Tag Archives: Public Education

Government-Run Schools: Legally Sanctioned Child Molesters

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Imagine if some private company opened up a school. People were forced to pay for the school with the threat of fines or imprisonment. The school gets to hire whomever it wishes to teach whatever it wishes to teach, with no accountability whatsoever.

By “no accountability” I mean: The teachers and school officials get paid, and the school stays open, even if nobody goes; or even if the results are poor. But most people are forced to send their kids to this school, because most cannot afford any other schools.

If I proposed something like this, you would say that I’m crazy. Yet this is EXACTLY what government-run schools are.

I blame the government for inflicting this situation on people in the first place. But, frankly, I blame parents who keep sending their children into these schools and expecting the outcome to be any different from what it is.

Parents would NEVER let strangers go off with their children for hours on end, especially if those strangers face no accountability for physically injuring or sexually abusing their children. Yet they let strangers openly and brazenly committed to indoctrination, brainwashing, “grooming” and all the rest take control of their childrens’ bodies and minds for 12 years on end. And they marvel at the disastrous outcome.

You can’t fix stupid. The government and its schools are clearly unadulterated evil. But people who keep delivering themselves (and their children) into the hands of evil, while expecting different results, really have to take at least SOME responsibility at SOME point.
Not a popular view, I realize.

But the truth is never popular … until it sets in with 20/20 clarity. Then you can’t run from it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

School Choice and Segregation: Fact and Fiction

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According to a study released in mid-May by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, “one in six students attend a school where over 90% of their peers were of the same race in the 2018-19 school year.” The publication of the report was timed to mark the 68th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision which ruled that state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional.

While this may be news to some, the results are hardly surprising. For varied reasons, people tend to live in areas populated by those similar in race and class. And to complete the picture, we have a ridiculous zip-code mandated education system, which, courtesy of the Big Government-Big Teacher Union duopoly, forces children to go to the public school that is closest to their home – no matter how awful it might be – throughout most of the country.

Then, on the educational freedom front, a RealClear Opinion Research poll in February revealed that 72% of the respondents support school choice, with just 18% opposed. The results don’t vary much by race, with 77% of Hispanics, 72% of Whites, 70% of Blacks, and 66% of Asians expressing support.

In March, the American Federation of Children released the findings of a survey which shows that 77% of those surveyed support education-savings accounts (ESAs), which allow parents to withdraw their children from public schools and receive a deposit of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts with restricted but multiple uses. Interestingly, the poll finds that 75% of Democrats support ESAs, as do 85% of Hispanic voters and 84% of Black voters.

And unsurprisingly, when any privatization measure shows promise, the teacher unionistas and their fellow travelers step up their deceitful propaganda campaign. Traditionally, their argument has revolved around money. The unions claim that “privatization siphons funds from public schools.” This is a terrible argument for so many reasons, but mostly because we should be funding students, not systems. The union’s other main talking point – used increasingly these days – is that school choice is racist.

The ever-quotable Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, insists, “Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” (A question for Weingarten and other choice-haters: While you despise any public money going to a parent who wants to send their child to a private school, you praise Pell Grants. These federal dollars go to needy college students, and can be used to attend private colleges, including religious schools like Notre Dame and Brigham Young. But on the k-12 level, giving parents choices – vouchers, ESA’s, etc., especially if used at a religious school – is your worst nightmare. Why is the private option perfectly okay for college students, but not elementary and high schoolers?)

The rarely coherent teacher union mouthpiece Diane Ravitch blogged in early May that the “origins of school choice are well-known; resistance to the Brown decision.” She blathers on, referring to libertarian Milton Friedman as a “right-winger,” and asserts that “Republicans are dedicated to destroying public schools, and stealing their funding.” Then doubling up on her wackiness, she exits with, “My addendum: if they destroy our public schools, they will destroy public libraries, public lands, the right to vote and, in time, our democracy.”

