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PODCAST: | “Freedom to Learn:” What Happens When States and Districts Proudly Violate Federal Laws?

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Defending Education’s Erika Sanzi explains why parental rights groups are calling for “legal housekeeping”

Erika and I delve into:

• Erika’s experience as a former teacher, union member, and school board member
• Defending Education’s mission to empower, expose, and engage
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion in K-12 schools
• School policies that hide student information from parents
• Federal civil rights laws and their application to all races and both sexes
• The role of advocacy, federal civil rights complaints, and legal action
• DE’s “IndoctriNation map“ that documents educational policies that violate federal laws
• School districts that intentionally violate federal laws despite federal investigations, findings, and consequences

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Below is an edited and abridged transcript from our conversation. Please follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday!

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Before we dig into the policy side of things, I’d like to talk about your personal background. You may be the first former teachers’ union member that I’ve had on the podcast.

Erika Sanzi: So I was a member of the NEA in two states. I taught for four years in Massachusetts, and when my soon to be husband got orders with the Navy out to San Diego, we went out there. And so was also an NEA member in California. and I taught high school. Then I took seven full years off to have my kids.

But towards the tail end of that time, I got interested and involved in what was going on in the town where we had since purchased a home (in Rhode Island, because we moved back east after our three years in California). I discovered that we had pretty abysmal proficiency scores in math and reading. I just started to get more informed about this new place I was living and immediately I noticed that the expectations just seemed so low across the board compared to what I had been used to in this admittedly very affluent district in Massachusetts. So I ran for a school board seat. It was one of these weird times where it was actually a very competitive race for people running for these two spots, whereas normally you’re begging people to run for these offices. I won the race by 43 votes. And so that was my first foray into public service as it related to schools. And my big focus was student achievement, which had not been really a much of a topic at all prior. And luckily there were people on the board at the same time that had the same priorities. And we definitely did move the needle, which was very gratifying.

But I had a two, four and six year old at the time. I don’t know what I was thinking, running for school board in that situation. So I only did one term and then I came off. Then I went back to working in schools part-time from about 2010 to 2015. I’ve worked in affluent districts, high poverty schools, parochial, charter, and so I have a lot of lenses as a former educator, and then also of course as a parent.

You joined what was then called Parents Defending Education at a time when parents were starting to realize that schools were teaching some pretty alarming stuff. Perhaps you weren’t as surprised as other parents because you did have this inside look as an educator and school board member.

Erika Sanzi: No, I actually was pretty surprised because when schools went totally bananas, that was much more around the 2020 timeframe. And I had come out of working in schools in 2015. So a lot of the most egregious things that we see now, in terms of, keeping secrets from parents about their own children and this race essentialist curriculum and this obsession with gender and LGBTQ, et cetera, et cetera, themes. That’s all pretty new, at least around the 2020 timeframe, and I hadn’t seen it with my kids either. Certainly that one-off rogue thing, yes, I had seen that kind of thing, but I had never seen anything like what we began seeing, which was policies put in place that fixated on what we would loosely call diversity, equity and inclusion, and got us to a place where we were sort of venerating people or denigrating people on the basis of their immutable characteristics in the public school system.

How did you become aware of that? Like the rest of us as the stories started trickling out or social media posts?

Erika Sanzi: That’s a good question. The one thing that stands out to me is that before Parents Defending Education, now Defending Education, even existed, I had begun to notice some very strange things happening in schools, just based on an online awareness.

I had been working for an education advocacy place that had always leaned to the left, but where I didn’t feel like it was an insane asylum until 2016. And that was when I felt like things got a little nutty and where I would say something like, ‘maybe, we probably shouldn’t be treating people differently on the basis of race in schools.’ And that was like a problematic statement.

As I got sort of squeezed out and it just was no longer a fit, I remember I came across documents that showed back to school meetings, community dialogues, at a school in California. It was a very expensive private school. and they had put out the schedule with all these little boxes and everything was broken down by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, et cetera. So the Jewish parents would go in this room, black parents would go in this room, Hispanic parents over here, LGBT, it was the craziest thing I’ve seen. And I wrote about that and that became my line in the sand. I understand there’s a lot of pressure to think this is a good thing. And I am stating that this is a terrible thing. And so it became people knew that this organization was launching and they knew me and it felt like a bit of a fit. And that’s how I joined two weeks before we officially launched the organization.

And so what year was that?

Erika Sanzi: 2021, the middle of March is when I came on board and we launched the organization, I think, March 31st of 2021.

