November 2025 — Ed Reporter Monthly Email Edition

Poisonous new lessons from the NEA-backed, far-left Zinn Education Project imply that the U.S. Constitution denies rights “especially to Black, Brown, poor, queer, and immigrant communities,” and tell students that knowing their rights isn’t enough. “Students should also be encouraged to ask hard questions,” one lesson claims, such as: “Why doesn’t our Constitution guarantee housing, healthcare, education, or a living wage — rights enshrined in other countries’ constitutions?”

But other countries’ constitutions do not necessarily guarantee these “rights,” at least not in practice. A 2020 report by the World Policy Center, for example, found that “people in many countries, low- and high-income alike, face barriers in accessing two key drivers of equal opportunity—education and healthcare—or experience daily living conditions that put a healthy life out of reach.” While 83% of constitutions “protect the right to education,” just 46% extend it to secondary schooling. And while 74% “explicitly protect some aspect of the right to health for all citizens, just 36% explicitly protect the right to public health, which can make a critical difference in preventing illnesses and injuries.” [Emphasis added.]

The report concludes that although the past 50 years have seen a strengthening of constitutional guarantees of equality and protections of education and health around the world, “many countries could further strengthen their constitutional texts, while nearly all could improve the implementation of existing constitutional values and protections.”

Is it any surprise that a project bearing the name of Howard Zinn and championed by the NEA would be more about leftwing propaganda than factual education? Despite Mary Grabar’s exposé of Howard Zinn’s grossly inaccurate A People’s History of the United States, among similar observations from other critics, his book has been and remains widely used in classrooms throughout the land.

The February 2020 email edition of Education Reporter included a review of Grabar’s definitive work, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America. Grabar clearly demonstrates Zinn’s “pervasive influence,” which she called “a national tragedy, especially considering just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest” it is.

Nonetheless, while Zinn passed away in 2010, faithful foot soldiers carry on his legacy of distorting history and turning young Americans against their country.

Zinn Project curricula

The Washington Examiner recently provided examples of the radical materials produced by the Zinn Education Project. which, according to its website, is a “collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.” It’s also aided and abetted by the largest teachers’ union, the NEA, which the Examiner says includes inviting “pro-violence activists to shape public school curricula” while claiming the Zinn Education Project “promotes and supports teaching history accurately.”

The NEA’s website brags that a Zinn Project “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign “supports at least 100 Teaching for Black Lives study groups each school year” across the U.S., and positions them as free professional learning opportunities. These study groups use the Rethinking Schools’ book Teaching for Black Lives, wherein “educators explore how to teach about racism, resistance, and joy in free, teacher-led professional learning communities.”

The Examiner notes that Zinn provides teaching resources “authored by Hamas sympathizers, praise for violent left-wing activists, and activities where students roleplay as ‘queer liberation’ activists fighting against the ‘Religious Right.’” And these are just a sampling of the fare being fed to schoolchildren. The article points out that “[m]aterials published by Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project are replete with praise of violent organizations, riots, and other illegal activity oriented toward left-wing political goals.”

Topics such as “Teaching the Fight for Queer Liberation,” tasks students “with roleplaying as individuals involved in various historical stages of the gay rights movement, often casting them in opposition to the ‘Religious Right.’” The lesson plan “speaks highly of the Stonewall Riots, a series of violent confrontations between police officers and members of the LGBT community in 1969.” Another example cited by the Examiner is “Crimes targeting critical energy infrastructure,” which is “also praised in Zinn Education Project materials as a valid form of protest.”

Support for Hamas and hostility toward Israel also emerge in Zinn Education Project lessons. A lesson cited by the Examiner titled “Whose ‘Terrorism?” encourages students “to equate various actions taken by the Israeli and American governments to the 9/11 terrorist attacks….” After a section of the book accuses Israel of being “an apartheid state,” the lesson’s author “touts that his materials helped one student ‘understand the frustrations that led to Oct. 7,’” in reference to the Hamas attack against Israel.

