By Ray Cardello for August 11, 2023, Season 21 / Post 17

Test scores in our public schools have been plummeting for years. The COVID Pandemic and remote learning definitely exacerbated the rate of decline. The number of students graduating from high school reading at the elementary school level is embarrassing but also harmful to the future of these students. We are failing our students and, therefore, their future security and earning potential. We have failed ourselves.

This year will bring a new challenge to our educational system. Thousands of children of illegal immigrants will attend schools in every county nationwide. These children will be challenged by language and customs. They will have tremendous issues fitting into a foreign system, and they will be dragging down the results of the entire class. Frustration and failure will heighten the dropout rates, and many of these students will opt for gangs for their future. Nobody wins in this scenario.

Teacher shortages are at an all-time high, meaning classroom sizes need to increase, and students will get less individual attention. The quality of teachers is also lower as the pool of available teachers is too small to meet demand. Everyone that graduates finds a position whether they are qualified or not.

It gets worse. The federal government has lost over 85,000 illegal migrant children of school age. They came across the border and were processed. They were transported to the supposed sponsors’ addresses, which did not exist. They fell through the cracks of the bureaucracy and are now lost. They do not appear in the system. Many of these children will end up in the sex trade or be sold as cheap labor. There is nothing compassionate about the broken Biden Border. It does not exist.

The Teacher’s union’s reaction to this quandary is to ask for more pay and a four-day school week. There is no logic to these demands and their impact on the education process. These demands are the union seeing the shortage of teachers and seizing the opportunity to enhance their way of life and wealth. They do not consider the well-being of the students left behind. Nearly 900 school districts have shifted to 4-day weeks. Schools that have already moved to a shorter week have seen a disproportionate drop in scores. This model may be suitable for teacher recruiting, but certainly not for the students. Everyone would love more time to spend at home with their families, but we must remember that teachers only work 180 days per year. More time off is not what they need. It is all about power and opportunity.

We have completely lost our way with our educational system. We know that the focus has been on indoctrination rather than education, and the falling test scores can quantify this. But the ruling class was not satisfied with indoctrination and wanted to take control of our children. Teachers should have been educators but instead chose to be mentors, and they did not want the parents in the conversation. They replaced the ABCs with CRT, BLM, LGBTQ, and ESG, none of which will prepare our children for their future.

Two things we can do to reverse this hellacious trend are to do away with the Department of Education and bring control of schools back to the local level. The other is to break up the Teacher’s Union. They have become dangerously powerful, and their focus is purely on the Teacher and not the student. This focus has to change before we lose an entire generation of children.