The National Education Association, the biggest union in the country, is a pit-bull on the issue. It regularly slams any privatization measure. In an extended piece on their website, the union trots out all the usual bromides – including that choice will lead to resegregation.

Homeschooling is also in the crosshairs of the purveyors of the segregation myth. In May, MSNBC got into the act, sharing a tweet claiming that homeschooling is being driven by “the insidious racism of the American religious right.”  

And now for some facts.

Regarding the siphon argument, Martin Lueken, Director of Fiscal Policy and Analysis at EdChoice, researched the actual school choice participation rates and found that it “does not have a negative effect on public-school systems or their funding. In fact, research suggests that greater take-up in choice programs leads to better student outcomes for the vast majority of students choosing to remain in public schools. Looking at these facts, it seems clear that the claims of exodus and harm caused by choice programs are greatly exaggerated.”

Another analysis examined 11 choice programs across eight states and D.C. Of the 26 studies examining the effects of these programs on public school students, 24 reveal positive effects, one study shows no visible effect, and only one finds negative effects.

Concerning segregation, 10 empirical studies have examined private school choice programs, and nine find that the programs reduce it, while one shows no visible difference. Not one revealed that choice leads to any racial discrimination whatsoever.

Despite the ridiculous homeschooling assertion made by MSNBC, the number of Black homeschoolers jumped, from 3.3% to 16.1% in 2020. Thus, Black children are homeschooling in much greater numbers than their White counterparts.

The Milton Friedman allegation is miles beyond inaccurate. In fact, Friedman and likeminded souls began touting vouchers as a strategy to combat segregation. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, researcher Phillip Magness explains that Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes of school choice and began attacking it “as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.”

So, now just who are really the racists? The ones who want to free Blacks to choose their schools? Or those who force them to go to their frequently failing zip-code mandated school?

Going forward, school choice should be branded as a civil rights issue. Lt. Col Allen West said it best in a recent opinion piece.

“We must reassert educational freedom and parental choice in America, this is the new civil rights battlefield. My very own parents made the decision about my early education realizing that a good quality education unlocks the doors to equality of opportunity. If we continue down this current path we lessen the opportunities for our children, but we increase the ability for others to determine their outcomes. If taxpayers, parents, are the ones funding public education, then they are the investors and have a definitive interest in their return on investment.”

Amen, brother West!

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

Public Schools are Dangerous—Defund Public Schools—NOW

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The media wants us to pay attention to the bloodbath in Texas right now — to that, and absolutely to nothing else.

They want us to pay attention to it with a certain slant. The slant is, “Guns are bad. If we just outlawed guns, this wouldn’t happen.”

They don’t want us to ask any other questions, other than, “How soon can we outlaw all guns, and repeal the Second Amendment?”

These sycophants and ideologues in the media DO NOT CARE about the pain or plight of grieving parents. They care about being SEEN as if they do. They are every bit as much the actors as the people you see performing on your favorite Netflix series. Acting is an honorable profession. Media and “journalists”, as we know them, are prepetrating the greatest, most sickening fraud in all of human history.

Nobody asks the question: What’s wrong with government-run schools? Why can’t they — or won’t they — keep children safe? Private schools keep children safe. Why can’t public schools? Because government schools are going to remain dangerous, even after you demand that all peaceful, law-abiding, nonpsychotic people turn over their weapons of self-protection.

Our government takes toys off the market if half of one percent of children die while playing with them. But government-run schools are proving far, far more dangerous to children than any toy ever could. How many brutal shootings resulting in dead children have occurred in Catholic schools? Or Jewish schools? Or Montessori schools? I can’t think of even ONE single case. ALL of these shootings are happening in “gun-free zone” government-run schools.

It seems obvious: Public schools are toxic. The risk is far, far too great of sending your children to one of these monstrosities. To say nothing of the intellectual brutality committed against children every day, by saturating them with fascist, Communist, Marxist, brazenly racist, government-sanctioned propaganda.

I fail to understand why ANY parents still send their children to government-run schools. Homeschooling seems like a better option, educationally as well as eliminating the risk that your children will be mauled or murdered on a typical school day.

