether you're going to have nice suburban yards, or apartments going up in your front yard. And they're dealing with schools.
[32:01] I'm really proud of the work that I did covering Congress, but that was an interesting revelation for me to say, all this stuff that I thought was the most important. If you're a reporter or you're in politics, you get to Washington because that's the major leagues.
[32:17] Well, it turns out that local government is just as important, and when no one's paying attention to it, that's when it creates this vacuum where really nefarious forces fill that vacuum, and you see some of the same people like the activist foundations who are playing in Washington. I think they identified an opportunity to come to work through the local governments because they frankly didn't have any competition. And so they could just come in and spend a little bit of money, and elect a whole slate of candidates in these local races, or even just push policy positions to the ones that were already there. And they could get away with it because no one was watching.
[32:50] I know that with coronavirus shutdowns, we saw a lot of parents begin to monitor their school systems and their local governments, and I hope that's going to continue. I hope people don't just go back to normal and say, "well, schools are reopened. I don't need to monitor them anymore." 'Cuz the fact is the disastrous decisions that they made during coronavirus was essentially a symptom. The bad decisions that you saw them make then were the kinds of decisions they've always been making -- things like operating schools as employment centers for the teachers union rather than serving the needs of children. So those things are still going on, and we as parents have got to remain vigilant and informed, because we can do it. It doesn't require that much.
[33:39] It's a little harder in Fairfax, because -- not to go on a tangent here -- but there's a separate issue which is: local government is so important, and one of the reason Fairfax has gone off the deep end, is because it's too big. It has 1.2 million people in it. We essentially don't have a local government, we've been disenfranchised. 1.2 million people is twice the size DC; it's twice the size of certain states. Most people can, if they have a problem, can go to the mayor, who might be their next-door neighbor, or their chair of the school board, who might live a block away, and they see them at soccer games or whatever. We don't have that in Fairfax County. What you have when you have these large entities is, regular people who are disempowered, and who's in charge are the people that have big money and a lobbyist and turn it into a business -- professional activism at the county level.
[34:44] And so, I think of the most important things that Glenn Youngkin can do in Virginia and especially working with the Republican controlled legislature is to enact a policy that actually is not partisan. It's breaking up the counties so that they're smaller. And one of the ways you can do that -- it's not as radical as it sounds -- you can create cities that are not part of the counties. And so basically, the process is a little murky because it's been around since the 1700s, but you look at places like Falls Church City or Fairfax City or Manassas Park or Manassas. They all have their own, in some cases, schools systems, police forces, things like that. They are not part of the counties.
[35:00] So I really think one of the things that would be most helpful -- to address the problems in Fairfax County Public Schools, but also a lot of the other problems we're seeing -- is for the legislature to send a signal that if communities of people get together and say that a majority of us want to create our own city, that the state in Richmond will grant that group of neighbors a city charter. Now, they're no longer a part of Fairfax, and you could see McLean essentially secede from Fairfax for example.
[36:05] And then One Fairfax starts breaking down because they can't redistribute from one group to another, because the people who they're going to redistribute from are just going to leave. And it's also a sort of diversity that people can have their own. You may have a town that's defined by its rural nature, preserving parks and trees. You may have another that likes that walkable, more urban feel. It's kind of like to each its own.
[36:22] So that's one of the things that I think Glenn Youngkin and the Republicans can do: say we will grant charters to any group that wants to become its own city. You can then create your own school system. You can then have your own prosecutors who are actually going to enforce the law. And if you want to make like a far left town, for that too. Anyone can do what they want to do. Because if the Democrats take control of the legislature in the future, they can undo a lot of what Glenn Youngkin may do. But if they can establish new cities, these cities can be around 100 years from now.
[36:54] Palle: Look, that's a very good point. Have you discussed this with the legislators or Governor Glenn Youngkin? I mean, it's kind of strange. I'm hearing so much from you, but it just makes so much common sense. I have not heard from anybody else about this.
[37:27] Rosiak: Yeah, I wish I could just call up Glenn and let him know what I think. I haven't had that opportunity. But I think it's not radical. I think it would fit in with this whole mentality because it's not a radical proposition; it's not a partisan proposition. I think a lot of times, communities just have their own unique needs, and the problem with One Fairfax is: Fairfax County is 400 square miles.
[37:43] We're not One Fairfax; we shouldn't be One Fairfax. It's absurd to suggest that we're all the same or that we have the same needs -- we absolutely do not. Some of us live in pretty rural places; some of us live in high rises; some of us live very close to DC, some very far. There's so many differences, and that's fine. We should embrace our differences and understand that local government is going to serve people in different ways. And so, I think it's just a matter of empowering people, and I think if you had a vote where most people in, say, McLean said, "we would rather be a city," and then the state legislature said, "no, that's a very un-American idea." I mean, it comes back to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence -- that you have a right to be self-governed. And so I would like to see that push, and I think it's not overtly partisan.
