Welcome back. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Frank McCormick, who was a public school history teacher for over 12 years.

At Waukegan, is that my saying my correct question?

Yes, correct.

Waukegan High School in Illinois. In June of 2021, he began publicly speaking out against the ideological infiltration of critical social justice in public education.

He now speaks to concerned parents and campaigns for school board candidates across the country and as a contributor to the chalkboard review, welcome Frank.

Thank you so much for your time.

So this topic obviously is very close to my heart because I'm raising a child and also because there seems to be this mass gaslight that's going on where you have the governments and the government sponsored media pretending that the education system hasn't changed at all.

And that this isn't actually happening in the classroom and that today's classrooms are just like they were in the past when it's very clear and apparent that it just isn't.

And I'm someone, I mean 12 years in the public school system, that means you were teaching, I was coming up in that classroom environment and it seems radically different even across just the last 10 years.

Absolutely in 2016 and 2020 were both pivotal moments where I really noticed things starting to change 2016 with Donald Trump, he elected galvanized a lot of teachers.

And 2020 after George Floyd was kind of like this calling like we have to do something we have to transform, we know we've had Donald Trump, we've now had this kind of martyrdom, we have to change our school system.

And the key difference in 2020 was that it became kind of institutionalized, the kind of powers that be kind of made the wokedom, the orthodoxy of the school system.

Right and so what have you seen in terms of the differences because that's a long time to be teaching 12 years is a very long time to be teaching history.

What would you say are the most significant differences that you've noticed?

I would say the policies that started to come down from the school district are just the messaging and tone, things such as making certain books, Dr. Seuss books, disappear from school libraries.

You had kind of official messages that would come out during certain kind of political moments where the school would give an official stance on something which we didn't typically have before they had tried at least to maintain the appearance of neutrality.

And I think kind of you saw teachers organically kind of create movement to have their classrooms become centers of social justice in a way that was probably a little more frowned upon in the past.

So it's just activism that's happening in the classroom at every level and I enrolled into a course recently just taking one course at UCLA and it was shocking to me because again I wasn't in university 10 years ago.

So it was shocking to me to see how much it transformed just in being able to get into the classroom, insisting that children, every student put their gender, what is your gender?

What are your preferred pronouns?

Whatever it is, at least have a couple of students that say they, them, and then you just feel like I felt like the entire time the professor is walking on eggshells. And then secondly the book that was introduced, our piece of literature throughout the semester was completely anti-Trump nonsense.

And I was, it was a media and law class that I was taking and they had factually incorrect things in this book. So they were teaching us that Trump gasped people, gasped protesters during the George Floyd riots.

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