Public schools are the problem. They should be defunded. Parents should get tax credits for education, as a transition to a totally free market for education. We have (more or less) a free market for shoes, clothes, airlines, automobiles and groceries. Why no freedom in education?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Forcing 1 Million Escaped Students Back to the Public School Plantation

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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The Great Public School Exodus, as some are calling it, is transforming the educational system.

As the New York Times recently noted, “America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020.” School systems in woke states were hardest hit. “New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years” while California lost a quarter of a million students.

The total loss of over a million students leaves public school enrollment at a historic low.

Even while trapped in a failed system, those kids still meant money in the bank for teachers’ unions and the leftist politicians funded by dirty money looted from property taxes. Now that they’re gone, both Democrats and unions want to bring back their property to keep the cash.

Democrats could try to win back the million students and their parents who fled a failing system. They could try to retune schools to better compete with private schools, charters, homeschooling, and other alternative options to the failed public school system.

Otherwise how are you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm now that they’re seen what a  functioning educational system that puts math and science ahead of wokeness looks like?

In the face of parental revolts over efforts to bring graphic sex, racism, and sexual identity grooming into classrooms, Dems could give parents greater control over school curriculums.

Instead they’re trying to destroy any alternative to the system whose teachers fund their party.

Last week, minority parents protested outside the White House against Biden’s new war on charter schools. Even while the media eagerly covered every pro-abortion activist wearing a handmaid costume, 1,000 parents rallying at the White House received virtually no coverage.

Why are minority charter school parents upset?

The Biden administration’s assault on charter schools comes by way of rules which, much like the CDC’s school reopening regulations, were likely written with a great deal of input from the UFT and teachers’ unions, are meant to cut off alternatives to the failed public school system.

After attacking school choice and now charter schools, all that’s left is homeschooling, and educrats have been pushing for “reforms” to crack down or eliminate that option entirely.

Elizabeth Bartholet, the director of Harvard Law’s Child Advocacy Program, described the “homeschooling phenomenon” as a “threat” to society, claiming that conservative parents “homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy”, “promote racial segregation and female subservience”, and “question science”.

Her paper called for a “presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.” These views are not fringe.

Other leftist activists are targeting Christian and Jewish religious schools, often under the guise of front groups like the anti-Orthodox Yaffed. Under Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, New York’s Jewish and Catholic schools banded together to resist the leftist assault on their schools.

But the smears and efforts at regulation continue to be mainstreamed among Democrats.

Examples include the “Don’t Say God Bill” (or as its backers call it, Senate Bill S6423 or the Right to Learn Bill) by New York Senator Robert Jackson who boasts of being awarded the highest honor by the United Federation of Teachers which also targets religious schools.

Beyond the obsession with ideological indoctrination, it’s also about following the money.

Teachers’ unions remain a major contributor to Democrat candidates and to the Left’s activist machines, and their members are campaign foot soldiers whose loss would be devastating.

For example, the New York State United Teachers alone accounted for $5.8 million in 2016 spending. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association spent over $35 million in 2020. Beyond that they ran phone banks and got out the vote.

The vast political power bought by teachers’ unions allowed its members to keep schools shut down during the pandemic, destroying the education of an entire generation of students.

The Democrats only forced school reopenings when poll numbers turned catastrophically bad and Virginia turned red. But they still face the problem of over a million missing students.

Enrollment declines also mean that fewer teachers and schools will be needed. And while teachers’ unions routinely fight to minimize class sizes, not because they want to be better teachers, but because they seek to maximize their employment numbers, there’s only so many crooked contracts that can offset a decline of 50,000, let alone 250,000 students.

Unions and Democrats need those kids back in public schools. There’s a lot of money and power riding on it. Declining unions won’t have as much money to give to the Democrats. And fewer teachers will mean less activists manning phone banks or knocking on doors.

Biden is trying to put those escaped students back on the public school plantation where they will be taught nothing except racism and sex, but their bodies will be used to generate cash.

