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PODCAST | “Freedom to Learn:” Challenging the American Bar Association’s Accreditation Monopoly

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Sarah Parshall Perry on ABA Accreditation, Teachers Unions, & Gender Ideology.

Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and senior legal fellow at Defending Education, joined the Freedom to Learn podcast recently to discuss the power and gatekeeping of accrediting bodies like the American Bar Association (ABA). We also covered K-12 education topics, including parent-excluding gender secrecy policies, teachers unions’ political spending, and the growing push to turn classrooms into activist spaces.

Want to learn more about why the ABA’s accreditation monopoly matters? Check out the Wall Street Journal’s editorial, “How the ABA Spreads DEI in Law Schools,” and Sarah’s National Review op-ed, “The ABA Is a Joke. So Why Is It Still Accrediting Law Schools?”

Follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.

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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re one of the most energetic, dedicated, and determined people I’ve had the pleasure to work with in recent years, and it is a crowded field. What drew you to our particular public policy area?

Sarah Parshall Perry: It’s probably your exact same skin in the game. Once you have kids, your perspective on the value of American public education completely changes. I was really radicalized during the COVID era. In fact, I was serving at the U.S. Department of Education as one of the senior attorneys at the civil rights office at the time. And it was surreal because I was working for the government, sitting at my kitchen table, because the entire government had gone home to basically telework, while I was also overseeing the online schooling of three of my children. And it was absolutely unbelievable.

I’m in this because I believe public education should work and should be high-quality for every American school kid. That’s a promise that every kid deserves.

Defending Education is launching a Center for Litigation and Legal Policy. What’s the Center’s mission?

Sarah Parshall Perry: Ultimately, we want to bring greater transparency and greater enforcement efforts to what we’re seeing right now as the violation of civil rights and constitutional law in American education. One of the things we feel very strongly about is the First Amendment, that every student does not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate.

And that is true in higher education, the same way it is for K-12. We see these campuses institute things like, for example, “Bias Response Teams.” We launched a lawsuit against Missouri State University (MSU) because they have an anonymous reporting system where students could report other students if they felt as though their particular protected class was somehow disadvantaged or discriminated against, but it didn’t rise to the level of discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments. They could basically anonymously narc on their fellow students, and those students could be dragged in front of a disciplinary council and actually be “re-educated.”

That’s the kind of stuff that we’re looking forward to litigating more in the future. Sometimes it takes federal litigation, and that’s exactly what the center is going to be all about.

You recently issued a report exposing the role of the American Bar Association when it comes to accreditation of law schools. That seems a few steps removed from your typical work. Connect the dots for us. Explain why this was an important issue to tackle.

Sarah Parshall Perry: What we’ve realized is that a lot of these specialized education schools, whether it’s medical school, schools of social sciences, schools of education, or law schools, have their own subset of problems when it comes to the indoctrination and ideology that’s being pushed from the accrediting associations. We’ve taken a bird’s-eye view of all of the accrediting associations that are recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Since 1958, the American Bar Association has been the sole accreditor for American law schools. That means they act as a gatekeeper for Title IV funding purposes for 196+ law schools in the United States. That also trickles down to professional licensing because in just about every state in the country, with a few exceptions now, as people are starting to wake up to the ABA’s nonsense, you have to sit for the bar, but only if you have graduated from an ABA-approved law school.

That means that they’re not only gatekeeping on education, they’re gatekeeping on professional licensing. And one of the problems with the ABA is that they’ve instituted some model standards that are de facto mandates for American law schools. One of those is standard 303(c). And that requires six credits of what are called experiential learning classes in cross-cultural competency, bias, and racial sensitivity.

I like to joke that yesterday’s lawyers are smarter than today’s lawyers because we didn’t have to sit through six credits of racial sensitivity training. But now, that is a mandate at least 62 American law schools that we’ve been able to discover, with 72 American law schools still operating — loudly and proudly, I might add — DEI offices despite the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard ruling, despite federal directives from the U.S. Department of Education, and longstanding civil rights proclamations on not using race in higher education.

Unfortunately, the problem is not going away any time soon, and the 62 schools that we know are using standard 303(c) requiring six credits of racial sensitivity training are just those that we discovered in front of a paywall. That doesn’t count for any of the other classes that are being hidden behind student logins or behind university paywalls.

So if they’re taking those classes, then they’re not taking substantive legal classes, right?