The Examiner says hundreds of lesson books published by the Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools have been sent to NEA members this year alone. “Additionally, Rethinking Schools was granted a table at the NEA’s 2025 Conference for Social and Racial Justice, where they distributed their books and shared excerpts, specifically from Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices.”

It’s important to note that many of these lessons and materials are aimed at younger children.

Parents’ rights group fires back

A group called the American Parents Coalition (APC) sent a warning through its notification system, The Lookout, that the NEA and AFT are undermining education and parental rights with radical political agendas. Instead of promoting “excellence in public school education” and “high quality education,” APC says the unions instead “divert resources from classrooms, override parents, and prioritize left-wing ideologies over kids’ learning, well-being, and academic success.”

The unions have funneled more than $43 million to left-wing aligned groups and causes since 2022. APC cites as an example one AFT PAC that “raised more than $13 million for the 2024 election cycle with more than 98% of contributions going to Democratic candidates, including $1.5 million to federal congressional candidates.”

The group correctly notes that the unions “are doubling down on radical activism while ignoring teacher shortages and misusing dues that could fund classroom essentials like training and supplies.” APC also points out the troubling and continued decline of public-school student scores in core subjects like reading and math.

On November 11, Fox News’ reporter Andrew Mark Miller wrote that the APC’s warning urges parents to be “vigilant” and to understand that the teachers’ unions are “pushing boycotts in support of DEI, legal and activist campaigns against the Trump administration, denouncing a Supreme Court ruling that ‘enabled parents to opt their children out of age inappropriate and one-sided LGBTQ+ content,’ and climate activism.”

Miller said the APC’s warning “also focuses on the NEA 2025 Handbook,” which reportedly exposes the union’s “radical beliefs” and “attacks homeschooling.” In addition, the handbook touts “the use of preferred names and pronouns as being of the ‘utmost importance’ while blaming ‘white supremacy culture’ as the ‘primary root cause of institutional racism.’”

The APC’s website provides information on how parents can file public records requests in their school districts, present concerns to their school boards, and push back in writing against the teachers’ unions’ radical agendas.

Parents groups send letters

On October 28, Fox News reported that more than 20 parents’ rights groups led by Defending Education, sent letters to legislators and education leaders in all 50 states urging them “to conduct a top-to-bottom audit of their education laws and policies to ensure compliance with federal civil rights and constitutional protections.”

The letters target each state’s officials, indicating the groups’ grave concerns about “the current condition of public education — a proposition that falls ultimately to the individual states, their legislators, and leaders like you.” The letters contain state-specific information, and each was signed by both national parents’ organizations and those operating locally in each state.

The letters call on officials to rid their public education systems of DEI, poor hiring practices, and discrimination based on race, sex, and gender. While they do not drill down to specific curricula such as provided by the NEA-backed Zinn Education Project, they do refer to violations of “federal statutory and constitutional law, including Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause.” The letters ask that each state “audit (and rescind, if appropriate) laws that run contrary” to these statutes, and likewise “examine state policies for vetting and hiring school employees so that dangerous individuals cannot gain access to minor children….”

Observers wonder if state officials will pay any heed to their constituent groups’ concerns and demands, or if they will continue to operate business as usual.

Defending Education’s vice president and legal fellow, Sarah Pershall Perry, told Fox News: “Our assessment of state education laws coast-to-coast reveals a troubling reality: many state laws are at odds with federal anti-discrimination provisions and are going to invite federal scrutiny…. It’s time for states to clean house — because at bottom, education is, and always has been, a state proposition.”

Despite what conservatives view as a disheartening loss in Virginia on November 4, a bright spot appeared in the most notorious county in the state for education policy: Loudoun County, where a battle over liberal transgender ideology has raged for years. Independent school board candidate, Amy M. Riccardi, won a seat on the board of education in Sterling, Virginia, upsetting the liberal incumbent Arben Istrefi.