Over the pandemic, white public school enrollment dropped by 8%, while black enrollment only declined by 5%. While black students have fewer options, parents got out when they could. That’s why the Biden administration is going after charter schools, a popular alternative among black parents, and why its allied activists are hitting homeschooling and religious schools.

The common denominator here is getting escaped slaves back to the public school plantation.

Or, as the New York Times puts, “State education officials have appointed a task force to investigate the decline and to try to determine the whereabouts of unaccounted-for students and their reasons for leaving the public school system.” But the reasons are abundantly obvious.

New York took a 6% hit in enrollment, the highest in the country, with California in fourth place, while Florida, Texas and South Dakota had some of the best numbers.

The American Enterprise Institute found that mostly remote schools lost four times as many students as schools that remained mostly in-person. Remote learning was never about public safety, it was one of a million concessions to the corrupt quid-pro-quo influence of unions.

But this was the one that broke the public school system in the only way they care about.

Biden is going to war against parents who opted out of the public school plantation because he and his party desperately need every advantage that they can get in 2022 and 2024. Having already destroyed public education, they’re out to destroy private education too.

Daniel Greenfield

End the Culture War; Separate School and State

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A Florida bill restricting classroom instruction regarding sexuality in kindergarten through third grade has become the latest culture war skirmish.

Supporters of the bill say government schools have no business being involved in this type of instruction with young students. They make a good point. The use of government power to indoctrinate children in certain political and social beliefs — regardless of the wishes of parents — is a major problem.

While the instruction at issue in Florida is associated with efforts of leftists, the temptation to seek to achieve ideological objectives through education policy can be strong among conservatives as well.

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill similar to the Florida bill. Because the Ohio bill applies to private schools participating in Ohio’s taxpayer-funded school voucher program in addition to government schools, conservative legislators supporting the Ohio bill are vindicating the warning of conservatives and libertarians that allowing government to subsidize private school tuition would lead to government control of private schools.

Other conservatives are trying to force schools to adopt a “patriotic” curriculum. This is just as pernicious as leftists’ efforts to force schools to teach critical race theory. Students indoctrinated in critical race theory will graduate believing that white male capitalists are the source of all evil. Students indoctrinated in “patriotism” will graduate believing every bit of propaganda sponsored by the war party and will smear all dissenters from the “party line” as unpatriotic spreaders of disinformation from Russia or whatever country replaces Russia as global enemy number one.

In a free society, parents — not politicians, bureaucrats, or teachers unions — would control education. Parents would decide whether and when their children’s education will include topics like sexuality, race theory, and the evidence for and against Darwinism.

Parents’ demand that their children receive a quality education reflecting the parents’ values could be met by a free market if the government got out of the way. A free-market education system would provide parents with a variety of options, including religious and secular private schools, community-based schools, and homeschooling.

People searching for a quality homeschooling program that incorporates libertarian ideas without ever sacrificing education for indoctrination should look into my homeschooling curriculum.

The Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education. Interactive forums provide students with the opportunity to interact with their peers outside of a formal setting.

I encourage all parents looking to provide their children with an indoctrination-free education to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschoolirobertsng program.

Paul Craig Roberts

The Big Money Behind the Push for 1619 Project Education

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Many people have become aware of how Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Life nonprofit foundation influenced the 2020 elections.

But few are aware of how his company, Meta, and other far-left companies are also underwriting 1619 Project educational indoctrination programs for future voters. Taxpayers help subsidize these efforts. Those who profit are the world’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House, and the global media company, the New York Times, whose newspaper has the second-highest circulation in the nation.

The New York Times, a for-profit company, had its product promoted by a nonprofit company, the Pulitzer Center, which designed the prepackaged curriculum and pushed it, unvetted, into 3,500 schools immediately after the 1619 Project was published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine. Coincidentally, Sam Dolnick, New York Times assistant managing editor, sits on the board of the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center also posts promotional materials, such as editor Jake Silverstein’s op-ed touting the 1619 Project books and webinars on teaching the 1619 Project, where subscriptions for the newspaper are pushed to teachers.

