Education

Twenty years ago, one of the most popular bits on late-night television was “Jaywalking,” where Tonight Show host Jay Leno quizzed passersby on world events, geography, history and more. He would ask random people on the street about literature, who the vice president was, or who we fought in World War Two. The clips that made the cut inevitably involved embarrassingly ignorant answers. Today, America is a nation of Jaywalking Allstars; whereas it was once a punchline for someone to be that ignorant, ignorance is now the norm. In early May, news emerged about record low scores for history and civics for eighth grade students nationwide.

Exams start on Monday. Thousands of A-level and GCSE pupils will be swotting hard for them right now. Some will do well; others won’t. Knowledge and ability are the two obvious keys to success. But there’s another factor that’s often overlooked: exam technique. Having taught thousands of students of all abilities at several leading schools, I know this is a vital reason why some teenagers are more successful than others: they use the right exam techniques under pressure. So what are these techniques?  First and foremost, arrive early. Exams need a clear head and turning up at the last minute is certain to be stressful.

A “Chinese puzzle” in its classic version is a game where you must fit a variety of ill-assorted boxes inside other boxes. The term came to mean any intricate problem, especially one in which what looks like the way forward leads only to new obstacles.   These days, in which we are warned not to use ethnonyms for fear of giving offense, it might be safer to say something like “brainteaser.” But the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate American society genuinely deserve the old term. The news this past week adds a few curious details to those efforts. Details first; explanations to follow.

Only occasionally in American history does an issue surface that challenges not only the values of an established political party but the party’s ability to function. If any such issue has emerged in our own time, it's clearly school choice. The evolution of such a diverse educational marketplace — private schooling, homeschooling and tutoring, among other options — will severely reduce the Democratic Party’s election workforce, squeeze its finances and even discredit its basic philosophy. Consider first the workforce. If nothing else, the widespread subsidy of K-12 grade schooling in venues not run by teachers' unions would deplete the enormous army of campaign workers that Democrats have come to depend upon during every election cycle.

A public school teacher for three decades, my mother kept me out of them for nearly a third of that time. Her refusal to allow me to partake of the public education system that paid her bills echoed a memorable quote of G.K. Chesterton’s: “Everyone goes to the elementary schools except the few people who tell them to go there.”  If the recent numbers are any indication, more people have followed her example. In 2019, about 2.8 percent of US students were homeschooled. By 2020, that number had jumped to 5.4 percent. And in 2021, it was up to 11.1 percent. Research from Stanford and the Associated Press places the overall increase in enrollment since the beginning of the pandemic at 30 percent.  Around the country, red-state politicians are taking notice.

In a surprise development, teachers' unions in eight states recently announced drives to pass legislation that would establish so-called “wealth taxes.” Working with progressive legislators in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, and Washington, the unions have devised what they believe are the best ways to tap, not just the incomes, but the assets of the most successful earners. Under the bill proposed in California, for example, residents with both financial and illiquid assets would be required to file yearly reports on their holdings, obligating those worth more than a certain amount to pay 1 to 1.5 percent of the total to Sacramento, even if they move out.

It’s just after ten o’clock and about a dozen activists are gathered in a hotel meeting room near Dulles airport. Christopher Stio, an educator with Americans for Prosperity, reminds the group for about the third time, “We are not normal!” He has a point. After all, who in their right minds would spend Saturday in a five-hour grassroots training session at a DoubleTree? The attendees here, though, have an important and timely motivator: improving their local school systems. Education policy became a top issue in 2021’s gubernatorial race in Virginia. Parents were fired up about the breakdown of public schools, from extended school closures during the pandemic to contentious left-wing doctrine being inserted into official curricula.

The end of term is here and parents up and down the country will be awaiting the arrival of their child's end-of-term report. But I hope they won’t be expecting too many pearls of wisdom from the impersonal emails that will ping into their inboxes shortly.   Ten or a dozen years ago (the exact date varied, school by school), in an act of educational vandalism, handwritten school reports were abolished. Edicts were issued by school ‘senior management teams’ and grudgingly, reluctantly, teachers put their fountain pens and little bottles of Quink back into their desks, never to be taken out again.   The personal touch in the reporting process disappeared with them.

On October 10 Mississippi Today ran an article that nicely captures how America’s debate over Critical Race Theory has been marked by far more hyper-politicized nonsense than policy substance. As the author, Bobby Harrison, points out, GOP officials in Mississippi have been taking a victory lap over their supposed banning of CRT. “Here in Mississippi we are leading the way and we are driving the conservative movement,” Governor Tate Reeves said at a country fair. “We have banned Critical Race Theory — and we have banned vaccine mandates.” But the CRT bill, Harrison notes, does no such thing.