Most readers familiar with Luke Rosiak probably know him as the Daily Wire reporter who broke the explosive cover-up by the Loudoun County school board of a rape by a boy in the girls’ restroom. The scandal, which culminated in the accused rapist’s conviction in juvenile court, dominated the news in the weeks leading to the Virginia gubernatorial election, which Republican Glenn Youngkin ultimately won just a year after Joe Biden had won the state by 10 points.
So, you would be mistaken for assuming that Rosiak’s latest book, Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education, would consist solely of red meat for a raging culture war being waged in the country’s classrooms (and school bathrooms). But although Rosiak, an alum of the Daily Caller, Washington Times and Washington Examiner, does investigate many of the schoolhouse conflicts particularly salient to the conservative base, the book’s bottom line is hardly political. As Rosiak characterizes it, the book is “about what happens when schools start putting their resources into everything except preparing our children for college or careers.”
The success of the book stems from the fact that Rosiak starts from an utterly uncontroversial premise felt by parents of all political stripes, namely that children seem to be doing worse by multiple objective metrics, from academics to behavior and mental health. Only then does he dive into the social justice conflagrations that are a bit sexier than statistics, and into competing methods of teacher performance metrics. It is this order that reveals the most compelling part of Rosiak’s thesis: “anti-racism” and critical race theory, woke testing reform, the liberal donor drive to puppeteer students as left-wing activists — these are not the main reason why the kids are clearly not all right. Rather, they are excuses to explain away and obfuscate just how badly the taxpayer-funded school system has failed our children academically, emotionally, and mentally.
To his credit, Rosiak doesn’t spend much time in the woke weeds. (The word “transgender” appears merely six times, for example.) That’s because he’s trying to cut to the heart of the matter, and the cover-up is much less interesting than the crime, if only because failing student performance in math and reading gets much less play in the rest of the media than the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, Soros-funded activists, school closure debates, and whatever other clickbait beckons on Breitbart and BuzzFeed.
Rosiak’s most shocking reporting covers his home turf of northern Virginia. In one of the most revelatory chapters of the book, the Loudoun County public school system attempts to terrorize mathematician Brian Davison. Officials make multiple reports to the police and his employer about him. The devil is in the data: He had had the audacity to request more student test scores to model and evaluate teacher performance better. What Davison found was horrific. But the public system will do anything to conceal just how little it’s succeeding at educating students, just as it will conceal how little it’s succeeding at protecting them. Ideology comes first, and readers who have been observing the school wars in the press may be surprised to find out that the main belief of the ideology that dominates among education administrators seems to be less CRT or transgenderism than the boring old racket of plain old self-interest.
In fact, finish Rosiak’s book, and you’ll understand how his straightforward and sober reporting on a horrific rape cover-up by the Loudoun County school board was contorted into some transphobic straw man by the corporate media. Rosiak never claimed the rape only occurred because the assailant, a boy then wearing a dress, was some stranger taking advantage of a not-yet-active trans bathroom policy. In their haste to fact check a story of their own creation, Rosiak’s opposition ignored the real crime: a rape by a student whose school district then allowed him to go to another school to rape again pending criminal proceedings. Pronouns and pledges to check one’s privilege may make the most salacious headlines, but the great evil afflicting America’s schools, perhaps the biggest scandal afflicting American governance and public life, remains administrative incompetence.
Tiana Lowe is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner, as well as an on-air contributor for The First on Pluto TV.