Penguin Random House, which published The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a pseudo-scholarly, 500-page neo-Marxist expansion of the magazine (copyright held by the New York Times) also enjoys the services of the Pulitzer Center to market its books to educators and librarians, and to fight laws intended to keep it away from students.

Penguin Random House also exploits nonprofit opportunities to sell its books. Markus Dohle, the CEO of the German group Bertelsmann that owns Penguin Random House, donated $500,000 via the nonprofit Dohle Book Defense Fund to PEN America to fight “censorship.” As Daniel Greenfield has written, Penguin Random House specializes in publishing racist “anti-racist” tracts by Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi, and pushes them into schools. Kendi’s screed, “Progress,” which refers back to his own book Stamped, appears in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Before publishing The 1619 Project books, Penguin had quickly produced a collection edited by Kendi and Keisha Blain (University of Pittsburgh history professor, who, in the Nation claimed that the “obsession over critical race theory is a new manifestation” of  “anti-Blackness and anti-intellectualism”). Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, featured short knock-off essays by contributors to the 1619 Project and mostly far-leftists, such as Donna Brazile, the Democrat Party-Clinton operative, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, radical academics Robin D.G. Kelley and Peniel Joseph, Sherrilyn Ifill, Barbara Smith (on the Combahee River Collective), Black Panther and Communist Angela Davis (on “The Crime Bill”) and “Black Lives Matter” founder, Alicia Garza. Most recently, Greenfield has exposed how the company is remaking Dr. Seuss into an avatar of social justice.

Prior to release of the two 1619 Project books in November, the publisher had set up a deal for getting “woke” followers of Hannah-Jones to buy copies and donate them to schools and libraries, where laws addressing curriculum do not apply. This was through a nonprofit, diversebooks.org, which was largely funded by Penguin Random House. By March 1, more than 6,000 books had been bought and donated through retailers at bookshop.org.

The Pulitzer Center, which has enjoyed the largesse of Democrat donor Pierre Omidyar and funding from the Zuckerberg Foundation, has served as the clearinghouse for 1619 Project educational materials.

The Pulitzer Center also helped Penguin Random House by running a pilot program that gave advance copies of the book to 35 educators in fifteen states and the District of Columbia. Last month a post-pilot education conference  hosted by the Pulitzer Center revealed how these two books are intended to be used. (Penguin Random House has also provided free, downloadable educational guides written by Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center.) Penguin Random House, which certainly wants to get its books to every student, provided the moderator, Allan Spencer.

The webpage for the conference describes Meta, “formerly Facebook,” as “lead supporter” for the 1619 Project Educational Materials Collection at the Pulitzer Center. Additional funding comes from “Humanity United, the Trellis Fund, the Art for Justice Fund, Open Society Foundations [Soros], The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.” The 1619 Project creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has appeared on several of the Pulitzer Center webinars (alongside teachers union president Randi Weingarten and others) to encourage and instruct teachers on using the materials. Teachers have received $5,000 grants to implement the materials and write lessons.

A good part of the Pulitzer Center’s mission these days is “resisting” state laws against the use of the 1619 Project in classroom instruction. So efforts are being made to get the books to other students and in other ways—such as in libraries, and after-school and prison programs. One of the sessions involved a Stetson University program advertised as offering “quality liberal arts education” to inmates at Florida’s Tomoka Correctional Institution. The presentation by  Andy Eisen, who teaches history, and Pamela Cappas-Toro, professor of World Languages and Cultures, offered a view into the three-day “mini-unit,” Public History and The 1619 Project, created by the non-profit Community Education Project program. As one of the assignments, involving inmate-students collecting information about their sugar consumption from products in the commissary and linking results back to sugar plantations that relied on slave labor revealed, the program has little to do with history, languages, or the liberal arts. It follows, instead, the 1619 Project mantra, that every injustice in the world—down to availability of sugary snacks in a prison commissary—has its roots in slavery.

