Luke Roziak’s Race to the Bottom exposes how Critical Race Theory, SEL, and CSRE—backed by Gates, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations—replace academic rigor with ideological agendas, masking 36% literacy and 24% math proficiency failures. Teachers, often poorly qualified, allegedly enforce racial inequalities while unions and activists suppress parental rights, pushing gender/sexuality curricula without public scrutiny. Florida’s bans signal a backlash as parents reclaim school boards, framing the fight as a clash between family authority and entrenched education elites. [Automatically generated summary]
So that was the gay men's chorus singing, your children are not your children, which is actually a philosophical comment.
But there are those on the left who seriously believe this.
I think a lot of us remember Melissa Harris Perry on MSNBC with this little diatribe.
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children.
Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.
We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children.
So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.
So we're seeing more of this play out in our schools and our own investigative reporter, the Daily Wire's investigative reporter Luke Roziak has helped expose this.
He's the guy who broke the Loudoun County bathroom rape story that helped swing the Virginia gubernatorial election.
A lot of other stories that have been coming out.
He has now written a book called Race to the Bottom, Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.
Luke Roziak, you are a troublemaking individual.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming on.
You're doing great work, buddy.
It really, you have elevated the entire site and it's really terrific.
Your book, Race to the Bottom, you know, on the ad for Race to the Bottom, the log line, it says, everyone wants high schoolers to graduate well prepared for jobs, improve STEM literacy, greater achievement for inner city children, happiness for all children.
So why are liberals spending billions of dollars working against those goals?
Why are they working against those goals?
Well, it's really a couple different things.
You've got the true believers that are pushing the CRT to basically tear down anything that works just because it works.
And then from the ashes, they can take power.
It's really a virus that spreads in order simply to take control for the sake of it.
But the real question that interests me is, why would the schools allow this kind of rhetoric in?
And so the issue is basically I argue in this book that CRT is used, is just the latest technique used by teachers to conceal test scores and take the focus off of things that are objective.
Because when you look at the objective data, they are failing our kids.
We spend $17,000 a year per student.
We've got 36% literacy rate.
And so if they can get rid of standardized testing, which is what they did in the magnet school, there's no entrance exam anymore, suddenly we can't really evaluate the job performance.
So I think some of this racial stuff is really just a cynical ploy by administrators for their own selfish reasons.
So it almost sounds like there's a kind of a league.
And on one hand, you have teachers who are not doing their job and can cover it up by getting rid of these tests.
But on the other hand, clearly you have a group of people who believe that just having tests is somehow bad because it's unequal.
I mean, you know, the Asian kid might do better at math than the black kid, not necessarily for racial reasons, but simply because of the difference in their home lives or the difference in their culture.
I mean, are these people knowingly working together or is this just a conspiracy of interest?
I think it's a transactional alliance.
They don't actually necessarily agree on everything.
They just agree on tearing down the status quo.
And that's what you really see when you look into all the acronyms that you hear in the education world.
I spent two years writing this book.
know what all the acronyms mean, the SEL and the CSRE and all this stuff that they use to confuse parents and kind of keep them out because this is our turf and we've got education degrees.
Basically all that stuff is just trying to move things from the subjective away from the objective measures to the subjective.
And so basically they're willing to inflict sexual, emotional, and physical harm on children to get their way.
I mean, you've got the teachers unions shutting down schools for two years.
There's children committing suicide.
There's children who are going to be illiterate for, you know, basically, if you want to help kids, if you want to help minorities and poor kids, what's the best way to get rid of those unequal stats?
It's just to help kids learn, give them the skills they need to have high-paid jobs like math.
And so it's hard to believe they actually want to reduce racial inequality when keeping minority kids from learning math at a rigorous level is kind of the surest way to propagate it.
Where does the money come from for this?
When you say they're spending billions, where do those billions of dollars come from?
It's really the philanthropic foundations.
To answer the question, who is behind CRT?
One of the interesting ways to explain it or answer that question is it's the Gates Foundation, it's the Carnegie Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
And so if you remember about 10 years ago with Common Core, it was kind of widely acknowledged that the Gates Foundation architected this whole thing.
You have to be pretty powerful to influence a $1 trillion industry like K through 12, which is run by 13,000 different school districts.
And there's very few people powerful enough to do it.
These billion-dollar foundations are pretty much the only people that can.
The Gates, the Kellogg Foundation, in particular, and the Ford Foundation are super, super radical and obsessed with race.
