Governor Gavin Newsom just signed a state budget that omitted taxpayer funding of California's ethnic studies graduation mandate. Parents celebrated but they shouldn't get too comfortable. The ideological takeover of the American classroom didn't wait for California's legislature, and it isn't slowing down. School districts across the United States are already offering ethnic studies courses that promote divisive, anti-American, and Marxist ideas to children as young as kindergarten.
Early drafts of the state's Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum drew criticism from across the political spectrum for framing capitalism alongside racism and white supremacy as a "form of power and oppression." Even the Los Angeles Times editorial board objected, warning students should also learn about capitalism's role in expanding opportunity and in building the middle class.
The adopted curriculum includes lessons on settler colonialism, on the Third World Liberation Front, and even uses Black Panther Party newspapers as primary source materials. California law also encourages districts to develop their own ethnic studies curricula, and many have gone further than the state model. Some have incorporated materials on the "Land Back" movement, which rejects widely accepted notions of borders and citizenship. These are not fringe supplements. This is content already in classrooms.
And it is not just California. Colorado’s teachers passed a formal resolution declaring capitalism "inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources." Public school curriculum in Boston identifies an "enduring understanding" that white supremacy is upheld by capitalism, colonialism, and what it calls “heteropatriarchy.” Children as young as fourth grade are being taught to fear federal immigration enforcement and advocate for the abolition of national borders. As many as 26 states are reportedly adopting versions of ethnic studies curricula, quietly displacing civics education and reframing the way American history is taught from coast to coast.
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The infrastructure behind this movement is vast, well organized, and more powerful than any elected official or school board. The Zinn Education Project, whose lesson plans are used by thousands of teachers nationwide, teaches profit-driven economic systems are fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing. One lesson literally puts capitalism on trial as a criminal defendant. These materials are available for free download and are co-promoted by the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in America. They are not hiding. They are scaling.
Then there is "Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators," a teacher training resource with a chapter on sex education which scolds teachers who perpetuate what it calls "adultism." That’s defined as a belief adults can’t help young people establish personal boundaries. Children, the book insists, should "have the power to decide what is and is not acceptable to them." Read that again. This is a resource used to train the people who teach your children. And it is just one of many that treats parental authority not as a natural right but as a form of oppression to be abolished.
Step back and look at the pattern. Across every one of these examples you will find the same playbook: divide Americans against one another—Black versus white, men versus women, citizen versus immigrant. All the while undermine confidence in American history, in American institutions, and in American sovereignty. These are not new tactics. They echo Cold War-era strategies when Soviet-aligned ideologues sought to weaken the United States from within by fostering division and eroding faith in our Founding principles. The difference is this: Today, these strategies are being executed not only by foreign agents but by credentialed educators and book publishers operating inside taxpayer-funded schools.
This is not education. It is recruitment. Socialists and communists have never been honest about their intentions. They do not announce their aims. They rename them. They call socialism "social justice." They call class warfare "culturally responsive teaching." They call the dismantling of American identity "ethnic studies." But the goal is the same as it has always been: Produce a generation who views America not as an imperfect nation worth improving but as an irredeemable empire to destroy.
The results are already visible. The most recent Nation's Report Card reveals fewer than one third of fourth and eighth graders are reading at grade level. Proficiency in American history and civics is even worse. A majority of young Americans now tell pollsters they view socialism favorably. Significant numbers support abolishing ICE, eliminating prisons, and opening borders. These are not the policy preferences of informed citizens. They are the predictable output of a curriculum designed to produce ideological certainty rather than literacy, civic knowledge, or career readiness.
Recently, the National Education Association made its priorities explicit in its July 2026 agenda. The teachers union playbook includes anti-ICE advocacy and training on racial injustice for classrooms as early as kindergarten. Not one item addressed the dramatic collapse in reading scores nor how to close such catastrophic learning gaps.
Here is the hard truth too many good Americans have been slow to accept: You cannot vote your way out of this. Elections matter enormously. But elections are downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of education. A generation shaped to view America as the world's villain, to identify with collective victimhood rather than individual responsibility, to distrust free markets and despise national sovereignty, will not suddenly reverse course because a different candidate wins the election. Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman reminded Americans many times: “What is important is not the particular person who is elected president or the party he belongs to. I have often said we shall not correct the state of affairs by electing the right people; we’ve tried that. The right people before they’re elected become the wrong people after they’re elected. The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”
The left did not capture American culture by winning elections. They captured it by writing the textbooks, producing the content, training the teachers, and patiently reshaping the story America tells about herself. We have a saying at PragerU, the organization I lead: Education got us into this mess. Only education can get us out. That is not a slogan. It is a strategy. The answer to ideological takeover is not to complain about it. The answer is to be part of the solution.
That means parents must reclaim their titles as a child’s “first teachers.” Attend school board meetings. Read the curricula. Ask hard questions. Pull your children from programs that treat American history as a crime scene. Join organizations that are building alternative educational content rooted in truth, in liberty, and in genuine civic pride.
And if you cannot fight it in the schools, fight it at home—a child’s “first school.” Every discussion at the dinner table about what makes this country worth loving is an act of resistance. Every time you sit with a child and tell her the truth about free markets, about the miracle of self-governance, about the moral case for individual liberty, you are engaging in an education revolution.
The left spent years building the education-industrial complex. We do not have half as long to dismantle it. Our children’s futures cannot wait. The next 250 years of American freedom and prosperity will be determined not by who wins the next election but by who shapes the next generation. That battle is already underway. The only question is whether families will fight back.
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