Election results posted by vpap.org show that Riccardi received 51.39% of all votes cast, prevailing against the Democrat-backed Istrefi, who won 47.76% of the vote. The Christian Post wrote that Ricardi’s campaign website highlighted her position on the controversial Policy 8040, adopted by the Sterling Board of Education in 2021 “that allows trans-identified students to use sex-segregated facilities that align with their stated gender identity as opposed to their biological sex.”

Riccardi’s website cited her support for the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of Title IX, “upholding the separation of boys’ and girls’ sports and the dignity of their unique spaces in restrooms and locker rooms.” Among her goals is to revise “School Board Policy 8040 to meet federal and state requirements,” as well as to focus on “academic excellence,” championing student safety, and holding administrators accountable.

The candidate’s message was well received by students and parents weary from years of struggle over transgender and pro-LGBT ideologies in the Loudoun County Public Schools, as Education Reporter most recently described in September.

On October 21, WorldNetDaily’s Bob Unruh wrote that Loudoun County teens, fed up with school board members “who decline to believe there’s a difference between boys and girls and refuse to protect vulnerable students in private areas like restrooms and showers,” worked to persuade voters to elect school board candidates willing to support them in the weeks leading up to the election.

The online media site Twitchy.com reported that the teens took matters into their own hands by going to the polls and campaigning for school board members who would “restore girls-only and boys-only sports and spaces.” They greeted voters and asked them to vote for candidates who would protect students’ privacy.

Outgoing Governor Glenn Youngkin also urged citizens to “get out and vote” and elect conservative school board members. ABC-7 News quoted Youngkin as saying:

• The bottom line is that biological boys and biological men should not be in locker rooms with biological girls. And biological girls shouldn’t be in the same locker rooms and bathrooms as biological boys, and if you need a third bathroom, go build one. But the bottom line is, this is about the safety and the dignity and the privacy of your children….. Loudoun County, here we are. We have a chance to win this one at the ballot box. We have a chance to elect a school board who will, in fact, look out for parents and children, as opposed to their own ideology.

Unruh wrote that one campaigning teen told the local media station WJLA: “I’ve been sick of it [the LGBT agenda and policies] for quite a while. I just can’t put up with it anymore. It’s not normal. It’s not something we should be supporting.”

Unfortunately, efforts by the high school students were not enough to boost conservative school board candidates Matt Malone and Samuel Yan to victory, for whom they also campaigned. But newly elected board member Riccardi will join conservatives Lauren Shernoff and Deana Griffiths in Loudoun County. According to The Christian Post, Shernoff was unopposed in her reelection bid for a board seat in Leesburg, Virginia.

Last April, U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) introduced H.R. 2617, the Say No to Indoctrination Act, which would “amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to prevent the use of funds under such Act to teach or advance concepts related to gender ideology, and for other purposes.”

While this legislation has stalled in the House, U.S. Senators Jim Risch (R-ID) and Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-KS) introduced the measure in the Senate in July. Risch said in a press release: “Schools should prepare our children for the future, not promote radical gender ideology. The Say No to Indoctrination Act puts an end to woke education practices in K-12 schools and makes President Trump’s common-sense policy permanent.” He was referring to Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which the president signed on January 29 of this year.

Senator Marshall observed:

• As American students lag behind globally in math, reading, and writing, the last thing our taxpayer-funded teachers and schools should be doing is teaching radical leftist nonsense like so-called gender theory. I’m proud to support this legislation to codify President Trump’s executive order, and ensure our children’s education is focused on meaningful, future-ready skills, not woke ideology.

An impressive list of Senate co-sponsors includes Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Ted Budd (R-North Carolina), Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri), and Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama). But time will tell if further action in either chamber will be forthcoming now that the government shutdown has ended.

Victim of indoctrination speaks out

The Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) reported on September 18 that President Trump had again highlighted the “dangers of political indoctrination in the classroom,” using as an example the first-person testimony of a child victim.

Written by Sarah Katherine Sisk, Hillsdale College alumna and master’s degree student at George Mason University, the AMAC article described how the president, speaking at the Museum of the Bible during a meeting of the White House Religious Liberty Commission in early September, called “12-year-old Shea Encinas to the podium to share his experience as a fifth-grader in a California public school.”

