The DNA within the school systems has been radically altered along with administrators, teachers, and many students.
Teachers’ unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America.
Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students.
In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 “marks the second consecutive year the state’s public school system has lost thousands of students,” the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents in Minnesota or any other state keep their children in public schools?
In 2021, the Minnesota Department of Education’s statewide test results showed another drop in the number of students meeting or exceeding grade-level criteria. Overall, reading scores fell 7 percent, math scores dropped 11 percent, and science scores shrank 8 percent.
In another example, New York City public schools — which compose the nation’s largest school district — have already lost about 50,000 students over the past two years and are expected to lose nearly 30,000 more by the time school begins this fall.
Increasing Spending Without Results
Minnesota Education Commissioner Dr. Heather Mueller explained the poor student achievement outcomes thus: “The statewide assessment results confirm what we already knew — that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our students’ learning and they need our help to recover.”
The problem with blaming poor student outcomes in Minnesota on Covid is that the state’s public schools actually had “little to show for decades of increased spending,” wrote Catrin Wigfall of the Center of the American Experiment in a July 2020 report titled “Allergic to Accountability.”
“The consistently increased flow of dollars into Minnesota’s public schools has not translated into improved student achievement outcomes or more learning,” Wigfall wrote.
Goal of Even More Woke Teachers
For insight, look to what the Minnesota Department of Education now values in professional teacher training when it comes to hiring licensed teachers.
In 2021, Minnesota’s professional educator licensing and standards board proposed an addition to what proficiency standards for teachers to be licensed. Proposed requirements include:
- Helping students develop social identities based upon their social grouping.
- Understanding “systemic trauma,” including racism and micro and macro aggression.
- Fully affirming and incorporating identity politics into the school including race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, economic status, and ethnicity.
- Connecting students with local and global political activists.
- Understanding that Minnesota’s laws were created to oppress by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
In addition to demanding increased wages, the MFT stated they are at war against capitalism. At a rally with her union members, Greta Callahan, president of...