The state of education didn’t get this way overnight. And it won’t improve overnight—but those who stick with it and commit to making change will see it, little by little. That’s what Ian Prior reminds us of on The State of Education podcast today. He is closely involved in organizations like Fight for Schools and America First Legal that are fighting to correct the wrongs in the system and support parents, teachers, and students.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE:
GET CONNECTED WITH NWEF
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nwef.org/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NWEF_org
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nwef_org/
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdHayyOqPftVoiGEqxYdsg
To hear more from NWEF, subscribe to our other podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1898310
– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
The state of education didn’t get this way overnight. And it won’t improve overnight—but those who stick with it and commit to making change will see it, little by little. That’s what Ian Prior reminds us of on The State of Education podcast today. He is closely involved in organizations like Fight for Schools and America First Legal that are fighting to correct the wrongs in the system and support parents, teachers, and students.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE:
GET CONNECTED WITH NWEF
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nwef.org/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NWEF_org
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nwef_org/
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdHayyOqPftVoiGEqxYdsg
To hear more from NWEF, subscribe to our other podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1898310
– WHAT IS THE NOAH WEBSTER EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION? –
Noah Webster Educational Foundation collaborates with individuals and organizations to tell the story of America’s education and culture; discover foundational principles that improve it; and advance practice and policy to change it.
Website: https://www.nwef.org
Reach out: info@nwef.org
Ian Prior Interview Transcript
Interviewed by Melvin Adams
July 2022
ADAMS: I am Melvin Adams, host of The State of Education podcast. Thank you for joining us today! Many of you have probably seen our guest today on the news. Ian Prior is an attorney and former deputy director of public affairs for the United States Department of Justice.
He is the executive director of the organization Fight for Schools. He has been at the heart of much of the challenges brought by parents against the Loudoun county public school board. Ian, welcome to our show!
PRIOR: Thanks for having me, Melvin.
ADAMS: Alright, let’s jump right in. Let’s go back to the Loudoun county thing—I know you’re still very much in the middle of that—but what were the primary issues in Loudoun county and what caused you to get involved in support of the Loudoun county parents?
PRIOR: Well, it was really an act in three parts, you could say. The first piece of it, I wasn’t involved in. Some parents were frustrated that the schools remained closed.
And they would go to school board meetings, they would voice their discontentment and their displeasure. And they just didn’t feel like anything was getting done, that this was political as opposed to following best practices like other school districts in the country.
And at the same time, there were these parents that would show up and talk about some of the curriculum issues or the direction of the schools—specifically it was the use of Critical Race Theory in teacher training and whatnot.
And those two things started happening throughout 2020, but they didn’t really bubble up to the surface of national news beyond maybe one or two events in school board speakers.
Then what happened in March of last year was there was a private Facebook group called The Anti-racist Parents of Loudoun Couty. Now that sounds fine, but in reality, what you had was this group that was plotting against parents who went to speak at school board meetings—either for opening schools or against some of the woke policies that we’d been seeing.
And they listed something like 60 to 70 people and they wanted to infiltrate their groups, publicly expose them, and hack their websites for anyone who had a website on these issues. And it was really a moment of cancel-culture.
And there have been a couple of things out here in Loudoun over the previous year where you had seen cancel culture manifest itself at the community level—one with all a local business, another with a young girl who was at college.
And parents were fed up and they said, “This is not going to happen. You’re not going to put my name on a list in a group with 600, 700 people, including 6 school board members, administrators, and people that work for LCPS. And that really exploded everything and generated Fight for Schools from that point.
And we started that pact really to be able to bring attention to the things that were on with our school board, at our schools. And we eventually started out signature-gathering process to remove those 6 school board members who, not just had been in the group, but even after it had gotten exposed, they never said one thing to denounce it, most of them didn’t leave the group. They stayed in and basically gave it their implicit stamp of approval.
And so last year, you saw throughout the summer that parents were going out and they were energized—they were getting signatures by the hundreds. It was certainly a tall task but we were making a lot of progress.
Then you really get to the third act, which was when you had a teacher by the name of Tanner Cross go and speak at a school board meeting as a citizen providing public comment on a policy for which they invited public comment.
And this policy was policy 8040 which allowed students to use the bathroom of the gender they identified with. Same thing with locker rooms. It would also require students and teachers to refer to students by their preferred pronouns.
He goes up, he makes his statement, that opposes this. It’s not fiery rhetoric or anything like that, but they put him on suspension. And once that happened, that really drew a lot of attention to this specific policy.
He eventually won his case in court and was quickly reinstated. But by then people were looking at this policy and saying, “This is not what we want and we need to discuss this more. You can’t just force this down parents' throats without giving them the opportunity to explore alternatives.”