Encinas told the audience how he “was forced to read a book called My Shadow is Pink to a kindergartener — a story about a boy who likes ‘things not for boys.’ The book has clear LBGTQ themes and encourages children to accept the idea that they could be born in the ‘wrong’ body.” The child said he was a Christian and that “Jesus means everything to me.” He added that the book told kids they could choose their gender “based on feelings instead of how God made us. I knew this was not right, but I was afraid of getting in trouble.”

When the boy’s parents confronted school administrators, they were “treated badly.” Encinas said that afterward, he and his brother were bullied and “the school did nothing to stop it.” President Trump called the episode “proof of ‘radical gender ideology’ being pushed on students.”

Sisk’s article demonstrated that despite repeated attempts by the Trump Administration, and even the Supreme Court in Mahmoud v Taylor to remove woke propaganda and curricula from the public schools, it is deeply entrenched across the country and many schools hide the fact that it continues to be taught. (See Education Reporter, July 2025.)

Sisk described a Monroe County, New York school board meeting that “descended into chaos after furious parents discovered elementary students had been assigned The Rainbow Parade: A Celebration of LGBTQIA+ Identities and Allies.” She wrote that children as young as five were exposed to “illustrations of a naked person walking down the street, a pair of men in bondage outfits, and other adult-themed parade scenes.”

Angry parents “shouted down school officials, demanding to know how such material could possibly be considered age-appropriate.” But as has happened at numerous school board meetings in recent years where understandably outraged parents protested the inappropriateness of pro-LGBT library books and curricula, the Monroe County board members “abruptly shut down the meeting and left without hearing any official public comment.”

In echoing the many voices that have spoken out in recent months, Sisk emphasized that “schools are failing at their core mission.” The 2024 NAEP scores show “nearly 70 percent of fourth and eighth graders are reading at or below ‘Basic,’ the worst results in the test’s history.” Math scores were similarly dismal, she noted, “stuck near historic lows.” But as she pointed out: “Instead of fixing the crisis, too many school officials are pouring energy into social indoctrination while real education falls by the wayside.”

Sadly, America’s political scene increasingly appears to favor the far left, with Democrat candidates openly running and winning elections on socialist/communist tenets. The result is that the battle for parental authority over the education of children has become ever more critical, since years of unrelenting leftwing propaganda in education has doubtless contributed to the current political climate. Parents and concerned citizens and politicians cannot afford to relax their efforts, even for a moment.

In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election to mayor of New York City, an interesting spate of postings on X are providing food for thought about what comes next. For example, an influencer with nearly 381,000 followers and identified on X simply as “Dr. Maalouf,” posted a video on November 5 that shows an “Islamic imam” explaining how Muslims plan to “take over America.”

In the video, which was clearly recorded before Mamdani rose to power, the imam tells his audience: “Dream big. Have a vision.” He remarks that people once laughed at the idea of Muslims “taking over Mecca. What happened?” he asks rhetorically. “What is Mecca now?” He chuckles, then says:

• No one can stop [us] from having a Muslim president…. It’s coming. Change is coming to America. First, work towards electing a Muslim mayor. Then, at the next election, nominate people [Muslims] for the school boards of education. Nominate people for the local township[s]. Soon the demographics change.

He continues: “Muslims have the most children. According to research, Muslim households have 3.4 children per family. The white American has one child per family.” While he concedes that such a takeover may not happen in his lifetime, he encourages his audience to “think about your grandchildren.”

Dr. Maalouf’s post attracted a flurry of responses. One subscriber posted a video of an alleged escapee from Iran now living in the U.K. who accused mayor-elect Mamdani of promising New Yorkers “the same things Khomeini promised when he got into power: Free bus rides, free gas and electricity, free housing; exactly the same as Zohran Mamdani” is promising.

