Who’s Your Daddy?

It’s been an amazing week in California news, both for what’s in it as well as what’s not. The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that sex-assault claims are so widespread in Los Angeles Unified schools that board members took a break from their liquidation of the bourgeoisie to ask Evil Wall Street bankers to finance another $250 million for settlements. That brings the district’s total budget for its apparently popular sex-with-kids program to $750 million.

Meantime, neither the Los Angeles Times nor any other major California news org noted the release of a year-long federal investigation into California’s schools. In its eye-popping 20-page report, the U.S. Department of Education concludes that top California officials ran – are still running! – a massive scheme to hide student gender-transition plans from parents. Parents, state officials believe, are a danger to their own children, a danger so terrifying that only government officials can parent the little ones.

That finding could mean the loss of nearly $5 billion in federal funding for California schools.

The point in juxtaposing these hair-raising stories is to underscore the irony: the very education officials who believe that parents can’t be trusted to manage their child’s alleged gender issues at school are running a state school system that looks like Epstein Island.

In its report, federal investigators say California officials “have systematically fostered a legal environment where schools maintain, or feel obligated by law to maintain, information about a student’s ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ that is actively withheld from parents.”

“It is clear to this department that the State of California has gone out of its way to ensure districts, schools, and individual staff feel obligated to violate FERPA” – the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act – “when faced with the decision of turning over records to parents,” the report concludes.

FERPA isn’t some new Trumpian wrinkle. “Congress passed the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in 1974 to assure parents of students access to their educational records,” the feds note.

Despite the plain language of the federal law, California officials have created a series of workarounds. The California Department of Education offers “guidance” to local school districts that emphasizes state antidiscrimination law but ignores FERPA. Following that one-sided state guidance led some school officials to hack their own student-records software programs – hoping to rewrite computer code that would eliminate the possible disclosure of student “gender transition plans” to parents.

Some local officials courageously resisted. Ignoring the state’s guidance, they acted on the compelling and historic logic of parental authority and notified parents of gender issues. Many of them were beaten into submission.

State officials, including state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, disrupted local school board meetings. They cheered punishing local political campaigns directed by friendly neighborhood teacher unions against school board members who dared to stand up for parental notification policies.

The U.S. Department of Education report spends a significant amount of ink on lawfare, particularly the weaponization of lawsuits brought by the report’s super-villain, Attorney General Bonta. The report shows that Bonta uses his office to file lawsuits against recalcitrant local school district officials like the unbowed trustees at Chino Valley Unified.

The result of the state-directed pressure campaign was to violate parental rights guaranteed by FERPA, the federal report says.

Last summer, the report reveals for the first time, the U.S. Department of Education tried quietly to persuade California simply to follow federal law. The state refused. Its defense: It’s not the state’s job to instruct Local Education Agencies (called LEAs) on federal compliance.

On the contrary, the feds say. Accepting federal education dollars comes with a promise to comply with FERPA. “No funds shall be made available under any applicable program to any educational agency or institution which has a policy of denying, or which effectively prevents, the parents of students who are or have been in attendance at a school of such agency or at such institution, as the case may be, the right to inspect and review the education records of their children.”

Second, given the federal government’s finding that California has violated FERPA, the U.S. secretary of education is authorized to “terminate assistance” – to cut off that federal funding

“Approximately $4.8 billion remains available for drawdown by the CDE, including both discretionary grants and formula grants,” the feds say pointedly.

That seems pretty straightforward. But this is California, where making movies about political corruption involving rich businesspeople is an industry and where almost all actual politics is pure theater.

Attorney General Rob Bonta responded quickly to the threat of a federal funding cutoff with a remarkably dumb lawsuit. He ignores the plain language of FERPA. He ignores the fundamental authority of parents over their children, a notion embedded deep in the human animal and which finds its expression in every major world religion and in almost every time and place – except of course in chaotic Soviet-style programs that bear an uncanny resemblance to California’s public schools.

Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.