Our Public Education Nightmare

We’ve written before about the deterioration of the public education system in this country. We were hoping someday soon to see a turn-around and happily be able to report positive progress. Nope. Not only has there been zero improvement, but a new low was also reached recently with teachers in several states insisting they must be able to present sex/gender instruction to children as young as 4 years old. This goes beyond just being woke – it’s creepy (more on this later).

Student achievement in the US was formally compared with performance in other developed countries for the first time in 1967. In that study, focused on math, the US ranked 11^th out of the 12 countries measured (Washington Post). Starting in the year 2000, an international test was administered to 15-year-old students in more than 70 countries around the world. This test, part of the “Program for International Student Assessment” (PISA), has been administered every three years since then. In the seven PISA tests conducted over the last 20 years, US students have consistently ranked in the bottom half of these 70+ countries in mathematics, with no statistical improvement at all since the test began being administered. Worse, in the 2018 PISA test, roughly 20% of 15-year-olds from the US scored so low on the reading portion that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old.¹

Within the US, a historical look at SAT scores for college admission shows we have been flatlining for a long time. In 1972, the average math SAT score was 509. In 2016, the last year before the SAT test was completely redesigned, the average math score was 508. In that 46-year time span, math SAT scores in the US didn’t budge, and even got marginally lower.

This dismal performance has not been lost on many parents as they are increasingly turning to one of three alternatives to the public school system for K-12 students. Private schools are the best known traditional alternative and have enrolled a steady 10-11% of the K-12 student population every year since 1999. However, the fastest growing public school system alternatives are charter schools and home schooling.

Charter school enrollment in the US has steadily increased since the 1970’s when the concept began. These are publicly funded independent schools established by teachers, parents, or community groups under the terms of a charter with the local, state or federal government. Charter schools have more freedom in their teaching methodology and curriculum with higher accountability for both student achievement and teacher performance. Charter schools typically receive much less money from the federal government than traditional public schools, forcing them to seek a variety of funding sources to remain operational.

Federal support for charter schools blossomed under President George W. Bush and that support continued under Presidents Obama and Trump. Despite the current efforts of President Biden to make it more difficult for charter schools to exist and further expand, their share of student enrollment is now estimated to be between 11-12% of the K-12 population.

By far the fastest growing alternative to the public school system is home schooling. Long considered an extreme recourse, the modern version of home schooling in the US has its origins in the 1960’s. A very small percentage of US students were home schooled then, but the practice gained traction in the 1980’s and has been on the rise ever since. That rise became meteoric in 2020 when COVID-19 hit. While the exponential increase in home schooling in 2020 wasn’t too surprising given the forced lockdowns accompanying COVID, what is surprising is that home school attendance has not returned to pre-pandemic levels with the lifting of lockdowns and reopening of public schools. Home schooling now remains the preference for an estimated 11.1% of K-12 students (US Census Bureau).

If you add up all the K-12 students now enrolled in one of the above schooling alternatives, it totals approximately 32%. That means US public school system enrollment has now dropped to about 68% of the K-12 student population. Public school system enrollment is likely to drop even further as the trend for charter and home schooling continues to increase. This is a dramatic change from the 1970’s when nearly all K-12 students were enrolled in public schools.

At the macro level, the efforts of the federal government to improve public education have been an epic failure. The only bright spot has been past Presidential support for charter schools (excepting the current President). The overall trend we believe we are seeing now is the education problem beginning to correct itself by way of parents simply choosing to avoid public schools altogether for their children.

In our view, there has been a total loss of perspective within the public school system as to what is critically important in the classroom. Math, reading, and writing are no longer the highest priorities as is clearly evidenced by the test scores over the time frames mentioned above. When public school teachers, administrators, or supporting politicians do decide to speak up, their focus is on topics far afield from core academic problems. All we hear about now is the teaching (or not) of critical race theory, the need to discuss sex/gender preferences with kindergarteners, or the exclusion of parents from influencing curriculum choices at local schoolboard meetings. These are the priorities at the forefront of public education today in the US. Naked activism for the teachers’ pet social causes is rampant and being foisted upon our youth.

