OPINION
As I keep advising parents of today’s school-aged children: Homeschool your kids. In retrospect, it’s what I would have done, had I my druthers. Absolutely, were my kids school-aged now, it’s what I’d do. It’s not just that schools are clearly doing a pretty bad job of the basics of education: the latest, worse-than-ever NAPLAN results are proof enough of that.
It’s more that, otherwise, the Woke establishment will be getting their hooks right into their impressionable young minds.
Recent revelations that even childcare centres are indoctrinating the very youngest children into wondering “Are all white men bad?” underscore just how bad things have got.
And in the US, not just parents, but teachers, too, are abandoning the public school system in droves.
In 1983, a National Commission on Excellence in Education likened the erosion of standards in the US system to “an act of war”.
Its clarion call was ignored.
In November 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress results were released for the test taken earlier in the year and showed that just 33 per cent of the nation’s fourth graders are proficient in reading, and 36 per cent are proficient in math. The eighth graders did even worse: 31 per cent are proficient in reading, while 26 per cent show proficiency in math.
Accordingly, a recent Gallup poll revealed that just 26 per cent of Americans have a “great deal/fair amount” of confidence in public schools.
No wonder kids aren’t even bothering to show up. Chronic absenteeism has grown by 13.5 per cent since 2018-19. Every state is affected, with rates varying from four per cent to 22 per cent.
Some are blaming Covid hysteria – which begs the question of why kids didn’t simply return once restrictions were lifted. Others blame bullying and depression.
But there are other factors. Many parents are fed up with increasing school-orchestrated indoctrination, whether it be Critical Race Theory, revised American history, transgender ideology, etc.
I know people who gave up their dream of a teaching career, because, as one said, “I just can’t teach this shit.” Other teachers, like their students, are choosing to just not show up.
According to The New Teacher Project, even before the pandemic, nearly a third of teachers were considered “chronically absent”, missing more than 10 days of work, and one in four students attended a school where more than 40 per cent of teachers were chronic absentees.
Also, according to Heritage Foundation researchers Jay Greene and Jonathan Butcher, there is an “alarming rise in teacher absenteeism”. They report that 72 per cent of public schools had higher teacher absenteeism rates than before the Covid-19 pandemic.
So, what to do? Private schooling is vastly more expensive and, frankly, not much better. Even religious school are kowtowing to wokeism – often under threat of legal action.
Home-school your kids.
Homeschooling is booming, having almost doubled nationally since 2020. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at about 3.3 per cent. But the National Home Education Research Institute discloses that during the 2021-2022 school year, there were 3.135 million homeschooled students in the U.S., or about six per cent of the total.
Apparently feeling the threat, governments in thrall to the powerful teachers unions (one of the biggest donors to the Democrat party in the US) are also forbidding parents from shopping around for better public schools out of their area.
Seventy-four per cent of parents support open enrollment, according to a recent EdChoice national survey […]
Some parents have used false addresses to get their children into a better school. But according to a new report, in at least 24 states, parents who use an address other than their own to enroll their children in public school can be criminally prosecuted, resulting in steep fines and even jail time.
The Michigan Star
The woke state wants your children. Or else.