Sarah Parshall Perry: That’s exactly it. They’re not taking taxes, torts, contracts, or constitutional law. Where you take from one area, you are necessarily giving to another area. And this is where I think we are always struggling to make sure that the quality of education is our number one priority, whether that’s in K-12 or in higher education.

The more you infuse indoctrination, you eliminate the opportunity for actual education. That is substantive classroom time that’s not being dedicated to the actual finite practice of specialized law. I don’t care what your field is. It could be patent law or constitutional law, civil rights litigation, or corporate mergers and acquisitions. That’s six credits that’s being dedicated elsewhere. And that makes, ultimately, for less capable attorneys.

You said “gatekeeper” when you were talking about accreditation. Can you explain a little bit more about what the significance of that is?

Sarah Parshall Perry: Sure. The Department of Education has the sole authority to approve individual accrediting agencies. And these accrediting agencies are those that give their thumbs up, their imprimatur of approval on any particular institution as representing a quality education.

I’ll give you an example with the ABA. Not only do they require six credits of racial sensitivity training, which is totally useless, but they also require, for example, a certain number of law school books to be in the law library. They need a certain number of professional full-time tenure track professors to be teaching as opposed to adjuncts or part-time professors. Some of these criteria don’t have any direct bearing on whether or not someone is achieving a quality legal education. But as the only imprimatur of approval, the only association that can give a thumbs up or thumbs down, that accreditation serves as the gateway to get federal funding. When the ABA says this law school is good, the Department of Education can release Title IV funding, higher education funds that can go to institutions that have passed essentially a quality check. But if the ABA does not approve, what they do is they imperil the opportunity to get federal funding from the U.S. Department of Education. And that, as we know, is a significant amount of money from all of the law schools across the country. So, again, all of the accrediting associations, for example, the American Medical Association or the Southeastern Colleges Accrediting Association (a geographic accreditor), all of these operate as kind of the levers of power on how much access to how much federal funding a particular institution can get. That gives them a lot of outsized power.

You have some recommendations that could be implemented at the federal level. Two of my colleagues at the Defense of Freedom Institute are part of NACIQI, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. Tell us what you’re hoping to see at the federal level, what you’re hoping to see from NACIQI.

Sarah Parshall Perry: The NACIQI review of a lot of these professional associations is up in July. We’re hoping that the same sort of dog and pony show that all these accrediting agencies roll out is really going to be scrutinized for what it is. Is this a sufficient sort of indicia of how quality a legal education is, a medical education is, a social work education is, or are these accrediting associations using their bully pulpits to indoctrinate and infuse their particular political perspective through the accrediting process? Our hope is that all of the members of the NACIQI Board, when they come together to review, will just take a very close look at something that has been, for a generation, largely rubber-stamped. The accrediting process has never garnered the attention that it’s getting this year.

But we see that as a hopeful sign that ultimately there is an opportunity for reform. And what we also hope is that the Department of Education will remove barriers to recognizing new accreditors, that these accreditors can actually come to the market, that there won’t be such two, three, or four-year hurdles before they can actually be recognized. And that, as we know, competition drives excellence, right? That’s not just in the private enterprise sector, but also in the public education sector as well.

Tell us what you’ve seen out of Florida and Texas on this front.

Sarah Parshall Perry: Yes, Florida and Texas have actually been the vanguard of this movement because the judiciary in each state, the judges who are sitting at the highest state level, generally the Supreme Courts in every state, have the opportunity to actually determine what is required to sit for the bar. Will they require graduation from an ABA-approved law school, or will they require graduation from any law school, regardless of whether or not it has ABA approval?

Texas and Florida have taken it upon themselves to revisit these particular processes and say that they’re going to accept graduation, not just from an ABA-approved law school, but also from a non-ABA-approved law school, and the non-traditional legal education route through, for example, an apprenticeship program. This is something that California has been recognizing for years. California does a lot of things wrong; this is something it actually does right. It was one of the first states to say there were alternative paths to be able to sit for the bar. You didn’t just need to graduate from an ABA-approved law school.

The minute we divest the ABA of its power, we recognize that the state judiciaries actually have an opportunity to make a difference in who can become an attorney in their state. We know that there are burgeoning efforts underway in Tennessee and Ohio as well, and we’re very excited to see what they do.

Well, Sarah, in a National Review piece, you referred to the American Bar Association as a “progressive advocacy organization masquerading as a neutral membership organization.” That reminded me of all these medical associations that we’ve encountered in the gender ideology space. This seems like an issue that’s much broader than just the ABA.