[38:48] The Democrats kind of expose themselves by, if they were to oppose cities getting essentially freedom, they would. I think they will, but they expose themselves, because what they're saying is "we want your money. We don't care if you like it. You're going to stay so that we can confiscate your money and make everyone equal." But it's not up to them. I mean, if the state grants the charter and if you can put it on a ballot, all you need is a majority, like 50.1%. And so I think what you hear so much about Virginia schools, and it's not like they're further to the left or more incompetent than somewhere like California. It's that jurisdictions are too big here.
[39:21] But look at California: they've got smaller school districts. You look at somewhere like New Jersey: every town's got their own school district. That's totally common. Some people think it's a joke when I say that. It's not a joke at all to suggest that you would have a community with a mayor and its own schools -- that's how most people live in America -- and I think it's something that we've been deprived if in Virginia, and I think fundamentally it's at the root of our problems in Fairfax.
[39:53] We don't have a responsive local government. We have these weirdos like Carl Frisch that come in here from California and raise over a hundred thousand dollars from all over the country to push their weird national activism. And that's just not the kind of thing that I think would happen if we had little towns with 5,000 people.
[40:10] Palle: Absolutely. Look, I can't let you go without asking another question. It is my understanding that you exposed more that 60 districts indoctrinating and not educating. Where are all these multiple districts? Were they concentrated in specific states? How did you pick those districts?
[40:26] Rosiak: I don't know that there was any real methodology to it. I just researched a lot of stuff and the craziest anecdotes went into the book. I also tried to use different case studies, that would show how there are some small towns that did get this woke, dysfunctional stuff. It's not limited just to the problem I just mentioned. I essentially, when I talk about school districts, I usually try to use them as metaphors, so that even if you don't live in that school district, you can say, "well, how are the same problems happening where I live?"
[40:58] And so, when I broke the story of Loudoun County covering up a rape by a guy wearing a skirt, a lot of people cared about that, but you should care about it even if you don't live in Loudoun or even in Virginia. And one of the takeaways is that they've been doing similar cover-ups all the time for years.
[41:15] For example, during the Obama administration, he became obsessed with the racial discipline statistics in schools, and so a lot of them compared the school to a prison pipeline saying that black kids were being suspended, and that was causing them to become criminals. And it was, you know, kind of out on a limb. It's kind of a weird thing to say it was the active causing, if being suspended that caused otherwise good kids to become bad. It's also kind of a conspiracy theory to say that teachers were framing black kids for assaulting someone when they didn't actually do it. Think about it. Teachers aren't suspending kids for no reason. They don't have an incentive to frame black kids for crimes they did not commit.
[42:04] But President Obama put out this letter with the full force of the Department of Justice that said, if the suspensions by school districts were not equal when it came to race, you could get into all kinds of trouble, and basically be sued and hauled into court. And so, what that caused was deception and cover-up, very similar to the Loudoun rape, where often times it was black kids assaulting Asian kids, and then there were more Asian kids to be suspended so they could balance out the stats.
[42:36] In Philadelphia, there was some particularly egregious incidents that happen everywhere. Asian kids beaten to a pulp viciously every single day by black kids, and the schools were systematically covering it up so that they could present a spreadsheet that could be called equity. And so that's one of the things that is so important to know about equity -- it's purely on paper. They don't care if the actual world that you live in is burning to the ground. Equity for school administrators is a piece of paper. It's a database or a spreadsheet that can make the schools look good.
[43:09] We've talked about the foundations and the consultants. Why are the administrators wanting to do all this? And one of the reasons, or really the main reason, is because they're failing at their only mission, which is teaching kids writing and science and math. And they have the test scores which are horrible. The NAEP, which is like a national test, shows that only about a third of 12th graders can read. Only about 24% are proficient in math. These are devastating statistics, and it's not for lack of funding. I mean, we spend well over $17,000 per kid in Fairfax County.
[43:57] And so, how do you live with yourself when you're getting $17,000 per kid and you can't even teach them tread by the time they're eighteen? It's a shame. I don't think almost any of us are as bad at our jobs as you would have to be to get those kinds of results. And so they became obsessed.
[44:14] What a decent person would do when confronted with negative statistics, is to find a way to improve the situation. What these people do, and it makes them bad people, is they say, "well, how can we conceal it? How can we trick people into thinking it's not as bad as it is?" And that's where equity comes in, and that's where the consultants come in, and they say, "well, we don't actually have to increase the pipeline of black kids into TJ by helping them learn math. Tests are racist. We've got to get rid of the test." And so they're anarchists. They want to burn everything to the ground. They claim that nothing is real. It's all just this very fatalistic mindset. "Nothing's real, and asking kids as if they know the right answer on a math question is not a valid way to ascertain whether they know math."
