Education

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children. History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has had a busy two years. Keeping students out of schools, helping teachers fight for permanent, paid truancy, watching her liberal columnist friends write slobbering, glowing profiles of her in the New York Times — these are things that can really take it out of a woman. So, Cockburn has absolutely no patience for the right-wing internet trolls (or Russian bots, possibly?) who had a good laugh at Ms. Weingarten’s expense this week after she had a small spelling error on Twitter. “We #StandWithUkriane,” Weingarten wrote on Wednesday in a since-deleted post. Big deal, says Cockburn. She was only one letter off, which is almost as good as spelling “Ukraine” correctly. Ms.

While pundits bicker about whether bills targeting critical race theory in schools are ethical or constitutional, an equally important question is whether they’re effective. While such legislation is a workable stopgap to loathsome practices like affinity groups, it can only work as a temporary measure. CRT is manifested not primarily as a set of explicit ideas to be taught like the freezing point of water or the causes of World War Two. Rather, it’s a philosophy that informs the instruction, curriculum, and policies of various districts. We cannot outright ban CRT from our schools anymore than we can ban the influence of philosopher John Dewey. When the culprit is a belief system, bans are the wrong tool.

As the omicron wave crests and public schools face teacher sickouts, strikes, and a rash of student absences, it is worth reviewing some basic facts about the pandemic and public education. The results of last year's experiment in remote learning have confirmed what any minimally competent teacher could have told you from the outset: instructing students online yields disastrous consequences. Indeed, the results are so bad that defenders of a maximally cautious approach can only argue about terminology (please don’t say “learning loss!”) while proposing that we shouldn’t actually measure how far students fell behind under lockdown. Meanwhile, the psychological costs of the pandemic era continue to mount.

With omicron cases rising, many school districts are returning to remote learning for the first few weeks of January. That, of course, could be extended, as we have seen happen so many times during the pandemic. As a school social worker, I can attest that remote learning has been an absolute disaster. Far from the “abundance of caution” approach, school closures have devastated our youth, with many still struggling to function. It boggles my mind that many large cities are repeating this mistake. While nearly all students suffer amid virtual schooling, our most vulnerable suffer the most. The following three hypothetical students exist in every school, as I have witnessed over the past 15 years working with New York City teenagers.

Ms. Work-to-Rule, chair of the local teacher’s union, smiles icily at the bezel. The weekly Zoom conference with the district superintendent and his many assistants is not going in the direction she would like. As schools across the country prepare to resume in-person classes, Covid purists insist on strict testing, vaccine proofs and other protections. If draconian demands are not met, a few big-city locals threaten teacher strikes. Some states require masks for students and teachers regardless of vaccination status. Others prohibit districts from requiring students to wear masks at all. School board meetings might be battlegrounds. The mild but highly contagious variant, Omicron, puts everyone — administrators, teachers, parents, and students — on edge.

Most Americans want schools to promote knowledge and champion principles of human decency. They want schools to be safe. They do not want children race-shamed, or exposed to the anomic and depraved. A fourteen-year-old boy wandering around campus — any campus — wearing a floor-length dress doesn’t sound wholesome to them. What’s going on in “our” schools, some ask, and not in a sunny way. Too many know from experience, at least in metro and blue-liberal districts, that any parent who avows the Ten Commandments or praises the Boy Scout Law might get the fish-eye from the principal. If dad objects to critical race theory or transgender bathrooms, heads explode. A frosty diversity lecture might not suffice. Should we call security or 911?

The English language as written today is often nearly incomprehensible on first reading, and as spoken almost unintelligible and unpleasant to the point where the civilized listener disengages himself in frustration and disgust from the speaker and his speech. The problem in the first instance is the readiness of people who know better to embrace demotic usage in semi-formal literary venues, such as respectable journalism; the second, the bizarre combination of pretension and illiteracy and its results, the jargon and barbarisms ubiquitous in the 21st century.

Have you ever wondered what American schools teach about 9/11? Here is a partial answer. I’ve reviewed five of the most popular American history textbooks for high school.

Jen Tafuto, an elementary school teacher in Manchester, Connecticut, posted a two-minute video on Twitter in which she announced her resignation from her position. She explained, ‘After six years as a teacher in Connecticut, I decided to resign from what I thought would be my forever career because I felt more like a political activist than a teacher in my own classroom.’ Her announcement, originally posted by 1776ActionOrg on August 30, quickly drew a lot of attention in the media. Fox News, RealClearPolitics, USA Today, the Daily Caller, a local Hartford station and a great cloud of bloggers too.