Public school

Friday

Bethany Lorden

Elites keep making education about themselves

This month, Congress put school-choice funding on offer to the states as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Progressives have bashed the provision for the harm they claim school choice will do to under-resourced school districts. But the program saps not a dollar from public schools, which shows the protest for what it is: elitist bluster. The same progressives who fumbled their schools’ Covid responses, instituted woke curriculum and pushed adolescent gender transitioning should not decree to parents which school is best for their children. Public schools have not earned Americans’ trust over these past few years; many private schools have. Under the new measure, families can receive a tax credit for donations to an approved scholarship-granting nonprofit organization.

Elementary school

Thursday

Amber Duke

The Washington Post’s assault on homeschooling

The number of parents choosing to homeschool their children has risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic. There are plenty of reasons for this trend, but the overarching issue was that parents simply lost trust in the public education system, whether because of the adoption of illogical Covid policies pushed by teacher’s unions or the introduction of controversial, politicized content into curricula. It became clear over the past few years that school boards and teacher’s unions mostly don’t have the best interests of students in mind, are resentful of parental involvement and are willing to lie if it means avoiding accountability for their bad decisions. The effect of liberal control over public education? Math and reading scores in the US are at their lowest level in decades.

media

Monday

Marc Oestreich

Four bold but real predictions for public schools this year

Last year’s report card for public schools? A resounding “must do better.” Trans athletes ruined competitive sports, the 1619 Project rewrote American History class and non-gendered bathrooms received their first human litter boxes.  As the final school bells rang on the 2023-23 school year for many Americans, popular opinion of our public schools plummeted. One Gallup poll showed just a quarter of Americans now have either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in public schooling. That represents a stark downward trend from around 1975 when more than 60 percent were confident in what schools were offering our youngsters. While trust tanked and academics atrophied, spending on education has climbed in direct inverse.

schools

Sunday

Teresa Mull

Don’t believe everything you hear about the ‘teacher shortage’

According to the mainstream media, there’s a national teacher shortage, though ongoing reports of this “catastrophic” phenomenon have left me skeptical. On one hand, there does seem to be a shortage of almost every type of worker these days, yet on the other, public school teaching has traditionally been a comfortable sort of job, offering a pretty predictable schedule, plenty of time off, benefits, and the rewarding opportunity to improve children’s lives. Where I live, teaching is considered a high-class career. It has its fair share of challenges, no doubt, but it's also not a sector where I would expect to see a shortfall of employees.

Wednesday

Jennifer Sey

When will Fauci admit the ‘open schools’ parents were right?

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Glenn Youngkin’s transgender policy is just common sense

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has delivered a major win for the school board parents who helped propel him to victory in 2021. Starting in October, the state's public schools will be required to adhere to a new policy regarding transgender students. The updated guidance, first reported by the Daily Wire, is rooted in truth, parental rights, and plain ol' common sense. Transgender students are now only allowed to change their names on official documents with permission from their parents. Students must also demonstrate a "persistent and sincere belief" that they identify as a different gender. "Overnight travel accommodations, locker rooms and other intimate spaces used for school-related activities and events shall be based on sex,” the policy also says.

youngkin

Tuesday

Terry and Katie Schilling

Why we pulled our kids out of public school

Public schools have had a rough few years. Since the start of the pandemic, parents have pulled more than one and a half million kids out of the public education system and turned elsewhere. Anecdotally, Catholic and other private schools in our area have wait-lists miles long now, filled with public school refugees. By some estimates, too, homeschooling rates doubled between spring and fall of 2020, and haven’t dropped significantly since. We were part of the public-school-to-homeschool exodus in early 2020 — and in our opinion, a lot of the public commentary attempting to explain the phenomenon misses the mark. Most theories focus almost exclusively on Covid lockdowns. There’s certainly a lot there to be angry about.

public school