Fellow educators,
On December 23, 2025, I published “An Open Letter to All Teachers in Minnesota: Reclaiming Our Noble Calling Amid Broken Systems and Misguided Mindsets.” In it, I laid out my full, unvarnished responses to Education Minnesota’s questionnaire and my vision for honest, excellent education in our state. Last night, March 26, 2026, I joined your organization’s Zoom forum and used those same prepared responses—word for word where the agenda allowed.
Most of the call stayed reasonable and grounded in rational dialogue. We discussed competitive pay for teachers and support staff, strengthening pensions, health care proposals, higher education accountability, and the role of parental choice. I answered plainly, just as I wrote in December: yes to better compensation and benefits for frontline educators, but funded by forensic audits, clawing back the billions looted through fraud, ghost enrollments, inflated counts, and administrative empires—not by raising taxes on struggling families or perpetuating the same broken machine.
I stand by every word I delivered:
• Compensation and Health Care: Support for a $60,000 starting salary, $80,000 minimum for experienced licensed teachers with a master’s, and $25/hour for vital education support professionals. These must come from eliminating rampant bloat and fraud that diverts billions from classrooms. On health care pools: yes—if they include ironclad independent audits from day one to prevent another slush fund.
• Pensions: Full commitment to improvements within the first two years, including reducing early retirement penalties and adjusting thresholds. The Teachers Retirement Association’s $7.1 billion unfunded liability won’t be fixed by wishful thinking or more taxpayer burden. It requires rooting out the corruption inflating costs—through aggressive audits and prosecutions that reclaim every stolen dollar from the networks that have treated our schools like their personal ATM.
• Higher Education: Public dollars with real accountability. Slash overhead and fraud, let funding follow the student, maintain physical campuses especially in rural Minnesota, and treat AI as a tool to enhance—not replace—the irreplaceable human heart and mind you bring to the classroom.
• School Choice and Vouchers: Minnesota should opt into smart programs that empower parents to choose the best fit for their child—public, private, charter, homeschool, or faith-based. This is not retaliation or punishment. It is healthy competition that raises standards everywhere while holding every school to uniform accountability. Centralized monopoly control has failed our kids for years. Low math and reading proficiency, stagnant or declining outcomes in too many districts, and science scores that have plunged under new standards prove the point. The real threat isn’t choice—it’s the machine that sacrifices children on the altar of power and ideology.
The call was productive until the final question. A participant who refused to appear on camera framed Minnesota’s educational ills as the fault of President Trump. I refuted that immediately and completely. Our failures in Minnesota—cratering test scores, bloated bureaucracies, fraud epidemics, and classrooms turned into ideological battlegrounds—lie squarely on the shoulders of misguided, intellectually and morally broken policies and players right here at home. Not in Washington. Not from one man in the Oval Office. From the thieving and grifting criminal organization that has looted our state for decades: the DFL-aligned networks, nonprofit rackets, administrative gatekeepers, and their enablers who treat education funding like a never-ending slush fund while frontline teachers and kids pay the price.
Fellow educators, it is time to discern for yourselves what is truly going on in Minnesota.
Take a good, honest look in the mirror. Many of you entered this profession with a noble calling—to shape young minds, instill truth, build character, and prepare the next generation for a constitutional republic where opportunity is real. Yet too often you’ve been asked to carry water for systems that prioritize power over proficiency, ideology over basics, and insiders over students.
I’ve walked your hallways—as a former public-school teacher and administrator, and now as a Catholic-school administrator. I’ve blown the whistle on the daycare fraud, COVID cash grabs, election integrity issues, and the broader looting that has drained billions meant for our children. I know the exhaustion of fighting bureaucracy while the real criminals operate with impunity.
Last night’s exchange reminded me why this fight matters. We cannot keep blaming outsiders for problems we created and sustained right here. The grift machine—political, nonprofit, and corporate—has rigged the game. It’s time to confront it head-on: demand forensic audits of every education dollar, prosecute the fraudsters without mercy, cut the redundant empires that never step foot in a classroom, and redirect every reclaimed dime to your paychecks, secure pensions, safe classrooms, and kids mastering reading, math, vocational skills, and honest American history.
Parents deserve real choice. Teachers who show up daily deserve respect and fair compensation earned through stewardship—not extracted from broken systems. Children deserve excellence, not excuses.
This is the inspiring Minnesota we can still build together: one where the noble calling of teaching is honored, families are empowered, corruption is dismantled, and every child has the opportunity to rise in a free and just republic.
True educators—I’m with you. Look past the scripted blame games. Read my December letter and last night’s responses. Discern the truth. Join the fight to reclaim what has been stolen from our classrooms and our future.
Let’s end the grift. Let’s restore the calling. Let’s build the Minnesota our kids deserve.
In steadfast service,
Phillip C. Parrish
Candidate for Governor of Minnesota 2026
Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander
Fraud Whistleblower
Former Public-School Teacher and Administrator
Campaign Manager: Heidi Wanty – heidi@parrish4mn.com | (612) 460-1717
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