From Texas, a state that has passed anti-CRT/1619 Project bills, Amanda Vickery, professor of education at the University of North Texas, served on the panel, “Teaching the Next Generation of Teachers, The 1619 Project Books in Schools of Education,” and was commended for her bravery and dedication to “resistance.” She described how she used the free copies in classes for her future teachers. As typical, the idea of historical accuracy was not even broached. Instead, Vickery expressed the reigning 1619 Project idea that history is merely an expression of “power,” with competing narratives, and the importance of students telling their own stories. (Such standards presumably justify the (false) claim in the picture book that “white people” went into Africa and kidnapped “mommies” and “daddies” in order to make them slaves.)

Unfortunately, a number of history professors are supporting the 1619 Project. Not surprisingly, as revealed in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, such Marxists as Gerald Horne and Eric Foner have advised the 1619 Project from the beginning! Johns Hopkins University history professor Martha S. Jones has jumped on board, contributing essays to both book collections, on  “The American Revolution” and “citizenship,” and making frequent appearances. She gave the keynote address at the conference, but revealed the ahistorical purpose; the 1619 Project, she told teachers, was meant to “challenge us to engage in a powerful thought experiment.”

A number of teachers shared how they used the materials in their classes (one of which was described as 99 percent black with most of the students lagging several grades in reading ability). One teacher used the Project to help instill in her students the idea that they were descended from African “kings and queens” (though not apparently that kings and queens in Africa owned slaves which were often sacrificed in funeral rituals for royalty).

As one reader told me about the use of the 1619 Project in his child’s high school class, the aim is to set students against each other by race. Criticisms or disagreements are cast as evidence of the student’s racism. I advised the student to use the sources in my book, Debunking The 1619 Project, to rebut the claims being made.

Everyone from kindergarteners to inmates are being targeted for indoctrination by companies that are profiting from an alliance with non-profits funded by left-wing political operatives—and taxpayers, against their wishes and the law. Taxpayers subsidize what these companies would normally contribute to the tax base but which they loop into tax-free subsidies to market their own products, as Penguin Random House does with Diverse Books and the Dohle Book Defense Fund. Education professors use class time in state universities to push Random House’s books to future teachers. Woke librarians eagerly accept donated books.

Recently, Hannah-Jones on Twitter asked professors to share how they use the 1619 Project. A sampling of the responses is alarming. In addition to being used in history and education courses, the 1619 Project is infusing English, paralegal studies, sociology, public health policy, and who knows what else.

Alarmingly, according to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, more 1619 Project books are in the works. It may seem amazing that the one magazine issue has had such an impact. But it should not be, when you consider that two of the biggest and most powerful media companies in the world are behind it.

Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America and Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.

Leaving Public Education: A Way to Shield your Children from Critical Race Theory

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The introduction of politicized education ideas like “critical race theory” into the curriculum of government schools is a major reason for American public school systems’ decline. In many schools, political agendas have been crowding out what many parents understand as the primary purpose of schools — educating students in core subjects such as reading, mathematics, and science.

US government data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that, as of 2019, only 37 percent of American high school seniors were proficient in reading. The results drop to 24 percent in math and 22 percent in science. The root of the problem is government’s near monopoly of education that means there is little to no incentive to stop federal, state, and local “educrats” from imposing the latest education fads on students. Any attempts by government to “fix” education, such as No Child Left Behind or Common Core, inevitably fail.

The replacement of education with indoctrination is one reasons many parents are pulling their children out of public schools to homeschool. Of course, one main reason for the growth in homeschooling is the covid lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Restrictions at schools have been especially absurd since children have tended to be in little danger from covid.

Homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. However, the authoritarians who believe children’s education must be controlled by “experts” are constantly trying to undermine homeschoolers. Sometimes homeschoolers’ enemies are aided by well-intentioned homeschooling supporters. For example, there is a bill pending in the Alabama state legislature that would make homeschoolers eligible for taxpayer funding. Homeschooling advocates supporting this bill forget that government funding is inevitably accompanied by government control. Thus, any homeschooling family that accepts government money is inviting the government to tell them how to educate their children. Further, some school districts use truancy laws to harass homeschoolers. States also make parents prove homeschool students are receiving an education that meets state standards.