In his rant, the Iranian went on:

• Mamdani even eats with his hands. Who eats with their hands? This guy is trying to pretend to be like a Muslim, and trying to be so cool. The guy wasn’t even born in an Islamic country. I tell you; New York is going down; the West is going down. It’s all a trick…. It’s the unholy marriage of Islamism and Marxism, and these are the enem[ies] from within…. I’m trying to warn you as an Iranian dissident. Don’t trust these people. They try to be friendly and smiling and they come up with all these fake promises. And before you know it, they take over your society, and you will be living in a Sharia-Communist society. Wake up, West!

Muslim-socialist connection

When the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) met in Chicago in August, they celebrated Mamdani’s win in the Democrat Party primary and proclaimed themselves now “in charge” of the party. While it’s unclear how many of the approximately 1,200 convention delegates identified as Muslim, the mood as described by The Washington Free Beacon was decidedly anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, evidence that the DSA is significantly influenced by Muslims.

According to an article by Muslim immigrant and former Democrat, Asra Nomani, “an alliance of socialists, Islamists, and Democrats can be traced back to a 2008 email to Democratic operative John Podesta.”

Nomani’s article was published by a number of media outlets including US Newsper.com and Fox News, and answered in depth the question of how “a 33-year-old socialist Muslim who wants to defund the police, globalize the intifada, and destroy capitalism, has emerged as the Democratic Party’s nominee for New York City mayor, with leaders like former President Bill Clinton fawning over him.” Of course, Mamdani won in the general election.

In recent years, Asra Nomani has emerged as one of the country’s key parent leaders fighting race ideology and other woke curricula in the schools. (See Education Reporter, April 2024, and October 2021.) Through her in-depth investigative reporting, her recent article traces “how socialists (red) and Muslims (green) seized the Democratic Party (blue) over a long 20-year campaign.”

She writes: “At 9:28 p.m. on Dec. 12, 2008, former ACLU civil rights lawyer Ann Beeson sent an email to former Clinton administration senior advisor John Podesta.” Through his Center for American Progress, Podesta was being tapped to persuade the incoming Obama Administration “to halt policies that allegedly targeted Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities.”

Nomani found Beeson’s email significant in that, in light of her research, it represented the culmination of a decades-long ideological drive that began with Muslim international students arriving at U.S. colleges and universities in the 1960s. Nomani explains that many of these students were not here “just to study, as my father did at Rutgers University, but to lay the institutional groundwork for political Islam, or Islamism, in the United States.”

By the 1980s, Islamists had a strategic base set up in Herndon, Virginia, and by 2006, a campaign was underway “to weaponize the term ‘Islamophobia’ to silence critics of extremist Islam” in the wake of 911. Nomani writes: “American Muslim leaders seized the moment to re-engineer the national security narrative, using American philanthropic networks like the House of Soros as a Trojan horse to racialize Islam, frame Muslims as the ‘oppressed’ and embed illiberal ideologies within America’s liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party.”

As readers might ask, is it any surprise that the name Soros would pop up in relation to subversive activity that could potentially be harmful to the U.S.? Nomani notes that Soros “pumped money into Barack Obama’s presidential campaign,” and that his alleged philanthropic institutions funded the dismantling of “Bush-era counterterrorism policies.”

She relates: “A Pearl Project analysis of 38 documents detailing the operations and funding of the National Security and Human Rights Campaign revealed the coordinated efforts of progressive and Islamist activists to reframe post-9/11 narratives. The aim: clear the path for red-green candidates like Mamdani.”

In addition, the civil rights group, Muslim Advocates, founded in 2005, “grew nearly 10-fold, from $76,331.03 in annual revenues in 2005 to $992,892 in 2023.” Nomani adds that the progressive Brennan Center for Social Justice, which champions pro-Islamic causes, enjoyed a revenue explosion “from $6.6 million to $57.9 million during the same period.”

With financial backing by Soros and other progressive donors, Muslim groups, progressives, and leftist media allies funded ReThink Media, which Nomani reports “became the loudspeaker for the red and the green….”

