Last week, I was excited to join American Sunrise on Real America’s Voice to discuss the crisis inside the education system.
As the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in America, and as a 12th-grade student living through these failures every day, I have a front-row seat to the problems that politicians and bureaucrats pretend do not exist.
That combination—student experience and national advocacy—shapes how I view the growing gap between the classroom Americans think exists and the classroom students actually enter every morning.
During the interview, I explained what I see in my own district. I am fortunate to attend a school where I can openly express conservative ideas without fear of punishment. I have teachers who challenge me and administrators who respect my work.
My experience, however, is not the norm.
The national system is built on a refusal to address controversial issues. Instead of teaching students how to think, schools often avoid discussing topics that dominate the news, from abortion to immigration to free speech.
That silence does not protect students. It leaves them with only one source of information—social media—and social media rarely rewards nuance or serious research.
When schools decline to teach students how to debate, the loudest online narratives fill the void.
Generation Z absorbs whatever version of a topic goes viral, not because young people lack curiosity, but because classrooms rarely create space to test ideas, ask questions, or challenge assumptions.
Civic literacy cannot grow in an environment where controversial issues are treated as radioactive. Yet that model now defines K–12 education in much of the country.
In New York City, incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani has already embraced policies that would devastate the families who rely on charter schools. Success Academy and similar programs deliver some of the highest results in the nation—passing rates above 95% on state math and science exams—while most traditional public schools struggle to reach half of that.
NYC charter schools serve students in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn who would otherwise be trapped in chronically failing districts.
Yet Mamdani, cheered on by teachers-union leadership, wants to dismantle the very opportunities that helped thousands of low-income students succeed.
As I said on the show, Jewish New Yorkers and immigrant communities understand this danger clearly. Families who fought to escape broken systems abroad now face elected officials at home who want to eliminate the programs that finally offered their children a path forward.
The same political ideology that weakens school choice also fuels a culture of hostility toward Jewish students, whose safety is now increasingly tied to policies that reject division rather than inflame it.
That brings me to the federal level, where the Department of Education has proven unable to manage even the responsibilities it claims to hold. The recent government shutdown demonstrated how unnecessary the agency has become.
Schools across the country functioned without interruption. Not one district closed its doors because Washington went dark. Yet taxpayers still fund a bureaucracy that spends more than $100 billion a year and, under the Biden administration, has poured resources into nationwide DEI and CRT initiatives that many teachers cannot even define.
These efforts have not improved academic outcomes. They have only deepened division and politicized classrooms.
The Department of Education embodies federal overreach: expensive, ineffective, and unaccountable.
This is why YouthVote exists. I founded the organization to give students access to real civic education, free of partisan control, and to advocate for school-choice legislation that places families—not bureaucracies—at the center of education.
Young people do not benefit from a system that limits opportunity, suppresses debate, and rewards political conformity. They benefit from competition, transparency, and open discussion.
Until the national system reflects that standard, students will continue to depend on school-choice programs, community-based debate initiatives, and independent civic-education groups like YouthVote.
America’s future depends on young people who can think critically and speak freely. The current system fails to produce either.
The post Gregory Lyakhov: School Choice Is the Civil-Rights Fight of My Generation appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.