That was such a crazy time because, for those of us in ridiculously unhealthy areas of the country, we were so dealing with school closures and just fighting to get our kids back in classrooms while at the same time becoming aware of what was happening in online classrooms and then in the schools that were actually open.

Erika Sanzi: Yes. It’s not like I had terrible experiences as a parent. For some people, it’s like their advocacy came from the fact that really disturbing things were happening in their own kids’ schools or in their own kids’ classes or to their children. That was not what drew me into this. It was much more of just me knowing what was happening in places and in schools and feeling that conviction of the fact that this is wrong.

Having been in schools starting in the late 90s, I also knew this is not normal. And I felt like what I was witnessing was words that sounded very virtuous and benign and that there was pressure to be on board with that in practice were really harming kids.

Defending Education has a mission to expose and empower and engage. And you all do that through investigations and legal action and parent training. How do you prioritize what you focus on?

Erika Sanzi: Part of it is that we have different people on the team who are doing different things. So the person who’s dealing with our legal stuff never really has to think about, how are we gonna expose this terrible survey that was given out in this school district that asks six-year-olds about if they’ve ever created a suicide plan and if they’re transgender. But the other thing is the level of how egregious is something. There are parents that reach out to us because they’re bothered by something in their school. And as much as I sympathize with them, it’s not always something that we’re going to be able to take on or even add to our website, because for us to put things up on our website, we have to be able to corroborate it, vet it. And it has to be something that we think really crosses a line. Understandably, people draw their lines in different places. If somebody’s upset that their school is reading some book in AP Lit that’s been a book in AP Lit for 20 years, I’m sorry that they don’t like the book, but that’s not something that we’re taking on; versus if students are being included and excluded in school activities or programs or events based on their race or ethnicity, well, that’s something that we’re going to take on.

I understand you’re saying that it has to be something that you all can research, back up, prove, and have documents and evidence of it and that it also needs to rise to a certain level. Are there topics that you’d say that you focus on more than others? I’m hearing you say things that might be violations of federal law when it comes to separating students out by affinity groups, by race, and then concerns about violations of parental rights or when it comes to keeping secrets on gender identity, which are often violations of federal laws. Are those the kind of criteria that you’re looking at?

Erika Sanzi: Yes. I mean, it doesn’t always have to be that big. For example, if we see a school district Facebook page that is all full of pictures of all the teachers with students that attended some big Pride event on a weekend, we’re probably going to put that on our website too. Because that’s baked into the way that they write that up on their Facebook page. What we’re seeing is an ideology and we’re seeing a bias and we’re seeing words used that would clearly alienate a very large swath of the families in that school district. But, yes, to your point when we see things that violate federal law which is largely I would say gonna be Title VI things related to discrimination based on race ethnicity or national origin and Title IX, which would be the sex-based discrimination, those are things that we’re not only going to document on our website, but the people who specialize in the legal stuff that we do, that they would take a look at because whereas something might just rise to the level of we’re going to put it up on our website, up on our map. People can go, see the documents or the assignments or the Facebook posts or the school board minutes or the policy, whatever it is, they can just see that for themselves.

Sometimes it rises to the level where we decide to file a complaint with the Office [for] Civil Rights. In the most egregious cases, we would actually file a lawsuit.

You’ve been referring to your map, which is called the IndoctriNation Map and is searchable by topic and by state. If people are interested in finding out what’s going on in their state, if they think, ‘I live in Florida, it’s fine.’ No, go to the map. It’s not fine. There are going to be issues.

Erika Sanzi: Right. Yeah, that’s actually been one of the myths that we have to debunk a lot. There certainly are places that are worse and better. That’s true. So if you’re in San Francisco versus like Tuscaloosa, but it’s different. But on the other hand, it’s totally untrue that we don’t see a lot of very sort of racially divisive or these gender policies that withhold information from parents or these lessons about teaching young children that,, and I quote, ‘you can be a boy or a girl or both or neither, and it’s your choice.’ I mean, that’s a very common lesson in some states that is the state standard. They’re supposed to teach that. We see these kinds of crazy lessons all over the country. Certainly not as much in the Sunbelt versus, like a California, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York.

I always say to people it’s not universal, but it is pervasive.

Another resource that I point to is this analysis of these policies that do intentionally hide information from parents. And is it over a thousand school districts where you all have the evidence?

