Senior aids in education research for new book

Home News Homepage - News Senior aids in education research for new book
Senior aids in education research for new book
Cassidy Syftestad and Christie Syftestad with author Lance Izumi. Syftestad | Courtesy

When senior Cassidy Syftestad was in fifth grade, she declared independence from her teacher. Now, she’s working to give parents the same freedom.

Cassidy Syftestad recently co-authored “The Corrupt Classroom” with her mother, Christie Syftestad, and Lance Izumi, Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a California think tank. Released this June, the book contains personal anecdotes and data presented under subcategories of indoctrination, religious bias, and sexualization taking place in classrooms everywhere, not just California. The book hit No. 3 on the Amazon bestseller lists in Economic Policy and Economic Policy Development on Sept. 5, the same day Izumi was featured on FOX and Friends.

Cassidy Syftestad’s interest in education didn’t begin in 2016, though. She recalled the time when her fifth grade teacher enforced the concept of taxation without representation by claiming a pencil from each of his students every day of the unit study.

“I was appalled,” Syftestad said, grinning.

At home, she decided to follow the colonists’ example and write her own declaration of independence.

“I changed ‘government’ to ‘school,’ ‘tax dollars’ to ‘pencils,’ ‘king’ to ‘teacher,’ and formally declared independence from him to get our pencils back,” she said.

He returned them.

For Cassidy Syftestad, the story is more than a precocious anecdote. It’s an instance of a teacher who was committed to creating an effective learning environment for his students, a fact her research revealed is becoming increasingly rare. Classrooms are more often used as “political soapboxes” for teachers than places to engage students, she confirmed, sharing an account she found of a Texas teacher who burned the American flag on the ground during classtime to make a point that free speech exists. Another teacher tacked up a photo of then-president-elect Donald Trump on the white board, pulled out a squirt gun, squirted the picture, and yelled “Die!” in front of an audience of high-schoolers.

In most cases, instances like these go unreported.

“The only way parents find out about it is if their kid thinks to mention it,” Cassidy Syftestad said. “If you like recess better than class time, you’re not going to go home and tell your parents about that.”

In the summer of 2016, after finishing her sophomore year at Hillsdale, Cassidy Syftestad returned to her native California to work as a legal intern for Churchwell White, LLP, a Sacramento law firm. There she met Randy Pollock, who introduced her to Izumi. Between their interest in education policy and a “shared affinity for Hillsdale,” as Cassidy Syftestad noted, the two realized they would work well together. Before the lunch was over, Izumi asked her to come on board as a research assistant for “The Corrupt Classroom.”

Prior to his work in education policy, Izumi had worked as a speechwriter for former Attorney General Edwin Meese III under then-President Ronald Reagan. When Reagan left office, Izumi moved to the Claremont Institute, where Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn was serving as president. It was Arnn who encouraged Izumi to focus on school choice issues in his state.

“So I owe my start in education policy to Larry Arnn,” Izumi said, chuckling. “Now it’s all I’ve been doing for the past 20 years.”

In addition to his work as fellow and director of Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Education, Izumi has written several books, including the series ‘Not as Good as You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School,’ and has served as a member and president of the board of governors of the California Community Colleges. He now serves as chair of the board of directors of the Foundation for California Community Colleges.

But the team still wasn’t complete — they needed a teacher to give the project credibility, Cassidy Syftestad explained. Izumi found the perfect match in Cassidy’s mother, Christie Syftestad, who has over 10 years’ worth of experience in public, private, and home education.

“I was really grateful when Cassidy met Lance because it gave us an opportunity to do something rather than just complaining on the internet,” Christie Syftestad said.

The project itself was a daunting one, as mother and daughter collected and summarized hundreds of news articles spanning from 2011 to the present, a task Christie Syftestad reported they could have worked on full time.

“In quite a few of the articles that we uncovered, the research supported that so many of these instances are not isolated; they are in fact trends and patterns that are occurring at all grade levels, K-12,” she said.

The most alarming data, according to all three, was the curriculum used to educate the teachers, not the students. Cassidy Syftestad reported reading a textbook training teachers to steep their compound sentences in social justice theory. Grammar was no longer about syntax alone — it was an avenue for worldview-forming.

“That’s how they sort of politicize it by following the rules,” Cassidy Syftestad concluded.

Bias isn’t limited to the teachers, however — it bleeds right into the classroom itself. Izumi reported several instances he uncovered in which students were taught the Soviet Union under Stalin was no more than a nation with “a poor record on human rights,” while Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were described as “sources of turmoil or disturbance,” with no indication of the millions of lives lost as a result of Communism.

“A student who is learning about those programs would have no sense of the wide breadth of those programs and would have a warped view of history,” he said grimly.

Ultimately, the three wrote “The Corrupt Classroom” as a good resource for parents. By balancing personal accounts with hard statistics, they explained, their hope is to create a convincing case for the right parents have to move their children out of a bad school and into a better one. The opportunity parents have to instill values in their children is critical, Christie Syftestad said—and it begins when they aren’t tied to the value system of a teacher or a school.

“Too much we think, ‘Oh, that’s too big, we can’t change it,’” she said, “and that’s not true—we can. There’s so many of us who think the same way. We just can’t sit back and be complacent. We need to be the hammer and not the nail.”

“The Corrupt Classroom” is available for purchase on Amazon.