Who knows what's best for kids? Hint: Biden and Democrats don't think it's parents

President Joe Biden riled conservatives this week during a speech honoring the nation's teacher of the year.

Biden quoted the teacher in saying, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.”

He then repeated it and continued: “Our nation’s children are all our children.”

It’s one thing for an individual teacher to say that, but it’s another thing entirely when the president does. It also hits on an increasingly common theme among Democrats: that they know what’s best for your kids.

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Republicans – and parents – are pushing back. The GOP-controlled U.S. House last month passed a “Parents Bill of Rights” that would grant parents more access to what’s going on in their child’s classroom. And some of the key education measures that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has backed center on similar themes.

Parents have flooded school board meetings around the country, calling attention to content they believe is inappropriate for their children – often subjects related to sex and LGBTQ themes.

Yet these concerned parents and Republican lawmakers are often slammed by Democrats and the left as tinfoil-hat wearing fascist bumpkins who want to “ban” books (i.e. ensure age-appropriate material is in school libraries).

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A new iteration of ‘it takes a village’?

Biden got a swift response from those who took issue with his comments, including school choice proponents such as a GOP presidential candidate, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.

"We do not co-parent with the government," tweeted parental rights group Moms for Liberty, which has led the charge against sexually explicit content in schools.

Others compared Biden’s words with former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” approach to raising a child.

While it’s true that children’s lives are influenced by a wide variety of people, from teachers to pastors to neighbors, what these Democrats are talking about goes beyond playing a supportive role to parents.

Jason Bedrick, an education research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says Clinton was referring to the government superseding parents. That's true for Biden, too.

“Biden's statement that there's ‘no such thing as someone else's child’ and the ‘nation's children are all our children’ is even more openly calling for the government to supplant parents,” Bedrick told me.

School choice is the antidote

Biden’s comments weren't made in a vacuum. It’s a common refrain among Democrats.

Last year, the Michigan Democratic Party created a firestorm when it posted (and later deleted) the following on social media: “The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.”

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And in Virginia, ahead of the 2021 gubernatorial election, Democrat Terry McAuliffe said in a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Needless to say, he lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin, who made standing up for parents central to his campaign.

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School choice is coming: A school choice revolution is storming the country this year. Will your state be next?

As gender ideology becomes more entrenched in public school classrooms (even for kids in pre-K), I expect frustrated parents who feel they are being ignored will seek out other options.

It’s no coincidence that school choice has expanded quickly in recent years. Florida recently became the sixth state to pass universal school choice, and other large states such as Texas are considering the same.

While Republicans like DeSantis are signaling that it's parents who know what’s best for their own children, Democrats are sending the opposite message.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques 

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden is wrong about your kids. They don't belong to the government