Leaders of education and parent’s rights groups nationwide had dissenting opinions after first lady Jill Biden recently claimed that her husband, President Biden, will always be “the education president.”
“I knew that Joe would always be the education president, because he knows that … the success of our nation starts with you, the educators who shape our students’ lives,” Jill Biden told a crowd at the 2023 NEA teacher’s union’s annual meeting on Tuesday.
However, education leaders and parents’ rights groups across the country have been skeptical of President Biden’s record on education. “In light of who her audience was, she was probably 100% accurate when it comes to Biden supporting the liberal NEA agenda,” said Sheri Few, president and founder of United States Parents Involved in Education in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Biden is THE most anti-parent education president in the history of this country! And he is THE education president that carries the water for the NEA.”
Few added that the Biden administration has faced criticism for wanting to label parents as “domestic terrorists” for objecting to pornography and critical Marxist theories in schools, and for Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s statement that trans kids belong to all of us.
Dr. Jameson Taylor, American Family Association senior fellow and director of policy for AFA Action, echoed these sentiments saying, “Biden took the easy way out of enabling the mediocre status quo. He has also failed to prioritize the things that matter – reading, writing and math – and is preoccupied with making every school in the country comply with CRT and transgender ideologies that are compromising student safety.”
This criticism comes shortly after the “Nation’s Report Card” showed that reading and math scores for 13-year-olds dipped to their lowest rate in decades, something that Biden’s critics said was exacerbated by school closures that he encouraged.
“If being the education president means sharing a bed with the teachers’ unions, locking children out of their schools for over a year and vilifying their parents for objecting, and subsequently, presiding over the total evaporation of two decades of progress in reading and math, then yes, the title fits perfectly, and he deserves a crown,” said Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education and a former educator.
It is clear that disagreement about President Biden’s performance as “the education president” abounds, and how his policies impact the education system in the US remains to be seen.