As mentioned at the top of this article, the most disturbing trend of all is the apparent strong desire to discuss LGTBQIA+ sexual topics with 4–7-year olds. This is argued as necessary and good, so that children at a very young age can adapt to a new social order containing dozens of sexual identities unencumbered by biology. It is being propagandized in the media as the leading edge of how our society is evolving. To disagree is to be unwilling to let go of biology as the basis of sexual identity. This is deemed at least reactionary, and more often characterized as bigoted. You must submit to replacing the simple biological determination of gender with a complex maze of sexual identities and an alphabet soup of acronyms and codewords that are nearly impossible to keep up with.

We think there is a psychosis at work here on two fronts:

• Impressionable children are now exposed at an early age to a growing collection of books, movies, commercials, and theme parks that are infused with a wildly overrepresented cast of LGBTQIA+ characters far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population. As a result, confusion and uncertainty are being created in young minds, introducing a sexual identity problem that did not previously exist.

• Among some of the teachers actively supporting this new agenda, we believe there is an element of pedophilia present. In our minds, there is no other rational explanation for someone (other than a parent) desperately wanting to engage in entirely inappropriate sexual/gender conversations with children as young as 4 years old. The LGBTQIA+ narrative imparts cover and an “acceptance” of this subtle form of pedophilia. It must be stopped. Thankfully, several states have now passed laws similar to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law which makes this behavior illegal for teachers in kindergarten through 3^rd grade.

Is it even possible to fix the public education problems in this country? If so, how?  We like the excellent suggestion that was championed by President Reagan in the 1980’s. Eliminate the federal Department of Education. We know it may initially sound radical, but there is merit to this. And there’s certainly not much risk of making things any worse.

First a little context – you may not be aware that the Department of Education is a relatively recent contrivance in our government. It has only existed since 1980, having been put in place at the end of President Carter’s term in office. Prior to that, the federal government’s involvement in education took the form of an “Office of Education” placed within various other federal departments over the years. It wasn’t until 1980 that it became a standalone entity with a cabinet level “Secretary” as its leader.

Interestingly, the historical timeline outlined above chronicling the demise of achievement and confidence in our public school system mirrors almost exactly the timeline of the existence of the Department of Education. Since its inception in 1980, the Department of Education has spent nearly $1.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer money attempting to better educate children. There is only one meaningful question to ask about this massive expenditure. Was it worth it? From the evidence we see, the answer is very obviously “no”. The only possible way to rationalize this enormous expense is to proclaim that the K-12 public education system would have been even worse off without it. Given where we are today, we don’t see how that’s remotely possible.

It’s important to note here that the Department of Education and the public and private organizations that support it (including many media outlets) publish their own student achievement statistics. Most of them are wildly spun, fudged, and cherry picked to make the Department appear relevant and even successful. A perfect example of this is the ranking of US students in the 2018 PISA test for math. By the test score numbers, the US finished 36^th. However, the Department of Education reports the US ranking was 30^th because by their logic the six countries just above the US were close in the scoring and not statistically different enough to count as six different rankings. You know it’s really bad when our government goes to this length to manipulate a test result just to advance us to 30^th place.

The management of education in this country was the domain of the individual states for the vast part of US history. That served us quite well. The arguments against returning to this model revolve principally around non-uniform teaching, testing, and curriculum standards emerging among the individual states. While naysayers see that as a detriment, we see it as a positive. Individual states would have more freedom to innovate on their own, with a much greater likelihood of a successful K-12 education model being born in one or more of the 50 states than anything that’s come from the federal government in the last 42 years. A proven effective model could then be copied by other states, if they so choose, out of their own motivated self-interest. This is far superior to being force-fed thousands of rules from a Department of Education that discourages local innovation.

Also, without the federal government involved, the freedom of states to create and implement smarter K-12 education programs would not be disrupted by states having to conform to a different set of ideologically based education rules each time a new Administration is elected (from either party).

Apart from its involvement in K-12 education policy, the Department of Education administers other programs that should be transitioned elsewhere. For example, the federal college student loan program is a big part of the Department of Education which can and should be privatized. Interest rates for those loans would then be determined by the free market, not the government, just like they are for all the rest of us in the real world. Also, any college scholarship money (e.g. Pell Grants) could be preserved by simply moving that money and its distribution mechanism to another department of the federal government.

The next president would do well to gracefully draw down and then eliminate the Department of Education from the federal bureaucracy. States are perfectly capable of filling any perceived gaps left by a gradual federal drawdown. Locally driven education policy, much like a close family structure, has a proven track record of success.

¹ From Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the PISA exam.