Earlier this week, Governor Pritzker and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona visited an after-school program at Fairview Elementary School in Springfield.

This was just one stop on Cardona’s five-state midwestern bus tour to promote the Biden Administration’s new “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” education agenda.

Raise the Bar has three focus areas (shown below) with two sub-foci for each:

From ed.gov/raisethebar/

Unlike so many Biden Administration agendas, which on their face are driven by a radical, progressive worldview, this one is fairly benign, perhaps even admirable.

Most of us can agree that kids would benefit from these efforts, so the issue is not with the basic goals. No, the issue lies in the program’s blind spots and the Department of Education’s unwillingness to address the why: namely, why our students are behind, why there are teacher shortages, and why kids’ mental health is suffering.

The truth is many of these are crises our government created or—especially in the last three to four years—exacerbated.

As to academic excellence, to truly address the root issue, the Administration would have to recognize the policies (pre-pandemic and otherwise) that put already-behind students at an even greater disadvantage.

It would have to admit to its own efforts to turn government schools into places where social engineering and experimentation, not learning and preparation for life, are the priorities.

I often remind my five-year-old that when you use time one way, you can’t go back and use it another way. The hours spent teaching our students about antiracism and the ever-increasing list of possible genders cannot also be used to teach history, science, music, math, or literature.

Though Cardona dismisses the concerns of parents over critical theory and gender ideology in the classroom, calling them “divisive,” he does understand that teachers are in an untenable position. Unfortunately, he either cannot or will not admit that teachers are being required to shoehorn ideology into what traditionally was a didactic space, blaming their lack of focused educational time on more being “asked of our schools.” He laments,

“[I]t’s important that we invest in mental health supports to have social workers in our schools, so our classroom teachers can teach reading, writing, math.”

As to student mental health, Cardona seeks to treat only the symptoms without addressing root causes, such as fatherlessness, pornography, and social media, to name a few, not to mention the 900-pound gorilla in the room: policies the Biden Administration itself has pushed and is pushing that present a real danger to mental health through government-mandated isolation, racial, political, and class division, and the self-hatred and sexual confusion of gender ideology.

In a press release timed for Cardona and Pritzker’s Springfield visit, Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller sought to remind the press who we’re dealing with.

“Governor Pritzker and Secretary Cardona oppose parental rights and believe young children should be indoctrinated with radical “gender ideology” politics in the classroom behind their parents’ backs.”

She continues,

“JB Pritzker signed the most radical sexual education curriculum in the country. Pritzker and Cardona have led the effort to violate Title IX by forcing our daughters to compete against men in sports, and they want to force schools to allow men into girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms.”

Make no mistake, Governor Pritzker and Secretary Cardona are no friends of Illinoisans’ kids. This new agenda claims to prioritize the education and development of successful students, but as always, the proof is in the administration’s actions. If you say you want kids to succeed while pushing policies that will necessarily endanger and cripple them, you are lying.

In an AP article about the visit, Cardona is quoted as saying he sees the Springfield School District’s after-school program “as a way to relieve some of the burden on public schools, which have carried greater and greater responsibility for child development for classroom learning.”

Again, the question is “why?” Why are schools carrying a burden they were never meant to bear? Conspicuously absent from Cardona’s words and the Raise the Bar resources is any mention of the centrality of the family, and the impact its health or brokenness has on our kids.

If we are to practically address the many difficulties our nation’s kids are facing, parents must first examine themselves. Education as the government’s responsibility is a relatively new concept.

It used to be that parents were their children’s educators, and even when they began sending them to public schools, most recognized they mustn’t outsource their kids’ character development and worldview formation to other adults.

Now, according to the conditions the Biden Administration claims necessitate this program, many of our students (and their parents) are expecting not just learning from our education system, but the formation of self.

It was never meant to be this way.

The nuclear family, the community, and the church are the mediating institutions that were meant to tell our kids who they are and where they belong. No matter what government efforts are applied to the education and development of our kids, we cannot and must not trust others to know and love our kids the way we do.

Those days are long gone.

Thankfully, parents are waking up. Perhaps the Governor and Education Secretary will encounter some of them in their travels, but don’t expect the press to talk about it.