President Joe Biden’s new nominee to the U.S. Department of Education is a frequent promoter of the critical race ideology that parents around the nation have strongly opposed.
LaWanda Toney, the director of strategic communications at the National Parent Teacher Association (National PTA), was nominated by Biden to be assistant secretary for the Office of Communications and Outreach on Wednesday. While the White House bragged about Toney’s experience in the media and education fields, her nomination appears to be another attempt by the administration to usher in an era of critical race-based thinking that parents and legislators across the United States have banded together to denounce.
In addition to her communications role, Toney also frequently co-hosts a National PTA podcast called “Notes from the Backpack” where she often discusses and promotes radical race and gender ideology with left-wing “anti-racist” and LGBT experts such as people from the Human Rights Campaign. In an Oct. 27 episode titled “Supporting Students of Color,” Toney asked her guest if he had any “advice for parents of color whose children are experiencing things like bias or microaggressions, things like that at their school?”
In another episode from September titled “Talking Race and KidLit,” Toney welcomed a conversation about “diversity in children’s literature” and discussed how to expose kids as young as elementary school “to all kinds of people, people of different races, religions, sexual orientations, genders, and cultures.” Toney also facilitated conversations about “identity” in a podcast called “Our Culture is More than a Holiday,” guns in a podcast titled “How to Talk to Your Kid about Gun Violence,” and
“misinformation” about COVID-19 and vaccines in a podcast with a bureaucrat from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.