Commentary: Teachers Also Think American Public Schools Are in Decline

Teacher

Eighty-two percent of teachers say that the general state of public K-12 education has gotten worse over the past five years. This is according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted in October and November of 2023. That’s not the only shocking statistic from the survey, either, which overall offers a grim statistical map of the fault lines fracturing our education system. However, these trends may offer some insight into how to fix our schools.

First, the teachers. Most teachers (77 percent) find their job frequently stressful, and a large majority (70 percent) say their school is understaffed, which may contribute to the fact that over 80 percent of teachers say they do not have enough time in the work day to complete all necessary tasks.

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Indiana Expands School Choice to Nearly All K-12 Students as Republican-Led States Continue Momentum

Indiana scored the latest school choice victory with nearly all, save for 3.5 percent of families with school-age children, qualifying for the state’s new voucher program, The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted last week.

“The hits keep coming on school choice in Republican-run states,” The Journal editors observed, detailing:

The new law raises the income cap to 400% of the free- and reduced-price lunch income level, which is now about $220,000 for a family of four. The bill also removes the other criteria for eligibility so that any family under the income limit can apply. Tens of thousands of additional students could qualify, and a legislative analysis projects that some 95,000 students might use the program in 2025, up from about 53,000 in 2023.

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Heritage Author Asserts Goal of Leftist Lawmakers’ Demand for Ethnic Studies Curricula in Government Schools Is Erasure of American Culture

A senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation says leftist lawmakers in Democrat-led states such as Minnesota and California are feeding into a culture of victimization and identity politics with their plans for mandatory K-12 ethnic studies curricula, the goal of which, he says, is actually to erase American culture.

In an op-ed at the Washington Examiner Tuesday, Mike Gonzalez wrote that what is most disturbing about the leftist call for mandatory K-12 ethnic studies curricula in government schools is that most of the lawmakers proposing these bills are actually “not in the least bit interested” in learning about the minutiae of the hundreds of ethnic cultures represented in the United States. Rather, “they care only about American culture — or, at least, how to erase it.”

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Florida Board of Education Approves Expansion of ‘Parental Rights in Education’ Bill to Ban Classroom LGBTQ Instruction in All K-12 Grades

The Florida Board of Education has approved an expansion of the state’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill that would prohibit classroom instruction in sexual orientation and gender identity in all K-12 grades, rather than only K-3.

In March 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law H.B.1557, known as the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, a measure that bans classroom instruction by teachers or third parties on the topics of sexual orientation or gender identity in grades K-3, “or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

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Commentary: One-Size-Fits-All Education Doesn’t Work Well, but Diversity Advocates Are Hitting the Accelerator

There’s a world of difference in the abilities of elementary school students in the Trotwood-Madison City School District, outside Dayton, Ohio. Some low-performing fifth graders are only capable of reading first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, says Angie Fugate, a district specialist focusing on gifted education. In the same classrooms, the aces read at a sixth-grade level, devouring thick novels that adults also enjoy, including the Harry Potter series.  

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Commentary: Tennessee’s Conversation About Rejecting Federal Money for Education

Historically, the Federal Government had limited involvement in Public Education. That changed in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) into law.

ESEA doubled federal expenditures for K-12 education and gave the federal government much more input into education. That has been the debate ever since, central control of education versus state/local control.

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College Board Announces Revision of AP African American Studies Course After DeSantis Rejects Pilot for Florida

The College Board announced Tuesday that it will be updating its framework for its Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies (APAAS) course following its rejection by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and his state’s Department of Education (FDOE). The College Board said in a statement its final framework for the course will be released on Feb. 1, reported WESH.

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The School Choice Movement is Picking Up Steam Across the Country

The school choice movement is gaining momentum as states focus on legislation that would give families greater freedom to select their child’s education, advocates told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Utah, New Hampshire and South Carolina are pushing for more expansive school choice legislation that would increase the value of school choice vouchers and the number of eligible students, while states such as Arizona and Florida have already implemented programs that provide vouchers to students outside of the public school system. The increasing push for more school choice legislation across the country is because other states have provided the model to do so, advocates told the DCNF.

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Commentary: The Systemic Racism of the Teachers Unions

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

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Poll: Most Americans Are Dissatisfied with K-12 Education

Most Americans are unhappy with the current K-12 education system, according to a poll released Thursday.

About one in four Americans reported being “completely dissatisfied” with education in America, while 32% are “somewhat dissatisfied,” according to a Gallup poll. Only 9% said they were “completely satisfied” with the education system.

