Mr. President-elect, see all parents.

Dear President-Elect Biden,

About that letter you've received from the Journey for Justice Alliance regarding your pick for Secretary of Education: ignore it.

That letter is a master class on manufacturing consent.

The diverse voices of our families need to be heard, but the J4J letter erases those of us who disagree with the teachers' unions and foundations who fund them. We won't allow teachers' union front groups to Blackwash a narrowly conceived political agenda that shouts down dissenters in our communities.

Neither should you.

Most Americans support public education and teachers, but, unlike teachers' unions, most Americans also support the rights of families to choose how, when, what, and where their children learn. That support is greater among communities of color, which is an inconvenient truth unions constantly sidestep.

Over the past 150 years, *our* communities have suffered in a system of public education that has deprioritized the brilliance of Black and Brown minds. These schools have diminished their potential. We have suffered under democratically-elected and appointed school boards that have appropriated resources unequally between Black and white schools. District policies have assigned our students to the worst-performing teachers; they slow-walk our students into gifted programs even when they are qualified and fast-track them into special education programs even when they don't belong there. Most current research tells us that Black and Brown children are victims of low expectations from their teachers, hypervigilant discipline from their principals, implicit bias throughout their school districts.

All along, organized public employees have bundled their money with ideologically aligned foundations to buy school boards and payoff elected leaders to focus solely on destroying the opportunities to learn Black and Brown families find outside of the racist, misfiring traditional system.

The next Secretary of Education must be a leader with verifiable receipts for educating the children who have suffered too long in a system that values adult career comforts over the learning needs of children. Appointing anyone from the Journey for Justice list of professional activists will be divisive and counterproductive because they haven't been vetted for their knowledge of educational improvement, but, instead, for their compliance with union-first ideologies.

For example, Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig's "scholarship" mercilessly attacks the educators produced by education nonprofits like Teach For America, the families who choose charter schools, and advocates of other reforms that hegemonic teachers' unions have framed as enemies rather than as collaborators. His body of work has done far more to exacerbate the polarized education debate than repair it. How can he logically represent the millions of parents, students, and educators who devote countless hours to improving learning through these avenues that Dr. Vasquez Heilig obviously despises?

Like all American families, Black and Brown people want freedom. Parents who exercise their agency to choose alternative educational opportunities are not going away. We deserve and demand representation too. It alarmed many of us to see you participate last December in a hateful forum organized by national teacher union bosses and their obedient grantees, an event where a wall of police officers prevented low-income parents with differing opinions from entering the building. Like many career politicians, you left us at the altar of hope while you ran off with the muse of transactional politics.

At that forum, you said what they wanted to hear. You wanted their support. Yet, you've promised to be a president for all Americans. You can't do that by abandoning families who don't have powerful national unions fighting for them to have educational options outside of the education deserts they have been redlined into for too long.

All of the candidates for Education Secretary suggested to you by the Schott Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers through their grantee - Journey for Justice Alliance - are not career educators with demonstrable successes for educating children of color. In fact, these proposed candidates are advocates who have chosen one side of a painful education debate and that makes them incapable of representing all of our families.

While these groups constantly call charter schools an "industry" and devise talking points about "privatization," they are a well-funded network of ideologically redundant activists who are attempting to buy their way into one of the most important education offices in the United States. For them, this is a political move, not an educational one. Given their record of defending teachers and education systems that have never done right by our families, we demand you pass on their candidates. Instead, we encourage you to select a leader who will represent EVERY American child and EVERY American family without regard for where and how they choose to learn.

President-elect Biden, Black Lives Matter is a slogan. Big labor and transactional politicians will never lead our real journey for justice. Stand for something bigger. The essential power schools are not imparting to our students is the Black mastery of words, numbers, concepts, theories, philosophies, and history - collectively called education. That must change. You can defeat educational inequality in the United States, but you must first end the needless education wars that pit parents against each other based on how they choose to educate their children.

Make your legacy one built on the tireless pursuit of improved educational results for our children who have infinitely more potential than their educators give them credit for having.

If your leader can't bring together unschooled, homeschooled, private schooled, charter schooled, and district schooled families, then your leader isn't fit to lead.

Fulfill your promise. Be a president for all of us.