President Joe Biden‘s statement that children belong to their teachers while at school has drawn criticism from conservative activists, who are engaged in a major political battle across the country over parents’ rights in education.
The president made the comments on Wednesday during a White House event honoring the 2022 national and state teachers of the year.
“You’ve heard me say it many times about our children, but it’s true: They’re all our children,” the president said in his remarks. “And the reason you’re the Teachers of the Year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children; they’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”
Ian Prior, the executive director of political action committee Fight for Schools and a senior adviser at America First Legal, called the president’s comments “appalling” and compared them to an infamous 2021 comment by former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in which the candidate said he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
“It is absolutely appalling that the President of the United States would effectively claim that the constitutional rights of parents to raise their children end at the schoolhouse door,” Prior said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “It’s frightening that Joe Biden is taking his talking points from failed gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe and [American Federation of Teachers] President Randi Weingarten, but at least parents now know exactly where he stands — against them and their fundamental liberty right to make decisions on the education and upbringing of their children.”
The president’s comments, tonally similar to McAuliffe’s last year, come as education problems have been pushed to the forefront of national political discussion amid a grassroots parents movement motivated by extended pandemic school closures and the incorporation of controversial concepts such as critical race theory and transgender ideology into classroom instruction. The issue and McAuliffe’s comments are largely credited as having benefited the campaign of Republican and now-Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who made education and parental rights a major theme of his campaign in the final weeks.
Central to the national debate on education has been the question of whether the community or the parent is ultimately responsible for the proper upbringing of children. For example, in the 1990s, while serving as the first lady, eventual two-time Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton published a book titled It Takes a Village that posited the idea that the community was responsible for raising children, a theme she later reiterated while on the campaign trail. Conservatives criticized her ideas as undermining the nuclear family.
Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for the parent activist organization Parents Defending Education called Biden’s comments a “red flag” and “very unsettling” when viewed in the context of school districts hiding information from parents and the administration’s policies toward activist parents.
“Biden’s comment raises a red flag because, when layered upon school districts refusing to share curricular materials with parents and adopting policies that explicitly call for the deception of parents, the whole thing is very unsettling,” Sanzi said. “Add the National School Boards Association coordinating with the White House on a letter that referred to parents as “domestic terrorists” and is it any wonder parents have a problem with his comments?”
The National School Boards Association infamously wrote a letter to the Biden administration last year asking the Department of Justice to investigate parents protesting at school board meetings as domestic terrorists. The letter prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a memo a week later establishing a DOJ/FBI task force to investigate threats against school board members.
The NSBA later apologized for the letter and withdrew it, but it was subsequently revealed that the administration had expressly asked the association to write the letter.