And if you actually look at some of the comments around this policy, most people were opposed to it. Now, what we found out later was that at a school board meeting on June 22nd where the policy was being debated, a gentleman was arrested at the back of the room, and later that night the superintendent said, “There are no records of sexual assault in the bathrooms at Loudon county schools.
Fast forward to October, we find out that wasn’t the case. The individual that was arrested, his daughter had been sexually assaulted in a bathroom in May. Which meant that the superintendent grossly misstated the facts, and the school board stood by and did nothing to correct the record.
And now you have parents that are seeing a school system is doing everything it can to hide the truth from parents for their own political reasons, for their own personal reasons. Whatever the case may be. And that’s really the story of Loudoun county and how we got to where we are today.
ADAMS: Wow. so you’ve had some victories and there are lots of issues that are continuing. But what would you say has been one of your most effective strategies in addressing these issues?
PRIOR: Well I think the Freedom of Information Act, for a time, was extremely helpful in helping us acquire the documents and information that really contradicted what the school system was telling us.
But eventually, they caught on and it started with the exorbitant charges. One woman was charged $36,000 for a Freedom of Information Act over a six-month period of asking for documents and emails that had the terms “rape” and “sexual assault.”
So that, right there, should concern you that there are so many documents that it would cost $36,000, but also the cost-prohibitive nature of that. So we were able to use the Freedom of Information Act very liberally at first to get that information.
I would say the other thing is just communicating. Communicating with different parents, teachers, administrators, and even some school board members, to really understand what is going on.
You know, you’re dealing with an a-symmetric situation. You’re on the outside trying to figure out what is going on in the school system. And you almost have to approach it like an investigation—because, really, that’s a lot of what we did was an investigation.
And you need to develop sources that will trust you, you need to be trustworthy with them. You need to talk to people that you may not think would be helpful but end up helpful in some way shape or form.
And then that information, you’re able to get that out to the press, you're able to use that at school board meetings, you’re able to have a beat on what is going on within the school system that you can highlight.
ADAMS: So let’s focus on parents out there, and actually even teachers. Because there are a lot of teachers that are concerned about what is going on in the schools and they’re afraid.
Maybe we should break this into two sections, starting with parents. How can they be engaged in fighting back against questionable school decisions? And at what point should a parent escalate their situation by bringing in legal help?
And then I guess we can apply the same thing to educators—and maybe the same principles apply to both. Talk to us about that.
PRIOR: Yeah, I think the first stop is always going to be for parents, their teachers, and their principal. If they have concerns about what’s going on, they should talk to the teachers and their principal.
Because a lot of this gets painted with a broad brush. “Oh well, this school system is having problems, so everybody must be having problems.” That’s not the case. There are a lot of good principals within a good school system that runs their school tightly. And they can be trusted and they’ll work with their parents.
It’s when you get to the administration level that you get the problems. Now, if that doesn’t work, with the teacher or with the principal, if you have a good school board member, you can bring it to the school board member, and hopefully, they can escalate it and get something done.
Other than that, if you start going down those roads, you need to start looking towards exposing this. Whether it’s getting into a media outlet that will cover it fairly, whether it’s pushing out this information to other parents—really making sure everybody knows about it.
But what we’ve seen is, despite the pressure, despite the national pressure from parents in Loudoun county, they still don’t respond. They just double down. And that’s, unfortunately, where you have to take legal action.
But just last week, one of my titles you didn’t mention [is] I’m the senior advisor for America First Legal on behalf of 11 parents in Loudoun county. America First Legal brought a lawsuit against Loudoun county for a systemic violation of parental rights.
And they’re not paying for that lawsuit, that lawsuit is pro-bono and that is something [where] they’re going to be held accountable, they’re going to have to answer those questions. And hopefully, we’re successful and as a model that can be applied throughout the country.
ADAMS: So as far as two teachers or two parents, let’s stay with parents for a second—I think you made a good point that it’s important for them to start with their teachers, start with their principles, and make sure that things are going on well in their own system, in their own schools.
And obviously to have active engagement with their children—to find out how things are going, what are they being taught? Be engaged. Know, know, know what’s going on.
But then there are some places like Loudoun that have gotten a lot of media attention and everybody knows about Loudoun, but what about that place out there that’s kinda rural and some places say, “Well the rural school board, everything’s great there.”
The problem is [that] there are some places where things are going fairly well and it’s really based on the school board and the local administration in those systems. But then you have places where it’s not okay. And some of those places are very, very rural.
And so how can parents in those places where they’re not getting the attention and where they’re not getting… they’re off the beaten track, what should they do? Does it start by really talking to each other and getting parents well-informed and united and making sure facts are facts? Talk us through that for the benefit of parents out there.
PRIOR: Absolutely, well, Loudoun is unique in that it started with media attention. And then it goes into the illegal atmosphere, right? In other places, there’s no reason that they cannot find an America First Legal, reach out to those organizations like ours, and if there is a case there, then you bring the case and the attention will follow.
