WASHINGTON, DC, Sep 5 — Confidence in America’s schools — kindergarten, grammar schools, high schools, colleges and universities — is in the tank. A new Rasmussen [August 29] poll shows that just eight percent of respondents gave public schools an “excellent” ranking and only 22% said they were “good” enough. Ten days earlier [August 19] a separate Rasmussen survey found that “only 23% of American Adults believe U.S. public schools provide a world-class education for our students.”
The distrust of public schooling has resulted in an exodus of children as more and more parents opt to homeschool their kids or send them to private schools. Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Fellow at the Discovery Institute and Director of the Institute’s American Center for Transforming Education. In a recent article she penned for the Institute, Dr. Ingraham wrote that many parents are particularly concerned about “the far-left political indoctrination that dominates today’s K-12 public education classrooms (the daily promotion of the LGBT agenda, critical race theory divisiveness, and woke academics). Their children have been freed from the political agenda of teachers’ unions and school personnel using them as pawns in their power plays … One example of this indoctrination is the increasing use of the Gender Unicorn as a tool to encourage students as young as age 5 to select their gender identity, their gender expression, the gender they are physically attracted to, and the gender they are emotionally attracted to, whether women/men, feminine/masculine, or other.”
It would appear that not only are the parents concerned about the indoctrination, many teachers are dropping out of school as well. The Washington Post reports that there is an unprecedented shortage of teachers in America. As the 2022-23 school year gets underway, the Post says school districts across the country are reporting “staffing gaps that stretch from the hundreds to the thousands.”
Perhaps public schools can’t find teachers these days due to the politicalization of the classroom– the movements that seek to undermine the respect for America among the youngest of the nation’s school boys and girls, chief among them being the notorious Critical Race Theory [CRT].
Many teachers would rather quit their jobs than succumb to the socialist claptrap that teachers are being forced to teach at the increasing number of schools that promote CRT. And, maybe, it’s among the reasons that teachers are quitting.
Kali Fontanilla has been a teacher for 15 years and a few months ago she resigned her job at a school in Salinas, CA. Kali went public with her story in an OpEd she penned for the Orange County Register. She was teaching at the school for five years when she resigned because, as she put it, “school officials were obsessed with left-wing indoctrination, and dissenting voices—like my own—were not welcome.”
Schools tend to keep their promotion of CRT in their classrooms a secret and Kari’s school was no exception. She revealed in her article that school officials are deliberately hiding the fact from parents claiming they do not teach their kids according to a CRT agenda.
“Well, I’m here to tell you those officials are not being truthful. Since teachers at the school used the same online platform for lesson plans and learning materials, I was able to access the ethnic studies lessons. While I expected to see plenty of America-bashing, what I found legitimately shocked me: Just about every single lesson had some element of critical race theory in it … Children were learning about the so-called four I’s of oppression (institutional, internalized, ideological, and interpersonal). The course syllabus said students would use colored strings to ‘rank’ their different identities to create ‘intersectional rainbows.’ And the class even included a ‘privilege quiz’ instructing students to determine how marginalized—or privileged—they were.