One of ReThink’s narratives was that Muslims were under attack in the West, and that in the U.S., they would be defended by the Democrat Party, a storyline which, Nomani says, “took hold in the post-Obama landscape.”

Red, green, blue marriage

Interestingly, Nomani shows that much of the anti-Trump hysteria was fomented and funded by Muslim activist groups and those in communion with them. She writes that in 2016, Bernie Sanders’ Justice Democrats, “a socialist group that he co-founded and which later propelled Muslim politicians Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar into Congress,” was taken over by Sanders’ surrogate, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. She rose to lead “Democratic ‘resistance’” to then-candidate Trump, and “was heralded by the New York Times as a ‘Brooklyn homegirl in hijab.’”

Nomani relates that Sarsour launched “MPower Change under the umbrella of another big-money Democrat-aligned donor, NEO Philanthropy Inc., to advance ‘Muslim Power.’ She hired Yasmine Taeb, the ‘first Muslim woman elected to the National Democratic Party,’ according to her official bio, and got at least $260,000 in seed money, some of it from the House of Soros’s Proteus Fund.”

Nomani’s research has uncovered a fascinating, albeit almost impossible to follow spiderweb of activist groups, NGOs, funding streams, and individuals to demonstrate how Muslim-socialist groups have seized control of the Democrat Party.

US Newsper.com summarized the main strategy employed by the many players as “to silence critics” through name calling and accusations of “racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.” These tactics “serve to intimidate dissenting voices and create a culture of fear.”

Muslim candidates: the numbers

The RAIR Foundation USA on November 9 posted the numbers of Muslim candidates that it says were backed by a “Hamas-linked network,” who have won key offices across America, “proving that the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to infiltrate from mosque to city hall is no longer a warning, but a reality.”

RAIR describes itself as a grassroots organization “comprised of everyday Americans leading a movement to reclaim our Republic from the network of individuals and organizations waging war on Americans, our constitution, our borders, and our Judeo-Christian values.”

The November 4 election results show that “a record” 42 Muslim candidates were elected to public office across the U.S., according to CAIR’s data, with one race still pending due to a recount.

RAIR writes that this year’s election results include, of course, Zohran Mamdani’s victory as mayor of New York City, but also Ghazala Hashmi who won in Virginia, the first Muslim lieutenant governor in U.S. history and the first Muslim woman to be elected statewide.

Other highlights include the mayors of Michigan’s largest Muslim-majority cities, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, and the reelection of Hamtramck, Michigan’s Muslim mayor in a close race. There is a new Muslim mayor of College Park, Maryland, and two new Muslim judges, one in Franklin County, Ohio, and one in New York.

Additionally, as the imam in Dr. Maalouf’s posted video instructed his audience, 20 Muslim city and town council members and commissioners won elections, along with 6 school board members.

RAIR warns: “While political leaders and journalists applaud the surface optics of ‘diversity,’ they ignore the deeper infrastructure behind it — a network of mosques, PACs, nonprofit fronts, and activist pipelines engineered to transform America’s institutions from within.”

And as Asra Nomani concludes, with the Democrat Party as its vehicle, “the red-green alliance,” i.e. Islamism and socialism, “has transformed American politics. The party no longer resists this movement. It accelerates it … candidates like Mamdani are only the beginning. A well-funded pipeline of red-green operatives now wears blue, ready to take over.”

