Schools

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.

The new school year is just a few weeks away, and that can only mean one thing: right on cue, school districts are once again bemoaning a “lack of funding.” It’s the same story every year. Along with notices advertising the local high school drama department’s production of Grease come headlines announcing the school district is in dire straits and schools will literally fall to pieces if they aren’t pumped full of life-saving funding, stat. Year after year, it’s the same old song and dance: school funding increases, and the next year they need even more. Why is it never enough, though, and where does all the money go?

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.

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.