And there's a really creepy story here because going back 100 years, the foundations have always been obsessed with race.
They were behind eugenics in the early 1910s.
Around 1940, the Ford Foundation was running a massive warehouse on Long Island, keeping track of every family's genetics so they could see which kind of genes America would be better off not having.
And more recently, the foundations have focused on basically getting rid of minorities by aborting them.
And so now when you have these foundations pushing ideas like showing up on time and working hard are attributes of a white culture, they position themselves now as very left-leaning social justice foundations, but that's a profoundly racist idea.
And it's actually very much in keeping with what they've been pushing for the last 100 years.
Why is it that, you know, we now see, in part because of your reporting, Luke, we now see parents stepping up and turning up at these school board meetings and protesting.
Something Is Going On00:10:43
Where are the teachers?
Why haven't any teachers, I mean, surely not all teachers are crazy people.
I mean, why haven't any of the teachers objected to this?
You know, they've been remarkably quiet.
And they say there's ways that, you know, they can make it, the activists will make it very uncomfortable for them in these schools.
But I'm kind of, I know that's true, but if the activists were such a tiny minority, I think that would be hard to actually happen.
So I think we have to give, we have to hold teachers to account here.
And the truth of the matter is, if you look at teachers are not particularly well qualified.
They enter college with the lowest SATs of any major, lower than gender studies.
I think the guys that go to college to study like gym class actually have higher SATs than teachers, and yet they graduate college with the highest GPAs.
So essentially anyone can become a teacher.
You can get straight A's in education school just by having a pulse.
And so I don't think we have to just honor teachers as these experts who we can't question.
The truth is these are people that have presided over the state of our public schools that have really maintained whatever racial inequalities there are for decades.
And so I think teachers and a large number of teachers, to tell the truth, do bear some responsibility here.
You know, this seems to me a part of the story that doesn't get told.
I mean, you know, you and Chris Ruffo have done a lot of great work exposing the kind of bizarre racial theories that these guys put forward.
But not enough people talk about the fact that our children really don't do very well in school and our teachers aren't really very qualified.
That seems to be something that people don't actually know.
I mean, our literacy rates in the world are high in the sense that most Americans can read.
But is American reading capability, is it lower than it is elsewhere?
So most American youth essentially can't read.
We have 36% proficiency in reading among 12th graders.
We have 11% proficiency in history among 12th graders.
24% proficiency in math.
And so, you know, these are 12th graders.
They're sometimes adults.
They're going to be voting the next year.
They're going to be holding jobs, ideally.
And yet America is 30th out of 36 developed nations in math.
So other countries are doing this better than us.
But the mentality that they've taken has basically been, it's equivalent to if you have a fever and you go to the doctor and he takes your temperature and he looks at the thermometer and you've got a 104 temperature and he just breaks the thermometer in half and says, well, now you're cured.
That's pretty much what the educators do.
They just say, well, let's stop measuring.
And what happens is when you hide a problem, it gets worse.
And so, you know, I think it's really important that people read this book because it situates all of what we've been seeing for the last two years in the broader context, that CRT and the school closures are symptoms of these underlying problems that you can see in a very dramatic fashion over the last two decades, where these schools are just vehicles to be used for a variety of special interests, whether it's teachers and administrators or ideological activists, and they're willing to really harm children to get their way.
So I think academics, your question is exactly right.
This is all about academics.
It's about the school's failure to actually do their only job.
And when they want to talk about race all the time, it's just a way to keep you from realizing that these people are the people who have managed to get a 36% literacy rate, which is pathetic.
That's a national scandal.
I mean, I didn't actually realize that the numbers were that bad.
That is a genuine scandal.
The book is Race to the Bottom by Luke Roziak.
It's in the news right now because of Florida, this bill to stop teachers from basically grooming children for sexual dysfunction at least through the third grade.
You know, I can't see any excuse to talk to somebody else's child about sexuality.
I mean, that's not something I would ever do.
I would expect to be arrested if I did that.
You know, it's just not none of your business.
Is this also to cover up school dysfunction, or is there something really sick going on?
I mean, if this were happening in a Catholic church, people would be up in arms.
People would be going insane.
If Catholic priests were saying to children, you know, you may not actually be a girl, you might be a boy.
Everybody would see what it is.
When teachers do it, somehow the left thinks it's defensible.
It seems to me something genuinely wicked is going on, or am I missing something here?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I don't see how this is covering up, you know, lack of academic learning.
