Public schools are in trouble, double trouble, as leftist unions, colleges, and media refuse to understand what is happening. Trust in public education is plunging with anti-girl, anti-faith, anti-traditional, pro-woke programs scaring parents, driving up home, religious, and private schooling.
The shift is strong and sustained. It cannot be blamed on COVID. While homeschooling jumped 62 percent during COVID, it is 53 percent up now.
Where public education is eroding fastest are woke-centers like California, New York, and DC, where distrust in public schools grows as politics replaces learning.
Homeschooling in California in 2023 jumped 78 percent from pre-woke years. In New York, parents are sick of targeting, and homeschooling is up 103 percent from 2018, and in DC up 108 percent. The woke joke is on the schools.
Even in places like Maine, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, where liberal governors indulge wokeism, transgenderism demeaning and discouraging girls, homeschooling is up by more than 50 percent, with no sign of falling.
In the meantime, public schools are taking a body blow, first devastated by COVID shutdowns, extended by national teachers unions, then distrust over quality, safety, the privacy of girls, political indoctrination, hostility to parents, and poor courses.
The political hijack of quality public education, lowering standards in math, science, writing, and reading, replacing quantitative learning with junk science, dropping history, earth sciences, biology, physics, chemistry even math for politically rewritten, anti-American, anti-religious texts is a gut punch.
The Jeffersonian ideal, solid moral and academic education to keep the republic safe, has been eroded and in some cases just trashed, especially in Democrat-controlled cities and states.
Instead, what one sees is intensive political indoctrination, objectively anti-historical, anti-freedom, anti-free market, anti-faith, anti-majority teachings – and concrete references to Marxism.
Over three years, many public schools have dived, losing respect, faculty, and students as anti-parent sentiment, critical race theory (CRT), climate hysteria, anti-Trump hyperbole, drug legalization, addiction, and deaths have risen, paralleling crime and dropout rates. Academic scores have meantime plummeted.
Given the role the political left played in pushing COVID mania, mandating shots, intimidating the public with job losses, shutdowns of schools, businesses, churches and family gatherings, then lowering of academic standards, politicizing non-political subjects, and spreading distrust of tradition, faith, our military and flag in favor of reinterpretations of sexuality, identity, and history, who is surprised?
Net-net, the effect of the political left on public education – driven by political actors, national teachers’ unions, and go-along-to-get-along administrators, has been nothing short of devastating.
From afar – speaking with parents, teachers, and former teachers – the effect has been a replacement of trust, confidence, free and open speech, respect for faith, political differences, and high-quality learning with fear, intimidation, and mediocrity.
Public education in America is in trouble, loss of students, parent trust, and quality outcomes driving the next generation toward homeschooling, parochial and private schools, and survival pushing smart kids and hard workers in another direction.
Of course, a clamor for money will rise from the national unions and their political brokers who get political benefit from politicizing education, undermining quality.
Sadly, rather than real education producing renewed support, creating a virtual circle for ever-better public education, the opposite is upon us. With faith in public schools is down, those who long bankrolled it seriously rethinking that move.
While other factors play at the margins, such as population shifts, demographic fluctuations, disinterest in learning, gig economy, rising federal dependence, and a slipping work ethic – all serious, the big variable in this decline is lower trust.
America deserves a great public education system, but a return to that high standard requires fresh, smart, non-political leaders, renewed appreciation for quality education, parents, kids, and an end to leftist politics in our schools.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