Sarah Parshall Perry: Yes, absolutely. Once again, we recognize that professional associations, the minute that they’re overtaken by political ideology, bad science, bad philosophy, and bad law, you recognize exactly how significant the trickle-down effect is. The gender identity war has taken on multiple different manifestations, not just in education, but in medicine and in healthcare.

We saw from the Obama administration forward when they were making very glib pronunciations about opening bathrooms up to anyone who identified as a particular sex based on their gender identity, regardless of their underlying biological sex. We saw that perpetuated and expanded under the Biden administration.

When that happened, of course, it was working in concert with HHS and Dr. Rachel Levine, the man in a dress. I don’t say that lightly. That’s exactly what he is, regardless of how he identifies, at the helm of the HHS, which is essentially pushing out propaganda on the necessity of so-called “gender-affirming” care.

Now, our own NIH, the CASS Review, and longitudinal data from all across the world, including the Western developed nations that have all backed off from earlier aggressive stances on gender medicine, recognize when the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, or the American Medical Association refuse to back off of gender ideology, that trickle-down effect into medicine, and even education. [For example,] the partnership between education and medicine in, for example, community schools or community-based health centers.

Education and medicine very often go hand-in-hand, and both professional associations have a real stake in advancing gender identity. This indicates to me that we are not anywhere near the end of the road on fighting for sanity in gender identity.

I’m sure you have the same reaction I do when you see declarations of victory on social media: “We won.” Oh, no. I’ll see a celebration of an executive order signing, as if that’s the end. No, that’s a wonderful acknowledgement of the problem, and it’s the beginning of the solution. There are so many steps and so many miles left to go.

Defending Education, like the Defense of Freedom Institute, has been fighting gender ideology and other ideologies in education. I’d like to quickly go through a few of the products and the efforts that you all have taken to expose what’s happening in schools and who’s behind it. On the topic of gender ideology and gender support plans, there was a recent exposure of what’s going on in Vermont, but you all have covered the gender support plans and their implementation in school districts across the country.

Sarah Parshall Perry: We have maintained a catalog for five years of schools across the country that are maintaining these so-called gender secrecy policies. And this is where students are being given gender support plans, and they’re being socially transitioned behind their parents’ backs without their parents’ knowledge, approval, or consent. To say that this is a violation of a longstanding constitutional right is to understate the problem. I was disappointed because the Supreme Court had an opportunity to take a case precisely on this issue, but it decided it was not going to take this case on the merits. It did give us a really good decision in the Mirabelli vs. Olson decision with Justice Barrett writing specifically that this was a fundamental interference with the parental right, worse than what we saw in Mahmoud vs. Taylor.

This is something that we’ve seen recently in Vermont to a degree that’s largely unprecedented in any other state aside from California, based on the actual population of Vermont. We’ve seen 200 schools. That represents over 50,000 students in the state of Vermont who are under gender support plan policies and gender secrecy plans, where their parents are being explicitly cut out of the equation. The “best practices” that these teachers, administrators, and school principals are instituting actually prevent disclosure of this information to custodial parents.

This is something that is so anathema to what we understand about the biological, long-standing, pre-political, natural right of the parent-child relationship that we didn’t think we’d have to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in. But here we are, we’re still having to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in. Over 1200 school districts, 12.5 million children in public schools in the US, are subject to school policies that hide gender identity information from parents. That is a scandal of national proportions. And if we’re not paying attention to it, we do so to our detriment.

These parent exclusion policies sometimes aren’t put in writing. They’re just in practice. And parents discover them the hard way when their child is hurt, and a wedge has been driven between the parent and the child by these school districts’ pernicious policies. Fortunately, the U.S. Department of Education is taking action and showing a no-tolerance approach towards those. We’re going to need to see a lot more happen.

Defending Education recently exposed that teachers unions are a political machine. Tell us what you all found.

Sarah Parshall Perry: We had two reports. One, we just looked from 2015 onward at the two national [teacher unions], the AFT and NEA, led by Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle. I can dunk on the NEA and the AFT all day long. We recognize that they’ve done nothing to enhance public education. Their missives about being for the children, wanting to change for the children, pushing democracy for the children are just “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” to quote Shakespeare.