A TPUSA student leader at the University of Colorado-Boulder was attacked after antifa put out a hit on him accusing him of being a “Nazi activist on campus” and a “white supremacist.” The Washington Examiner reported that 19-year-old engineering student, Nathaniel Ellis, who is secretary of TPUSA’s Boulder chapter, was beaten by a masked attacker on roller blades wearing all black, the uniform of antifa, and wielding a hockey stick. The attack happened “three days following the circulation of an antifa-branded flyer targeting him.” In addition, “wanted-style posters were created by Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists in collaboration with Front Range Anti-Fascists, a Colorado cell belonging to the Torch Network, an organizing body overseeing the accreditation of antifa chapters across the country.” The Torch Network is reportedly the “most radical” of antifa groups operating in the U.S. The Examiner further revealed that the student-led communist collective, “Boulder Students for a Democratic Society, instructed followers to ‘widely’ circulate the flyer, which was shared over 600 times.” An investigation is underway by the Boulder Police Department in an effort to find the attacker, who approached Ellis from behind and broke the hockey stick over his head. Ellis said his efforts on behalf of TPUSA will not be dissuaded, nor will he abandon his “America first values and actions.” The Colorado Federation of Young Republicans “voiced support for Ellis on Instagram, saying, ‘No student should be threatened or attacked for their political beliefs.’”

Lest anyone believe SNAP and WIC benefits are for American citizens only, a report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows that 47% of noncitizen households with children under 6 use the programs, while 31% of American citizen households use them. The Washington Examiner writes that an analysis of Census Bureau data found that “nearly half of the immigrant community taps into the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” which was suspended in some states during the government shutdown. While children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S. are entitled to those benefits pending further action from Washington, illegal adults and children born in their parents’ home countries are not eligible for SNAP or welfare. Nonetheless, “non-citizen households account for nearly one in five of all households with young children receiving WIC or SNAP.” The center’s report shows that the approximately 14 million illegal immigrants are costly to the country beyond border control expenses. “Once in the country, the costs of feeding, clothing, housing, and educating the migrants add up fast,” and “the results also are a reminder that once low-income immigrants settle in the country, it is very difficult to prevent their use of the welfare system.” The report poses the question of whether “it makes sense to have an immigration system that allows in so many people who turn to taxpayers to support their children?”

The national pro-parent organization, Moms for Liberty, recently shared the exciting news that they have successfully persuaded the FBI to “cut ties” with the odious Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The group’s Fall 2025 newsletter featured FBI Director Kash Patel’s announcement that the bureau is severing all ties to the SPLC, including relying on it for recommendations. Patel’s announcement came after Moms for Liberty sent a letter “co-signed by other top conservative leaders urging the White House to distance itself from the group.” The letter pointed out that the SPLC, which once “focused on civil rights and public interest litigation, egregiously strayed from its mission” less than 10 years after its founding. It has declined today into “what Politico has described as ‘more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.’” The letter called attention to the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” which Education Reporter has previously described, including in its January 2024 and July 2023 issues. The Hate Map now tracks “over 1,400 entities they classify as hateful and extremist,” and is in essence a smear tactic against groups with which the far-left group disagrees. Moms for Liberty charged the SPLC with becoming “so biased, politicized, and unmoored from its original mission that it has begun placing traditional value and faith-based organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, Liberty Counsel, and the Family Research Council on its Hate Map.” The letter added that the SPLC also “ran a feature article viciously attacking Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk for advocating for President Trump’s agenda on such issues as faith and the reality of biological sex.” Such attacks and designations by the SPLC have over the years motivated deranged individuals to lash out at organizations and individuals listed on the Hate Map. The Moms’ Fall newsletter recognized Mr. Patel and the bureau for making it clear that “the FBI will never rely on politicized or agenda-driven intelligence from outside groups — and certainly not from the SPLC.”

Originally posted at Illinois Family Institute, September 22, 2025. Reprinted by permission.

Home education freedoms are at a crossroads in the United States. The choice before us is whether homeschooling families will retain the mandate for education or whether, God forbid, we cede it to the State.

We have gotten to this point for two reasons:

First, we have allowed complacency and the status quo to keep us from going on the offensive to capture greater homeschool freedoms for our posterity.

Second, we have allowed a thesis-antithesis-synthesis, a sort of dialectic drift to carry us away from the moorings for which our home education forebears were willing to face jail-time. Without a solid grasp of certain fundamental, universal truths that undergird our freedoms — and if we don’t create some next level security for them — we will lose them one right after another.

A registration form here, a portfolio evaluation there, until one day we will look up and find we must effectively acquire a permit to parent.