Fortunately, as homeschooling has become a more popular choice, many new resources have become available to aid parents who desire to homeschool their children. Among these resources is the Ron Paul Curriculum.

Students using my homeschooling curriculum can attain a superior education in comparison to standards set by politicians or bureaucrats. Instead of indoctrinating students with instruction in subjects including critical race theory, my curriculum provides students with a solid education in history, literature, mathematics, and the sciences. It also gives students the opportunity to create their own websites and internet-based businesses. The curriculum is designed to be self-taught, with students helping and learning from each other via online forums.

Starting in fourth grade, students are required to write at least one essay a week. Students are required to post their essays on their blogs. Students also take a course in public speaking.

The curriculum does emphasize the history, philosophy, and economics of liberty, but it never substitutes indoctrination for education. The goal is to produce students with superior critical thinking skills who can thrive with their individuality.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Destroy the Public-School Systems

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A local Fox affiliate reports that last year in Baltimore’s largest high school, 77 percent of students graduated reading at an elementary-school level, and many of them at a kindergarten level. Only twelve students at the school were at grade level — that’s under 2 percent. And it was a whistleblower who came forward with this information:

A Baltimore City teacher comes forward with devastating information, showing 77 percent of students tested at one high school, are reading at an elementary school level

The teacher works at Patterson High School, one of the largest high schools in Baltimore with a 61 percent graduation rate and a nearly $12 million budget. We agreed not to identify this source who fears retribution for giving Project Baltimore the results of iReady assessments.

“Our children deserve better. They really do,” the Patterson High School teacher told Project Baltimore. “As a whole, the system has failed them.”

The teacher is a hero. It is a shame that the teacher, and not the administrators, is the one terrified about retribution. Public schools such as Patterson have a state-compelled monopoly on education that traps kids in their perpetually failing institutions. And the more funding they get, the worse they perform. Last year, the Baltimore public-school system — which functioned remotely most of the time — had a $1.4 billion budget for only 78,000 students.

From a devastating piece by Adam Andrzejewski at Forbes:

CEO Sonja Santelises ($339,028) and her chief of staff, Alison Perkins-Cohen ($198,168), collectively earned nearly $700,000 in pay, perks, pension funding, and health insurance benefits.

Santelises’ cash compensation was more than $126,000 higher than that of the U.S. Secretary of Education, a cabinet-level position.

Chief of Schools John Davis made $218,303 in base salary alone. Tina Hike Hubbard, the “Chief Communications & Community Engagement Officer” earned $194,283.

Other highly compensated employees included Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the “Chief Human Capital Officer” ($194,283); Lynette Washington, the Chief Operating Officer ($194,283); Theresa Jones, the “Chief Achievement & Accountability Officer” ($192,827); and Maryanne Cox, the Deputy Chief Financial Officer ($192,827).

In a marketplace, all these people would have lost their jobs a long time ago. It’s not the salaries that are the problem. It’s the failure of the system they oversee.

Few things have undermined minorities over the past 40 years more than inner-city public-school systems. Rich and middle-class Americans already have school choice. They can move. Neighborhoods with high-performing systems have far higher homes values, shutting poorer people out. Teachers’ unions use tax dollars, often through compelled dues, to help elect politicians who preserve the status quo — which, functionally, is the racial segregation of schools.

One of the most popular arguments against school choice is that granting parents the freedom to pick better schools would only weaken traditional ones. Well, imagine making this argument about any other area of life: “Hey, you can’t leave this supermarket because we’re going to suck even more.” No one would accept that logic. Yet they do for their kids’ education. Maybe when 77 percent of high-school graduates can’t make it through Goodnight Moon, someone will do something. We’re not that far off.

David Arsanyi