Once something is in litigation, people are going to start paying attention to it, so there are multiple different ways of doing it. Sure, you can start with the… let’s shine the spotlight of accountability on the school system and build it up from there with parents going to school board meetings, parents going on TV, going on the radio, explaining what’s going on and that eventually ripens into litigation.
The other option is, you start with litigation. If there’s an egregious-enough offense by one of these school districts and there’s a good lawsuit there that can make a difference not just in the school system, but really throughout the state or throughout the country, then you can start with that and that will ultimately bring the coverage, bring the spotlight of accountability to what is going on there.
There’s not really a one-size-fits-all way to do it, but I think finding what’s going on is the most important piece. And I always say, you need to activate, investigate, communicate, and litigate.
Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily go in the order of communicate, litigate—but generally when I talk about “communicate”, that doesn’t necessarily mean talk about it to the media, because you may not have a lot of media coverage in that area.
But it does require communicating with each other on the ground to understand that, “Hey, this is something that’s happened system-wide. This is not just my opinion or one class in one school, but this is actually what the school system is putting in place.”
ADAMS: Yeah. So, tell us a little more about your organization, Fight for Schools, and the other, America First Center for Legal Equality. Tell us about those groups and what needs they fill in our schools. How wide is the scope? Where all do you work? And how can you be reached?
PRIOR: Sure! Well, Fight for Schools has, up until this point, been primarily Loudoun county and really focusing on bringing transparency and honesty to the school system, the administration, and the school board.
And hopefully, when the time comes next year for our full school board elections, we’re going to be able to communicate with voters to let them know the information they need to go out there and vote and do it in an informed way.
You know a lot of times with school board races, at least up until now, people didn’t pay attention that much. You might get one flier in the mail saying, “Hey, vote for me, I’m going to get your kids better school lunches.”
You don’t know where they really stand on some of these hot-button issues. Well, our goal is to make sure that when we get to those elections, people are fully informed about where these people stand, or are they more concerned with their political careers? Are they more concerned with their partisanship? Or are they more concerned with the blocking and tackling of creating and maintaining a good school system?
So if people want to get in touch with Fight for Schools, it’s simple: info@fightforschools.com. America First Legal is a large organization. It’s a public interest litigation organization that is holding multiple actors accountable.
Whether it’s the federal government, state government, or corporations that are discriminating now on these woke ideologies, worse school systems, and so we have a host of different things going on—not just in Loudoun county but around the country and not just with schools but also with corporations.
Because corporations hold a very large sway in this country from a messaging standpoint and we know a lot of what they're doing is because of their perceived bottom line and it’s important that they recognize that this is not going to help their bottom line.
When you see a company like Disney go out there and get involved in the Parental Rights Bill in Florida and really just fall in line with the Left, they paid a price for that. They paid a significant price for that because it was disingenuous and it was misinformation.
And Disney is supposed to be a family place and here they are advocating against a parental rights bill. So we are certainly looking all over the place for areas where we can get involved in.
So for example you see a lot of these firms such as Morgan Stanley, or other firms like that that will advertise internships at schools. But these internships are discriminatory. They only want certain types of people to apply.
Well, that’s against the law. Those are the kinds of things we want to make sure that institutions and higher education organizations that are pushing this out to students, that they’re held accountable.
That also goes down through K-12 as we’ve seen with Loudoun county and in other areas where we’ve engaged in oversight activities and assisting parents getting access to materials.
We’ve got one case up in Pennsylvania, a gentleman by the name of Ben Auslander—he tried to exercise his rights under statutory law, goes in, looks at the teacher training provided by a specific educational group.
They told him that he couldn’t take pictures, he couldn’t photocopy, so he starts recording on his phone what he was observing. Well, they kicked him out and said, “You can’t do that. It’s a copyright violation.”
Well, on his behalf, America First Legal filed a First Amendment lawsuit in Federal Court and through that process, we actually received 166 pages of the materials that he was trying to inspect.
And you look at these materials and you see this is actually admitting that Critical Race Theory is part of what schools are trying to do to transform. There are no codewords, it just straight up says it all throughout the document.
And so it’s important to have parents like that that are willing to step forward. Like the parents in Loudoun who put their names on a lawsuit to exercise their rights and their rights on behalf of their children.
And to make sure that these school systems are held accountable and that we can return equality to education and get away from the idea that we’re going to engage in equity, which is just guaranteed results regardless of how hard you work, how hard you study, etcetera.
ADAMS: Yeah, absolutely. So, Ian, you’re an attorney. I know you’ve got a good education, but talk to us just a little bit about your own personal philosophy of education. Because I know that the bottom line is, that you become passionate and engaged around things you believe in.
And so yes, you believe in upholding our laws and you’re using that experience and profession to support parents and schools, but, fundamentally, are there core things that you believe—from a philosophical perspective—that are critical to quality education?