Erika Sanzi: This is definitely one of our most popular resources by far because we basically just put the policy, the exact policy as written on the website. In order to be on our gender tracker, you have to have written policies that openly state that district personnel can or should or must keep these students’ new gender identity hidden from their parents. And when that’s the case, that includes withholding all information from parents about the accommodations being provided by the school district. So as of right now, it’s 1,215 districts, 21,314 schools, and over 12 million students affected.

People who are genuinely concerned about the issue when it comes to gender identity and secrets from parents might have this false sense of security that, ‘well, President Trump passed some executive orders and we can say what we want on social media now. It’s fine. We’ve won.’ No, no, we haven’t. These policies are in place across the country affecting millions of students, and the school district officials are violating federal laws like FERPA and they’re very proud of that. They don’t plan to change their ways.

Erika Sanzi: Yes, it’s like part of the resistance. There are places that were already much more amenable to the idea of not doing these things. So when the executive order came down in those districts, largely in red states, they were much more willing to comply or able to comply or because the state leadership also was on board with doing that. But anybody who lives in a blue state, like I do, there’s been no change as far as I can see since the executive orders related to these gender policies. I mean, actually my district did do something, but it was ‘it’s okay that we’re gonna change ours because the state has its own and we can just sort of defer to that.’ So there’s a huge resistance. I believe right now, maybe 26 states are in compliance and 24 or not or something like that.

In my state, I’d have to check the date, but I want to say 2016, the guidance from the state Department of Education down to the district has been that children can change their gender at school, go by different names, different pronouns, et cetera. And if the child does not want the parents to know, the school will honor that request and a child could be using different accommodations, restrooms, locker rooms, hotel rooms on overnight field trips without the knowledge of their parents. When people say to me, ‘well, Erika, but maybe the parents are dangerous and the school is just protecting the parents.’ Well, okay, fine. But then that means then that if a kid says to you, ‘you can’t tell my parents my grades, you can’t tell my parents what I got on this test, you can’t send a report card home because they’re gonna be really mad and they don’t agree.’ Because that’s the same argument about the gender thing, right? ‘My parents don’t agree with this, so I don’t want you to tell them. And if you tell them, then it’s dangerous for me.’ So clearly I’m like, ‘oh, and you also can’t tell them that I was suspended. I got a D on my test.’

It’s just a ridiculous, it’s the only thing that schools willingly, deliberately deceive parents over.

You’re talking about the resistance and that sounds very familiar. I live in Northern Virginia where there are five school districts, we call them divisions, that are resisting complying with state model policy and also with federal law on this. They were investigated by the U.S. Department of Education, and they’re proud to be out of compliance with federal law. And they’re wealthy districts for the most part. Even if they lose federal funding – which is the threat when you are out of compliance with federal law, investigated, and then there are findings – they’ll just raise taxes on their residents to make up the money in some other way. So this idea of being part of the resistance, whether it’s a district or a state and being proud of it, continues.

Erika Sanzi: Yes.

There’s a late October letter that Defending Education sent out to 50 states calling on state leaders to do some legal housekeeping and to audit their education laws to make sure that they are in compliance with federal law. What prompted that? This idea of the resistance or this awareness that some states might think that they’re in compliance and they’re not?

Erika Sanzi: What actually prompted this is the crazy superintendent story out of Des Moines, Iowa, where we found out that he was in the country illegally. He had fled immigration officials in a school district issued vehicle and that when he abandoned the car and took off, they found a loaded gun and $3,000 in cash in the car. And then as people looked more, it turns out he also lied on his resume. He also never got that doctorate at that school where he said he did. And he also lied about awards that he was given. He basically was like a con man who had checked all the right identity boxes and had dazzled the all-female school board in Des Moines who despite knowing that he had not been honest on his resume hired him anyway. And now they’re in the midst of this hugely embarrassing debacle and he’s been arrested. I think he’s in jail or something, I don’t even know.

There’s a vetting problem here. But the other thing we discovered as we looked into this was that Des Moines had in their strategic plan that their teachers and their administration would be 40% people of color by 2030. They had racial quotas in place written down. Because our researcher Rhyen is so amazing, he had already put out a report about the state of Iowa and the affirmative action law in the state that was basically making school districts do race-based hiring. And guess what? Des Moines was in that report.

So there were a couple of things. One was these are school districts who are all at risk of losing federal funding. And certainly that’s worth flagging, but they’re also jeopardizing student safety. Where are the child safeguards when your vetting is this pathetic? And when you are so obsessed with these identity markers in the name of DEI that you’re making hires that end up revealing themselves to have been beyond just bad hires.