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Elite New York City Private School Director Shows Contempt for ‘White Boys’ Who Push Back Against Her Leftwing Political Activism at School

The student activities director at an elite New York City private school revealed in an undercover Project Veritas (PV) video that she “sneaks” her leftwing political agenda into classrooms “wherever I can.”

“I just keep trying to disrupt wherever I can,” Jennifer ‘Ginn’ Norris is heard saying in the video, the second in PV’s “Education Series” that is titled “The Secret Curriculum.”

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Study Shows Educators Giving Students Assignments ‘Substantially’ Below Grade Level

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic significantly hampering K-12 education, millions of students across the U.S. are working on assignments substantially below their grade level, according to a study released Monday.

Readworks, a non-profit focused on K-12 literacy gaps, studied 65 million assignments given to three million students in the 2020-2021 school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused students to miss months of learning, according to the report. Students were given assignments below their “grade level,” or academic expectations correlating to their age, one-third of the time.

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Kirk Cameron Presents ‘The Homeschool Awakening’: ‘The Public School System Has Become Public Enemy No. 1’

A new documentary presented by actor and filmmaker Kirk Cameron urges American parents to embark on the journey of homeschooling in order to regain control of their children’s education and protect the future of America.

Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), CAMFAM Studios, and Fathom Events announced on Monday the debut of Kirk Cameron Presents: The Homeschool Awakening, which will be in theaters for two nights only, on June 13 and 14, at 7:00 p.m. local time.

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Radical Illinois School District Curriculum Will Teach Children as Young as 4 Years Old About Ending ‘Gender Binary’ System Created by White ‘Colonizers’

The Evanston-Skokie School District 65 will teach children as young as four years of age to celebrate the transgender flag, to try on different pronouns, and that the “gender binary” created by white “colonizers,” based on male and female sex, must be broken.

Education researcher Chris Rufo obtained the curriculum documents, which he published at City Journal last week.

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LGBTQ Activist Group Urges American Students to ‘Take Vow of Silence’ in Schools to Address ‘Anti-LGBTQ Behavior’

The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) rallied U.S. students to participate in their annual Day of Silence Friday, during which the students are supposed to vow to remain silent in school, supposedly to draw attention to claims of “anti-LGBTQ behavior.”

According to GLSEN, which was founded by gay activist and former Obama administration “Safe Schools Czar” Kevin Jennings, the “Day of Silence” is “a national student-led demonstration where LGBTQ students and allies  all around the country—and the world—take a vow of silence to protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ people in schools.”

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Massachusetts Parents Sue School District Alleging Officials Violated Parental Rights by Secretly Encouraging Gender Transition

Parents in Ludlow, Massachusetts, filed a federal lawsuit that alleges school officials secretly promoted their children’s gender transition and violated their parental rights by choosing not to inform them about issues related to their children’s health and well-being.

The parents, Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, and Jonathan Feliciano and Sandra Salmeron, claim in their lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Springfield Division, the Ludlow School Committee and district officials “have exceeded the bounds of legitimate pedagogical concerns and usurped the role” of parents “to direct the education and upbringing of their children, make medical and mental health decisions for their children, and to promote and preserve family privacy and integrity.”

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Surge in Homeschooling Families Continues after Schools Reopen

The number of families homeschooling in the United States has remained significantly above pre-pandemic levels even though government schools have reopened.

The number of homeschooling students increased by 63% during the 2020-2021 school year in 18 states that shared data, AP reported. That percentage then dropped by only 17% in the next academic year.

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Florida Rejects 41 Percent of Submitted Math Books over CRT, Other Issues

The Florida Department of Education is rejecting more than 40% of the mathematics textbooks submitted to be used in the upcoming school year, citing critical race theory, Common Core and other language included in them that violate the state’s new standards.

“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the department said in a news release.

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‘Trans Demiboy’ Elementary Teacher: ‘Heterosexuality Is Pushed on My Kids on a Daily Basis at a Very Young Age’

A video posted to the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account features a self-described “trans demiboy non-binary” elementary school teacher who argues parents’ claims that pre-K through third grade children are not ready for indoctrination in gender ideology are signs of “internalized homophobia and transphobia.”

“Hi, I’m a queer teacher and I, 1,000 percent, do not support this bill,” states Amanda Tooley, who apparently now uses the name “Skye” and goes by “Mx. T” in her classroom at Saturn Street Elementary Arts and Media Magnet School in Los Angeles.