[45:03] They don't actually believe any of this. They're getting rid of merit solely to defraud the public into thinking that they are not totally incompetent at their jobs. And they're doing all of us a disservice, because society need objectivity and meritocracy. Are you going to drive over a bridge or fly a plane, driven or flown by someone the shouldn't have gotten into TJ or gotten a math credential? But also by the minorities who are basically deprived of what they can do. We all know that they're just like anyone else. They can succeed; we just have to believe in them. We can't start giving up on them and just lowering or abolishing standards altogether so that the pieces of paper look good.
[45:51] And people do talk about grade inflation. There are some really striking charts where you can see that there's essentially no correlation between grades and state exams that measure proficiency an objective way. The teachers are just basically giving out A's like candy, and it's not to make your kid feel good. People talk about 'snowflakes' or 'giving all kids a trophy'. That's not what it is. They don't care about your kid. They're doing it to make themselves look less incompetent. And so it's a total fraud on the American people to have these teachers be sending kids home with A's so their parents think that their schools are not failing them, when in fact the kids are being failed by the schools.
[46:40] And so one of the things I like to tell people to do is stay focused on these test scores. When you, if you show up at a Fairfax County School Board meeting, ask them about the SOLs. And if they're talking about a new policy, say they want to talk about 'menstrual equity' again and how they want to put tampons in elementary schools. Ask them, how is this going to affect test scores, and what's the proof of that? Because once you start confronting them with test scores, and bringing every single question back to test scores, they really can't argue with it because teaching kids is the mission of the school. Testing is a valid way to measure it, their performance. It's really the only valid way.
[47:13] And so, at the root of it is, when you think about all this equity stuff, and really a lot of the liberal stuff in general, it's all about emotion and feelings and SEL. The common theme there is that you can't quantify SEL. You can't quantify a kid's emotion, and they're doing everything they can to move from an objective way, where we could hold teachers and school administrators responsible for their performance, to a subjective way where everyone can just do whatever they want, and we're supposed to pretend the schools are working well, when they're clearly not.
[47:45] Palle: Look, this conversation is so very interesting. I just want to ask what's next? Do you intend to have more books published on the issues facing our schools and education? Or again, as you know, the nation is in crisis. We have inflation and soaring gas prices. Midterm elections are coming. So then will you be focusing on that?
[48:02] Rosiak: I'm trying to do all that other stuff you mentioned. What I'm hoping is that parents can kind of pick up where I left off, because there is this instinct. There are eople that are kind of out there talking about schools, like James Lindsay and Chris Rufo and others who are doing great work. There's this tendency for people to just say, "well, can you come to my school district and save me, Chris Rufo?" No, he can't. You've gotta do the work. You guys as parents are the ones on the ground. You guys are the only ones who can ask the questions and, you know, when I broke the Loudoun County rape cover-up, it wasn't all that hard to do.
[48:34] I didn't have secret skills that other parents didn't have. Parents can do this work, now that they know about the nefarious forces coming for your kids. The fact that they want to make your kids unhappy and illiterate. The fact that if we don't fix these public schools, even if you take your kids out and put them in private school, they're still going to have to live in a world when they grow up, that's populated largely by public school graduates. So, the parents have got to do this work. It's not something they can rely on others to do. It's not something they can rely on the national media to do, because there are 13,000 school districts, and who's going to be there? The most natural people to do the work are the people who are on the ground and know it best.
[49:23] So I'm hoping with what I put out in my book, Race to the Bottom, it kind of creates a road map for what parents can do. And even reading the book is an act of people saying, "oh, can you just fix the schools and tell me how to fix the schools in 30 seconds?" Well, if you could fix the schools in 30 seconds, they already would have been fixed. It does take work; it is hard. You mention parents. Everyone's busy. We gotta work, and advocacy we do is on the side and it is really hard, and the other side is sometimes professional activists that are able to wear you down. But we can do this because there's a whole lot more of us as regular parents than there are these crazy activists.
[49:56] But yeah, so I'm hoping that I can do some national reporting and that you parents will continue for as long as they can into the future, monitoring this, because I do think that schools are the important thing in politics and public policy, but also one of the most objective failure. And the test scores really lay it all out there.
[50:28] Palle: Look, I think parents that are hearing now or will hear later on, you said loud and clear. It's not a journalist or investigative journalist job. We just really have to roll up our sleeves and get the work done as parents.
[50:45] Luke, I thank you for coming. I know you're a very busy guy. You live in the neighborhood, and I appreciate your taking the time to join us at Fairfax GOP and kind of supporting us. I know you come to our membership meetings and educate us about things, but I think this is one good way for us to get the message to the parents. So I thank you for joining us on Conversations That Count. I really enjoyed talking with you.
[50.55] Rosiak: Thanks for having me.