Last Wednesday, the United States Department of Education released the utterly disastrous results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The same day, the department also hosted a conference and issued guidance encouraging school districts to mobilize students based on their sexuality for left-wing political activism.

The NAEP data showed that 13-year-olds today are nearly a grade level behind in math compared to 13-year-olds three years ago. It showed that low-achieving students today are nearly three grade levels behind where they were a decade ago. The Department of Education thus released a guidance "toolkit" recommending that schools form GSAs.

Millennials may remember GSAs as "Gay-Straight Alliances," school clubs that encouraged solidarity against homophobic bullying. But that’s no longer what they’re called nor what they do. Today, "Genders and Sexualities Alliances" are, according to their website, intended to "empowe[r] and trai[n] trans, queer, and allied youth to advocate, organize, and mobilize an intersectional movement" for "racial and gender justice" and "intersectional liberation."

The Department of Education guidance also encouraged schools to adopt more "inclusive language." For example, removing the words "mother and father" from school forms.

During one of the panels at the closed-to-press event that accompanied the release of its guidance, the department featured an apparently trans-identifying student who complained that they wanted to live in a world where they could go to the airport. They feel that they cannot do so now because of "like, laws in different places, you know?" They said they looked forward to a world without "transphobes," and implied that they were optimistic that we would have such a world once the boomers died off. They also said that although they usually don’t trust "cis/het men over 50," they have a good relationship with their principal because he punished a student who "dead-named" them.

On the day that news of the academic carnage dropped, the Department of Education chose to telegraph its intent to force schools to punish students who don’t use preferred pronouns. It also chose to insist — contrary to the letter or any plausible reading of civil rights law — that so-called "book bans" could violate students’ civil rights.

Now, there isn’t anything particularly surprising to the substance of all of this. It’s not surprising that the Biden Department of Education would press schools to facilitate left-wing political activism, erase the words "mother and father," or platform a trans-identifying student who has been propagandized to believe that interstate travel is literally physically unsafe.

But the timing here is actually a bit galling. The Department of Education could have picked any day of this month — of this four-year term, really — to release this "toolkit" on "creating inclusive and nondiscriminatory school environments for LGBTQI+ students." It chose to do so on the day that NAEP scores, which any reasonable observer expected to show horrible results, were released.

Conservative parental rights leaders have accused the Biden administration of being more interested in students learning their LGBTs than their ABCs. It sounds like a grossly unfair accusation. It really should be. But last week, the Department of Education played perfectly to this caricature.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.