As students head back to classrooms this week, parents are once again told to trust a public school system that has spent years proving it no longer prioritizes the basics.
The evidence is no longer scattered or debatable. What we see in Colorado is part of a nationwide pattern in which ideological projects consistently crowd out reading, math, and academic rigor. These are not isolated anecdotes. They are symptoms of a systematic academic contagion that has spread through public education.
Colorado’s Front Line
Start at home. In the past year alone, federal civil-rights investigators have opened probes into Denver Public Schools, Jeffco Public Schools, and Cherry Creek Schools over race-based programming, affinity groups that exclude students by race, and policies that prioritize gender identity—giving boys access to girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and athletic teams—over the need to teach reading, writing, and math. These are not fringe complaints from activist parents. They are formal investigations by the U.S. Department of Education.
Meanwhile, in the Roaring Fork School District, a Christian legal organization has formally demanded that the district abandon its K–5 sexual education curriculum. The materials, says the complaint, ask kindergarteners to identify body parts including the vulva and anus. They introduce kindergartners to language that treats the “binary construct of gender” as optional. When basic literacy and numeracy scores remain stubbornly low, this is what our K–12 schools emphasize.
Colorado’s 2026 CMAS results tell the familiar story: negligible gains in math among some grades, continued weakness in reading. The pattern is consistent. The more time and institutional energy districts devote to identity frameworks, equity indoctrination, and contested social theories, the less progress students make in the skills that determine their future.
National Contagion
Colorado is not an outlier. It is a case study.
Minnesota has adopted ethnic studies standards that begin in kindergarten. Five- and six-year-olds are expected to analyze “power imbalances” and learn concepts of “liberation” and “systems of power.” First-graders must construct meanings for terms like equality and systemic power. The framework does not feign neutrality. It is designed to shape how children view authority, institutions, and one another.
Multiple states—including California, New York, Illinois, and Connecticut—have health curriculums teaching young students that biological sex is separate from gender identity. Some materials introduce hormone blockers and related medical concepts years before most parents would consider the topics appropriate. Teacher licensing in several large states now requires demonstrated competence in “culturally responsive education,” frameworks that treat schools as sites of oppression and train educators to act as agents of social transformation.
The results are measurable. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about 30 percent of fourth- and eighth-graders reach proficiency in reading. Math scores are similarly dismal. These are not temporary pandemic scars. They are the predictable outcome of a system that has elevated ideology above instruction.
Education schools and professional development programs continue to prioritize critical race theory, identity politics, and activism over science, reading or effective math pedagogy. After decades of research showing that teacher certification and education master’s degrees produce no consistent gains in student achievement, the same institutions keep producing the same product: teachers trained more in political ideology than in how children learn.
Why the War on School Choice
None of this is accidental, and none of it is limited to a handful of radical districts. When the same patterns appear in state standards, teacher licensing requirements, curriculum frameworks, and professional trainings across multiple states, the problem is structural and system-wide.
That is why the political establishment—particularly its most ideologically committed wing—wages such a determined war on school choice. Choice threatens the monopoly. It allows parents to exit a system that has decided academic mediocrity is an acceptable price for ideological conformity. Socialist politicians and their allies in teachers’ unions understand this clearly. A family that can take its education dollars elsewhere is a family that can no longer be forced to subsidize the experiment.
Colorado has already lived through years of the disastrous transition from education to indoctrination. The results are visible in test scores, federal investigations, curriculum battles, and in the quiet exodus of families who can afford to leave.
Parents sending their children back to school this month deserve better than managed decline dressed up as progress. They deserve schools that teach children to read, write, and calculate before they teach them to view the world through the lens of victimology, power, and racist, superficial fixations on identity. Until that priority is restored, the academic contagion will continue—and the case for genuine educational freedom will only grow stronger.
AI Note: This article and others are written by Wayne Laugesen over the course of hours. Like most
writers,.use AI for editing, proof-reading, and research to ensure the best outcome for readers.