PRIOR: Yeah, I absolutely do. I think there are a couple of things here. We always talk about getting back to basics, right? Math, science, reading, writing. But I think we need more than that because we’re not living in the 1980s when I went to school.
You know, we have significant arts programs now, we have significant tech. We have all these kinds of things that children can aspire to that they may not have had 30 years ago.
So we really need to broaden the scope of what we provide to children and give them the option. Not everybody is necessarily going to want to be a lawyer or a doctor. Some people may want to design video games, some people may want to be in the arts.
We need to provide the opportunity for them to reach their goals, not just the goals that the education or parents want them to do as far as what they do when they graduate from high school or move on into the real world.
On things like history and literature, I think that’s where we run into a lot of problems. When you go and you start learning history—I mean, I come from a different perspective, I come from a New England background and the history I learned is probably different from the history in Virginia.
It’s still the same, you’re learning basic facts about what happened, and then as you advance, you can learn a little bit more about the context. And then if you really want to get into the context of it, that’s for later years and then college.
I was a history major in college, so I was able to take some of the things I learned in 4th, 7th, or 10th grade and really dive in. Because at that point you have life experience. You’re able to understand the different realities that existed 400, 700 years ago versus what happens today.
And that ultimately history is the study of human nature recorded. Unfortunately what you’re seeing now is that schools want to tell you not the facts of something and guide you along so you can critically think on your own, they want to tell you, “X” right?
They want to tell you, “Our founding fathers were all racist because they didn’t get rid of slavery when they wrote the constitution.” Well, when you’re in 4th grade that’s probably not the best way to go about it. The best way to go about teaching history is to teach the actual facts.
And then, when they get older and they’re in college, they decide that they really want to dig into all the different issues that were fazed by other regions of the country and different legislators or representatives and see how these things work and what it led to—so be it.
But when you’re starting kids off at a very young age teaching a very distorted and politicized view of our country, that leads down a dark path.
ADAMS: Yeah, the reality is that you have to begin with foundational concepts with kids. Because if you have foundational concepts that are based on truth, that is based on first-eye recorded history, then what happens is you have a premise from which you can go.
And you can always learn from both the good and the bad elements of history. And that’s how we make a better society. But when you erase certain parts of history, then all of a sudden you lose full perspective, and then it’s impossible to understand reality in the first place.
Or even how we can make things better. Because there’s always something that can get better and understanding where we’ve been, where we are now and that collective growth and understanding can help us shape better ideals for the future, potentially.
PRIOR: Yeah, so for me, this encapsulates what we’re talking about when you talk about learning about the Revolution. You start off as a young child learning about this you learn about the basics: the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Yorktown, and the Declaration of Independence.
As you get older, you start to learn more complex things: no taxation without representation, how did the money and the revenues spent on the French and Indian war impact Great Britain’s decisions with what they were doing with the colonists?
And then you go beyond and you now that they're a little bit older, they learn about when they’re negotiating the Declaration of Independence and their independence from Great Britain, you learn [that] Thomas Jefferson wanted to put something in the Declaration of Independence saying that slavery was abhorrent.
But you’ve got Ben Franklin saying, “now wait a minute, you’re going to lose half of the colonies, if not more, and how are you going to do this if you’ve got Great Britain dividing us?”
Well, how do you solve that problem now, looking back, knowing what you did? That’s an exercise in critical thinking that, at the right age, I think would be a great exercise. But if you just start by saying, “The Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers, were all racist.” You never get to that point of critical thinking and figuring out how you make changes that will lead to different results going forward, based on what happened in the past.
ADAMS: Wow, well this is an interesting discussion, Ian, and I appreciate you coming on to talk to us. As we wrap up here, what message do you have for our listeners?
PRIOR: Yeah, I would say that the key message here is that this is a righteous fight. And it is not going to be an easy one, it is not going to be resolved in a year or two years, it’s not going to be resolved with an election.
It is going to take a long time, it is going to take a decade, maybe more, to make sure that our educational system is doing right by our children and is depoliticized.
It should not be political at all. It should be about building children’s foundations so that when they get to the point that they’re adults, they’re critically thinking about issues on their own, through their own experiences, through looking at source materials, and being able to go out there and be the future leaders of America.
And so I think you’ve gotta get in this fight but you have to understand that this is a long haul but you have to understand that this is absolutely a righteous fight that you should be in.
ADAMS: Absolutely, well said. We didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not going to get out of this overnight, but it’s a fight worth being in.
PRIOR: Absolutely.
ADAMS: So thank you, Ian, for your part and what you’re doing. To all of our listeners: stay engaged, educate yourself, find where you can make a strategic difference, and get in there and stay in it for the long haul.
This is not just about our country. This is about our children and their future, which certainly comes back to our country as well. So thank you all for joining us today!