Colorado school boards, superintendents, and principals should consider themselves warned. Parents run the schools and will no longer tolerate far left or “progressive” agendas that focus on the racist judgment of students on a basis of skin tone in curriculums named “critical,” “race” “equity” and more. This disgusting fad is about to implode like “stolen-election” theories.

Tuesday in America’s most progressive city, San Francisco, more than 70% of voters ousted three “progressive” school board members who focused their energy on divisive policies and the renaming of attendance centers. They deemed as “racist” nearly any school named after a white male. They wanted to rename a school called “Abraham Lincoln,” which honors the president who ended American slavery.

Parents don’t care about school names. They don’t want children defined as oppressed and oppressors, even in San Francisco. They want children to learn fundamental subjects.

“…you’d be hard-pressed to find a recall supporter who didn’t speak openly about wanting to close the racial achievement gaps in academic performance that recalled commissioners Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga,” explains a San Francisco Chronicle editorial on Wednesday. The New York Times explains how Chinese-American parents wanted change because the school board members eliminated achievement-based admissions standards in favor of racial quotas.

Racial achievement gaps probably explain why voters empowered center-right reform candidates, many of them minorities, to control school boards in Colorado’s Douglas County, most Colorado Springs school districts, and other districts throughout the state.

As explained in a Dec. 28 Gazette editorial, only 38% of children in D-11 – the central school district in Colorado Springs – were proficient in English Language Arts. Only 31% were proficient in math. The numbers are more alarming when we look at minority students separately.

Only 15% of the district’s Black students were proficient in math and 23% in English Language Arts. Latino students didn’t fare much better. Overall, D-11 scored 159th lowest among Colorado’s 183 districts. Parents are pulling students out of D-11 in droves, with the district losing more than 4,000 students in the past four years despite a massive voter-approved tax increase.

With few exceptions, nearly all major districts in the Springs metro area generated similarly troubling data, probably because the same teachers unions have long controlled schools, the school boards and the administrators their hand-picked board members hire.

New majorities on Colorado school boards should not lose sight of the students. Failing superintendents making high six-figure salaries are replaceable and can find other jobs. Tens of thousands of underserved students in a district are not replaceable and have only one childhood in which to receive an education that determines the quality of their lives. Do what it takes to get results for students and parents who love them.

We’re seeing progress in Colorado. A new board majority in Douglas County recently fired Superintendent Corey Wise because of disappointing achievement among children. The new majority on D-11 is scrutinizing the failing four-year performance of students under the leadership of Superintendent Michael Thomas.

In District 20 on Thursday night, school board members will consider a resolution of statements that puts the interests of students and their parents first. Among them is one that forbids a superintendent from subjecting students to nonemergency “medical treatments, medical opinions, or medical advice without parental or guardian consent.” It prevents the district from ignoring or underreporting “student accomplishments,” and more.

They say the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Our K-12 schools cradle the minds of our children. It is time they get rocked by those who think minds are terrible things to waste.

Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board