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New Jersey to Require Youngest Students to Be Indoctrinated in Gender Ideology

New Jersey will begin teaching its youngest students this fall that it is “normal” to “feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘girl’ parts.”

In June 2020, New Jersey LGBTQ activists, including abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood – now the second largest provider of transgender hormone treatments in the nation – praised Democrats for approving sex ed standards that indoctrinate young elementary students into the dogma that the science of biological sex is subservient to activist-invented gender ideology.

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Kerry McDonald: Parents’ Demand for More Education Options Has Been Met with Greater Innovation in Providing Alternatives to Public Schools

Kerry McDonald

Senior Education Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) Kerry McDonald told The Star News Network the time is ripe in America for greater innovation and entrepreneurship in providing new education models for parents exiting the government school system.

Many parents got an up-close look at what their children are learning in public schools for the first time during the pandemic school closures and subsequent remote learning, leading them to consider education alternatives.

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Corey DeAngelis: More School Choice Creates Greater Incentive for Teachers’ Unions to Push Student-Focused Policies

Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children

In an interview with The Star News Network, nationally known school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis said teachers’ unions would be incentivized to push for more student-focused policies in public schools if school funding followed the child and more states adopted school choice programs.

DeAngelis, the national director of research at the American Federation for Children, is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation.

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Documentary Exposes Critical Race Theory and ‘Corrupting Influence of Teachers’ Unions’ on Education of American Children

Young girl in pink long sleeve writing

A new documentary exposes Critical Race Theory (CRT) as the “hidden agenda in America’s schools,” as it also emphasizes the “corrupting influence of teachers’ unions” and urges a return to the true education of American children.

Fathom Events, the film’s distributor, notes on its website Whose Children Are They? seeks to “pull back the curtain about what is truly happening in our public schools today.”

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Study: More Than One in Three Children in Early Elementary Grades Unlikely to Read on Grade Level by End of School Year

A study released last week has found more than one in three children in grades K-3 are unlikely to be reading on grade level by the end of the current school year unless they receive major remedial help.

Curriculum and assessment company Amplify analyzed data from more than 400,000 students in kindergarten through fifth grade and found that, while students have begun to rebound from the learning loss suffered during school closures amid the coronavirus pandemic, considerable gaps remain in basic reading skills, Education Week reported.

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Commentary: Critical Race Promoters Are More Odious than Marxists

Of late, Fox News has been hosting a series called “The MisEducation of America” featuring gatherings of critical race theory’s critics—such as Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University—focusing on the danger of teaching racially divisive versions of American history. According to Swain, a black professor of political science at Vanderbilt, forcing kids to do things like play games called “privilege bingo” are “a prime example of how CRT, has seeped down to K-12 education, and it disturbs students.” Further: “All of these critical theories with Marxist roots are destroying American education, and parents have to save their children. But they also have to work to save other people’s children.”

Although the media and our universities may choose to ignore Swain’s complaint, she is actually understating the problem she and “MisEducation” host Pete Hegseth are featuring. I’m not sure I see “the Marxist roots” of the crusade against white people and their history in quite the same way Swain and Hegseth see it. We are indeed witnessing class warfare but not of the kind that Marx foresaw. It is a war being waged by white elites against the “basket of deplorables,” the predominantly white, working-class, and small-town Americans whom these elites hate and want to divest of human dignity. Similar conflicts are going on simultaneously in other Western countries, featuring equivalent social conflict.

In none of these cases do we find Marx’s appeals to the proletariat to rise up against those who control the means of production. In fact, we are witnessing exactly the opposite. An alliance of corporate capitalists, feminists, the LGBT lobby, and black race hustlers are directing their fire on the working class, which seems to be the least affected by the hegemonic ideology of wokeness. If anything, we are now looking at what Pedro Gonzalez has characterized as “the counterrevolution of the ruling class.” If Marxist theory, which supposedly is “seeping in” has any application, it would be as an analysis of how our elites are suppressing those they are stepping on and trying through increasingly vicious hate speech to isolate.

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Commentary: Dear Policymakers, Homeschooling Is Here to Stay

Homeschooling is here to stay and the time has come for policymakers to acknowledge that fact. After years of increasing at a rate of about 3 percent a year, the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children has spiked, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the portion of children being homeschooled doubled from 5.4 percent during the 2019-20 school year to 11 percent in 2020-21. Among Black families, homeschooling jumped nearly five-fold during that time, from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent.

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