We must realize that certain powers that ought not to be are playing the long game for control over the hearts, minds, and lives of our children. In the case of HB 2827, for example, the bill attempted to completely undermine parents’ rights because it would ultimately allow the state to define what home education is and therefore to regulate it.

When you define something, you take dominion over it. Wherever there is an attempt to usurp the jurisdiction for a God-given mandate, there will be a generous helping of shape shifting narratives and false accusations to justify it. HB 2827 was such an attempt. This past spring, surely, we were all neglectful abusers, next time, who knows?

And, it really doesn’t matter, because whatever form the lies take, these projections are just accoutrements for a legislative word salad intent on garnering our compromise. And compromise or synthesis, if you will, is their long game.

In the case of HB 2827, “It was just a registration form,” they said.

But it was a registration form that represented waiving your and your children’s First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment protections if you should comply. While we were exhausting ourselves trying to prove we were not neglectful abusers, the battle was on a different line entirely.

The reality is that so many self-evident truths undergird our position as home educators, it would be actual abuse and neglect not to appeal to them to preserve the freedom to homeschool on our children’s behalf. Here are just a few to consider:

• Children are made in the image of God and to be stewarded by their parents, not the state.
• The right to define, design, determine, direct, and delegate education is fundamental and a priori to the family to which children belong, and not to the state.
• There are three jurisdictions of government: Family, Church, and State. The Family government deserves just as much protection from State encroachment as the Church does. The Bill of Rights affirms this.
• As Christians, bringing our children to Christ through home learning is one of the highest expressions of worship we can give our Creator.
• All education is religious and associative in nature. This is because there is always an ideological basis through which information is conveyed and there is always a medium of communication in conveying it. In the United States, home education is therefore protected by the First Amendment.

While the dialectic approach leaves us hoping for breadcrumbs of freedom, it uses fear, lies and confusion to bring about compromise and control.

Standing firm in truth buoys us along with a moral authority where we are not only willing to obey God rather than man, but where we reject complacency and use our power to create good laws and our own education systems.

After all, our mandate comes from God.

Home education is the fastest growing form of education in the world with a year over year growth rate of 8 percent. Presently, there are upwards of 4 million of us in the United States alone.

The International Alliance for Freedom in Home Education was born out of asking, “What if?” What if within the 3,144 counties in the United States, homeschoolers organized to preserve their own freedoms by making use of the instruments of local, limited, self-government?

At 4 million, that is a ratio of over 1,272 homeschoolers per county. What if we created our own systems where the spheres of Church, Local, and Family governments worked together to create a lawful firewall against state overreach? What if churches opened their doors throughout the week as community learning resource centers with libraries, science labs, classrooms, free to public schooled and homeschooled kids alike?

What if we went to our council meetings, looked our local elected officials in the eye and asked them to give us a pledge of protection for our home education freedoms?

In Illinois, when homeschool families around the state came together to fight HB 2827, a lot of those questions were answered.

In only a little over 2 months, the homeschool community organized and was able to get 12 counties, (over 10 percent of Illinois counties) to pass County Resolutions not only opposing HB 2827, but also affirming parents’ rights in home education.

Several counties went so far as to become “Homeschool-Private School Sanctuary Counties.” The International Alliance for Freedom in Home Education was privileged to play a significant role in equipping homeschoolers to do this.

Presently, we are looking to recruit homeschool families from every county in the nation. We provide coaching and customized county strategies for organizing, getting resolutions passed, getting local churches on board, etc.

We are developing our website, IAFHE.org, as a platform to facilitate this effort. It provides for each county to have its own page and closed communication network.

Please reach out if you are ready to advance home education freedoms in your county. Go to IAFHE.org or email us at info@iafhe.org.

Let’s preserve and protect home education freedoms, one county at a time!

Cora Weber is a second generation home educator, and mother to 7 children. She and her family were missionaries in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe, where a vision to help families and churches understand Biblical principles for nation building was born. She presently serves as Executive Director for International Alliance for Freedom in Home Education.