We also saw just a couple of weeks ago, the former superintendent in Evanston, Illinois…. Now he got famous because he said during COVID, they were gonna let kids come back to in-person schooling on the basis of race and sexual orientation to make up for historical wrongs. This guy, who has also now been arrested because he’s been indicted on 17 counts of embezzlement or something, again, checked all the right boxes and was a national embarrassment.

We sent the letter along with I think 26 other local parent groups in the different states, calling on them to conduct a top to bottom audit of their education laws and policies to ensure compliance with federal civil rights and constitutional protections. And that means if they have state laws or policies in place that discriminate based on race, sex, national origin, religion, violate federal law, obviously, they need to fix that.

I just heard a story from Wisconsin where a dyslexic child was not being tested. The mother knew that something was wrong because the child wasn’t learning how to read and the child wasn’t being tested. The parent kept trying to get resources allocated for her child and was informed quite proudly by the school that the school policy was to prioritize based on race. And they actually had a spreadsheet identifying the race of the students who were struggling readers and who was going to be tested.

Erika Sanzi: Los Angeles had a program that was a remediation program, but it was you had to be black to be in it. No other student, even if they needed remediation, could be in it. We filed a complaint about that and they actually did have to walk that back. Chicago also has the same, almost an identical program.

Number one, it’s just against the law. What I’ve learned over the past four years is that a lot of school officials and reporters do not know that the Civil Rights Act applies to everybody. Because originally the Civil Rights Act, we passed it because we had discrimination that whites were given rights that black people and others, but at the time, we were mostly talking about rights black Americans didn’t have. So in that sense, it makes sense that a person thinks of civil rights law as applying to people who aren’t white.

But the civil rights law applies to everybody and it means you cannot discriminate on the basis of race, period. And what has happened is that now, as we’ve seen so much more discrimination in the opposite direction, where they’re including certain groups and excluding others based on race. Currently, the most common is for white students or white staff to be excluded. I get a lot of pushback when I do interviews about that because their understanding of these laws is that they don’t apply to white Americans. Or, and this I actually prefer, they might say, ‘well, I wish they didn’t apply…I wish it wasn’t that way.’ At least that’s honest, right? ‘I wish we could discriminate in this way, because I think it’s necessary for students and staff.’ That’s a way better conversation than pretending that it’s not against the law.

But again, I would argue it’s always wrong to discriminate on the basis of race. And one of the reasons why is because you would end up getting back to the very thing that we were trying to get away from in 1964. Because at some point when you keep discriminating on the basis of race, you send a message that it’s okay to do that. And pretty soon, you’re going to start seeing some of the same horrific patterns that we were trying to get away from by passing that law.

Reporters love to be like, ‘so you’re just upset that white kids are excluded.’ No, it’s that there’s a federal violation. And if you play the tape forward, this could get very bad and very ugly very quickly.

I wanted to wrap up with you addressing a common myth when it comes to parental rights or enforcement of these federal civil rights laws. I feel like you just addressed one there with this misconception that the law only applies to one race. Is there another myth that you’d want to tackle?

Erika Sanzi: Well, they also don’t seem to know that Title IX also applies to males and females. Title IX was a 37-word law that says you can’t discriminate on the basis of sex. Now again, why did we have it? Because at the time, girls and women were being discriminated against. My mother and grandmother, there were no sports for them to even play. But it actually applies also to everybody. We see Girls Who Code, Girls on the Run, Girls Leadership Academy, in all of these public schools, and everyone’s like, ‘rah rah, that’s so great, you go girl, the future is female, woo!’ But the problem is, if you don’t have any sort of parallel similar program for the boys in the school, technically that is also a Title IX violation.

Now at the moment, we’ve got other big problems related to Title IX that have to do with males being allowed in single sex spaces and stealing podium spots from female athletes. So what I just said about the boys hasn’t really been the priority and that’s understandable because from a safety perspective, obviously, this is a way bigger problem that’s facing girls and women right now. But it is wrong to think that Title IX only applies to girls and women because it actually applies to everybody. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

Understandable as you’re the mother of three sons and somebody who is very grounded in common sense and now also in the federal laws. So how could people follow your work?

Erika Sanzi: Our website is defendinged.org and we’ve got tons of resources for parents and for parent groups. Certainly reach out to us anytime. There’s a way to send us a tip if you have a question or you need something. I have a Substack, sanzi.substack.com. I think it’s called Sanzi Says. I write very intermittently so it’s all free because I could never charge for such an inconsistent product. And I’m on Twitter/X @ESanzi.

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