Schooling

“Record drops in teen math and reading scores.” “National Math, Reading Scores Hit Historic Lows.” “Test Scores Flashing Red!” The headlines roll in weekly, each more alarming than the last. In February, twenty-six schools in Baltimore failed to bring a single student up to the most basic math requirements. The same month, sixty-seven schools in Illinois couldn’t produce a single proficient reader. We’ve reached a national education crisis, and its roots run deeper than many are willing to admit. The pressing question is: why can’t America produce proficient students? But perhaps a more crucial question is: why can’t America produce proficient teachers?

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.

Rockville, Maryland Hundreds of protesters rallied to protest a school board in one of America’s most liberal counties that plans to mandate the teaching of books they brand "sexualized" to public-school children as young as three years old in public schools. The rally-goers, almost all of whom were first-generation Americans or immigrants themselves, demanded that Montgomery County Public Schools restore their ability to opt out of a curriculum they say violates their First Amendment rights.

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.

The Kraft Heinz company has developed a pair of Lunchables meals slated to be served in school cafeterias starting next fall. The initiative has reignited a worthy debate over the nutrition found — and mostly not found — in school lunches. Folks are making a big fuss over the debut of Lunchables, as if the plastic packages of cardboard coasters that pass for pizza are somehow playing sloppy seconds to the gourmet wonders our schools have been crafting up to this point. Unless things have significantly improved since I graduated, Lunchables might actually be an upgrade from what most cafeterias specialize in — mystery meat sandwiches and those limp, anemic crinkle fries that led to my lifelong loathing of ketchup.

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the "Don’t Say Gay" bill, the words "gay," "homosexual" or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law. Quite clearly, the law states that "a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." A few things to note here: "primary grade levels" are defined in Florida as age three to grade three.

GOP Senate candidate Pat McCrory once appointed a state school board member who would become instrumental in adding Critical Race Theory to the curriculum in North Carolina public schools. McCrory, the former North Carolina governor, was tasked in December 2014 with replacing an outgoing member of the state school board with his own appointee. McCrory chose Eric Davis. "Eric Davis has a strong background in education oversight, having previously served as chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education and on the CMS Superintendent's Standards Review Committee," McCrory said in a statement at the time. "We look forward to his work on the Board and the valuable insights he has gleaned from one of the state's largest school systems.

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.

The Washington State Board of Health has convened an advisory group to examine the possibility of including Covid vaccines in the mandatory immunization schedule for children in public K-12 schools and daycares. Unsurprisingly, many parents and concerned citizens — both vaccinated and unvaccinated — are strongly opposed. Public interest converged on the issue ahead of a health board meeting held January 12, at which the immunization advisory group gave a preliminary briefing. Over 3,500 pages’ worth of comments from the public were posted on the Board’s website ahead of the meeting. The letters provided valuable insight into common opinion on mandatory Covid shots for children.

Once upon a time, at a little Indiana community college, I was on my way to becoming a high-school teacher — or so I thought. What I didn’t know was that our training was a form of brainwashing intended to enlist my fellow teachers and me for a political program. Our key text was a political operation masquerading as a trade publication: Education Week. At teaching college we were pushed to subscribe to EdWeek. Its headlines seemed tame and innocuous. For every story on Obama’s wonderful education policy, there were ten fluff pieces about blue-ribbon teachers, or profiles of decidedly overpriced new tech that could be requisitioned and tossed aside in just a few years.

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.

The Biden administration fired a stern warning to five states on  Monday afternoon, warning them that forcing all students to wear masks every day might violate the students’ civil rights. Just kidding! That’s what would happen in a country with health policies that weren’t stupid. In America, we have Anthony Fauci. Too bad. No, the Biden administration’s letter to state officials in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah is health policy as a bureaucratic Matruschka doll: the administration seeks to ban states from banning school districts from banning unmasked faces. Now, masking schoolchildren may or may not be good health policy (it’s not, but indulge Cockburn in the hypothetical for a moment). But isn’t it just that, a health policy?

Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon the cool, dispassionate scales of reason. Critical race theory (CRT) is one. There are different definitions of CRT, most of which contain cute elisions. Sharif El-Mekki, CEO at the Center for Black Educator Development, offers a typical one. ‘Critical race theory is a legal framework,’ he says. ‘It’s a lens for people to be able to apply to law and see how racial injustice and how racism has been baked in many laws in the history of America’. That is partly true about some of CRT’s applications. But the political activist Susan Sontag, not known for mincing words, provided a fuller picture.