I think it's basically the desperate reaction of an industry that is finally getting the scrutiny that it's deserved for decades.
And so for the longest time, they just were able to tell a few easy lies, like schools are underfunded, and parents will just accept it.
Now that parents are showing up to school board meetings, they are flipping out because informed parents would not accept the status quo when it comes to education in America.
So they're just saying almost viscerally, like, get out, parents.
These are our children, not yours.
We are literally going to take it to such an extreme that we're going to talk about gay sex to kindergarteners and there's nothing you can do about it.
Now, I think what exposes here is this is not actually Democrat versus Republican.
Education is so personal that it can really alter the traditional partisan alignment.
We saw that in Virginia with Democratic voters moving over to the right.
We see it with Asian parents waking up because of the assault on merit.
You know, you're going to see it with Hispanics who are religious and they don't like this sexual stuff.
But I would also say that traditional Democratic voters who are white middle class people, they don't actually want kids talking about sex.
It's absurd.
It's a total, it exposes that basically the education industry is not Democratic.
It's controlled by a particular strain of radical ideologues who don't actually even represent the base of their party.
You know, one of the things that Ben Shapiro says is it's very funny as he says only a genius like Joe Biden and the Democrat Party would make an enemy out of parents because there's an awful lot of them.
It's not a good political look.
Parents have obviously not been paying attention or these people would not be on school boards to begin with.
Now that they're paying attention, do you think that that's going to change?
Do you think that these school boards, you know, we saw that in San Francisco where three woke board members, and after all, San Francisco, not the most conservative place in the country, three woke school board members were chased off the board, we were called.
Do you think we're going to see more of that?
Or do you think that somehow the unions and the school boards are going to be able to hunker down and resist this wave?
I think what we're seeing is a transformative sort of upheaval in American politics that's going to last for decades.
You know, it's going to be hard because the other side is essentially paid to work in these schools and they have their whole language that they've created, this alphabet soup of different acronyms and jargon.
And they use that to keep parents away.
But parents are mad.
You know, what parents need to do is keep showing up to these school board meetings with courage and confidence.
And you get the courage because you know if you don't get involved, bad people are filling that vacuum.
And you get the confidence by being informed.
You can do that by reading my book and understanding these acronyms.
So when they talk at you, you can explain to them.
You can understand why you're being lied to and just shove it down their throat.
You can get informed by doing your research on these school board members because a lot of people just vote for them based on party without even knowing who these people are.
But the school board races are so important.
I started this book back in 2019 before coronavirus, before CRT really became a big thing, when I realized that out of the 10 Democrats on my local county school board, none of them had kids in the school system.
And when I learned that, I was just blown away.
I said, something is going on here.
And so what I do in this book is what we did in Loudoun with the Daily Wire.
I want people to understand that was just a case study.
Those same dynamics are present everywhere, even if you're in Wichita or Des Moines or, you know, wherever.
And so I do 61 case studies with different school districts across the country so you can identify those dynamics.
But I do think that if parents are committed and motivated and informed and they don't give up, absolutely we can take back these schools because this isn't Democrat versus Republican.
It's about 1% of the population that is basically employed by these schools or has some other vested interest in it versus parents and children.
And that's, I mean, that's a very hopeful idea.
Do you think that the homeschooling movement and private schools, I mean, I always joke that I actually wrote a movie that is perennially on the list of the worst movies ever made, but it put my kid through private school, so I didn't have problems like this.
I wonder, is homeschooling and private school, I know it's expensive, but is that an option for parents?
I think it's honestly worth doing.
The problems in the schools are so severe.
I think we need to take back those school boards.
Even if your kids are not in public schools, you are a voter.
You are a taxpayer.
You have every right to those school systems to be voting in those elections.
But you can do both.
If you can get your kids out, that's going to put some fiscal pain on these school districts and maybe it'll make them reform in the long term.
But it's a real uphill battle because even if you get a conservative school board or a sane school board, there's essentially this deep state, the superintendents and all the people that work in the schools.
So, yeah, that's kind of my advice is get your kids out, do the homeschooling, do the pods if you can, private school, whatever you can do, even if you have to get a second job to pay for it, it'll be worth it.
But, you know, what Republicans, they made a big mistake for decades by just talking about school choice as if it absolved them from having to care about the public schools at all.
And I think that really was a tremendous error because it allowed the Democrats to not only the Democrats, but this fringe ideology to completely colonize them.
And even if your kids go to private school, they're going to have to live in a country that's populated largely by public school graduates.