We found $669 million spent on left-wing democratic causes from the AFT and the NEA at the national level. At the state and local chapter level, over $339 million brought the entire total from 2015, that’s in a period of just over 10 years, to $1 billion on hard-left political causes. I am talking Act Blue, Democracy Forward, Media Matters for America, Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and the Democratic Senate PAC. These are educational opportunities that are being squandered on hard-left political causes. Every single union due that is paid in by a teacher who believes that they’re getting better pay, better benefits, better compensation, better time off, better working conditions is going instead to fund the pet projects of the leadership in the AFT and the NEA.

You show me what you spend your money on, and I will show you what you value. Thanks to these public records requests and the tax disclosures that we went through meticulously, we’ve recognized now what we always suspected, that they don’t care about education. They only care about activism, and only for a progressive cause.

Let’s acknowledge where those teachers union dues are coming from. They’re originally coming from the taxpayers who are paying the teachers’ salaries, and then a portion of those salaries funded by the taxpayers is then going to the unions, and then the unions are investing in these political groups. So, even if you don’t have a kid in K-12 education, you’re a taxpayer, and you should care.

Sarah Parshall Perry: Bingo. That’s it. And you’re subsidizing hard-left political causes whether or not you want to.

The unions’ May Day 2026 toolkits. What’s going on there?

Sarah Parshall Perry: May Day was a very interesting opportunity for teachers to push their own flavor of the week when it comes to activism. This is motivated by what we saw during the protests against ICE enforcement efforts in Minneapolis, and it expanded all across the country. Both of the teachers unions, the NEA and the AFT, developed these toolkits to basically teach teachers how to turn their students into little mini Marxist agitprops by protesting and by walking out.

They called for no work, no school, and a shutdown of the national economy. Specifically, because this happens to be what the AFT and the NEA want as their hallmark on the punchline of ICE enforcement efforts in Minneapolis. It is culminating in this so-called ‘Day of Action,’ and they developed tools to get kids to walk out of classrooms, tell teachers that they shouldn’t be marking students truant or absent, and that they shouldn’t be punished for being truant.

Defending Education is keeping an eye on these student walkouts and protests. There’s a tracker that people can find on the website to see how increasingly common this is becoming.

Sarah Parshall Perry: Yes. And what we’ve seen, Ginny, is that in increasing measure, there is a correlation between students who are not present for classroom instruction and the correlated NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) scores. We’re at 22% numeracy and 35% literacy for high school seniors in 2024, which is the last cohort that was judged completely through the COVID pandemic. That was an abysmal score refutation, and what we’ve seen now is that with increasing calls for activism, increasing measures for truancy, walkouts, protests, May Day involvement, that the classroom instruction periods, the actual time in which they’re getting classroom instruction, are beginning to be winnowed.

That doesn’t account for the fact that you’ve still got some of these radical ideologies, whether it’s critical race theory, critical gender theory, Marxism, or revisionist history. Even leaving that aside, just these specific hours in the day that kids are present, we are now seeing winnowed in greater measure as the activist unions are fomenting this unrest in American classroom education.

Any organization that uses students, young people, as the front of its organization is not doing so organically. Teachers who are using their classrooms as bully pulpits are inculcating values that these teachers are hoping are going to be promulgated in the voting booth in the future. Isn’t that where we see American public education going right now? If we’re not educating for numeracy and literacy, and our NAEP scores demonstrate that precise fact, then what we’re doing is we are actually educating for activism.

These May Day protests, the walkouts, are just part and parcel of the bigger problem from the unions as a whole.

We typically ask our Freedom to Learn guests to tackle the myth that bothers them the most. What myth would you want to tackle?

Sarah Parshall Perry: That dismantling the Department of Education is actually going to be worse for the cause of education. We actually saw higher progress scores, higher literacy rates, and higher numeracy rates before the Department of Education opened its doors, which shows you that throwing money at the problem has never been the solution for American education.

The Department of Education doesn’t educate a single kid. It simply enforces civil rights law and decides when it’s going to open or close the purse strings.

Those are functions that can actually be better handled by other agencies. And remember, the Department of Education was actually previously the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the precursor to HHS, which means that a lot of those laws can be enforced by the Civil Rights Office at HHS or the Department of Justice. So the Department of Ed needs to go. Whether or not we’ll see that in our lifetime remains to be seen.

How can people follow your work?

Sarah Parshall Perry: I’m very active, probably too active for my own good, on Twitter. You can follow me on X at @SarahPPerry. And, of course, our website, DefendingEd.org.

Our tip line is one of my favorite tools. We get probably 50 a day from parents all across the country. Every one of them is vetted. We encourage listeners to go there if they think something might be amiss in their public education system.

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