These past couple of years have seen an impressive increase in the amount of involvement that parents have in their children’s education. It’s not that parents weren’t involved before, it’s that — out of necessity — they’ve gone from being vigilant to hypervigilant. Closer attention is being paid to curricula and there is far more involvement in school board meetings. Many concerned parents have even run for school board seats, often successfully.
While the increased scrutiny and parental involvement is most definitely encouraging, it is more than likely too late to save public education in the United States. Not all education, just the ongoing, taxpayer-funded indoctrination operation that’s run by the Dept. of Education.
The list of things that are wrong with public schools in this country is too long to examine in depth in one column. Most objective observers would agree that the state of public education in this country is a hot mess right now. Those who claim otherwise are generally leftists who believe that all government is good and/or members of teachers’ unions.
We’ll get to them in a moment.
It isn’t a mess that came into existence recently or quickly. The mess in public education is more like something a sociopathic hoarder would create in a house over the span of decades. Hiring a cleaning service for a day won’t tidy things up. It’s probably best to bring in a hazmat crew and, once they flee in horror, just hit the mountains of debris with a flamethrower.
The flamethrower approach may have helped the public education problem back in the 1980s, or maybe even the ’90s. We’re in sort of a “nuke it from orbit” phase now.
I wrote a short book in 2013 (which I updated in 2018) titled “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower,” which examined where it all went wrong in public education and academia in this country. Yes, it’s an irreverent, comedic take on the situation, but it was all based on some hard truths. In it, I chronicle how the leftist takeover of our education system began with the ’60s radicals, even before the Dept. of Education existed. I treat it with humor because that’s my defense mechanism. There are going to be jokes or liver damage, nothing in between.
It doesn’t take any deep analysis to realize that the teachers’ unions are the cancer eating away at public education in America. They used to have a significant portion of the country duped, but the pandemic forced them to drop their masks. The unions were so awful then that they even found themselves at odds with far-left leaders like former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Relevant: COVID-19 Has Exposed Teachers’ Unions as the Shakedown Artists They Really Are
As long as the teachers’ unions are around and getting their power from their unholy alliance with the Democrats, public schools will be more focused on indoctrination than education. The easiest way to hang onto the power they have — which is immense — is to keep churning out generation after generation of school kids who are 99% leftist before they ever get to a university where commie professors can finish the job.
The teachers’ unions aren’t going away though. The only way their influence can be weakened is through increased options in school choice. Several Republican governors have signed excellent school choice bills into law in recent years. This is where the red state/blue state divide is most pronounced. Blue states are fully in thrall to the teachers’ unions. The most powerful and wealthy political lobby by far in California is the California Teachers Association, for example.
School choice is a winning issue for Republicans, yet few national candidates talk about it a lot. The nation’s Republican legislators and governors get it, and it’s time that GOP House, Senate, and presidential candidates learned a lesson from them.
We can’t keep dooming our children to the indoctrination mills.
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