Posted on 05/14/2024 5:40:48 PM PDT by george76
It is hard to overstate just how much public education in the United States was permanently changed by extended school closures of 2020 and 2021.
For an entire year, millions of students across the country were forced to attend classes via Zoom, wear masks that affected their cognitive abilities, and were generally socially isolated. At the same time, decision-makers in school districts from Virginia to California were pushing a political agenda that blatantly sought to shut parents out of the education of their own children.
The swift and intense backlash from parents changed the politics of education forever. And documenting it all with glee was Corey DeAngelis, an expert in education policy who recognized early on that the public education system in the U.S. would be changed forever by the pandemic actions of school district officials and teachers unions.
Mockingly dedicated to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union for “doing more to advance freedom in education than anyone could have ever imagined,” DeAngelis’s new book The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools recounts how the failures of the public education system were laid bare by the pandemic in remarkable detail.
DeAngelis is a self-described “school-choice evangelist” who has been at the forefront of turning anger at the public education system into tangible policy victories at the state level. In the past three years, several states have passed some form of universal school choice amid a surge in public support for the policy initiative.
The Parent Revolution‘s greatest strength is in its retelling of the political awakening that took place in and around public schools in 2020 and 2021. From the school closures of 2020, the parent activism of 2021, and the attempts by teachers unions to gaslight the public about what was really happening, DeAngelis weaves a riveting narrative of righteous anger that birthed the most significant conservative grassroots political movement since the Tea Party.
The biggest villain in this story is the teachers unions, whose misdeeds during the pandemic are numerous and astonishing. In Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, DeAngelis reminds readers that teachers unions used the charge of racism and white supremacy to smear families who begged for school districts to return to in-person classes.
Predictably, parents who lived in districts without in-person classes turned to private options for schooling. But even then, DeAngelis recounts how union-backed politicians blocked private schools from opening their doors to students on the grounds that allowing private schools to open while public schools remained closed would exacerbate existing inequalities between public and private school students.
As these fights over school availability gave way to battles over pornography, critical race theory, gender ideology, and parental rights in schools, the winner in it all was the cause to which DeAngelis has dedicated his life: school choice.
First West Virginia and then Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, and several other states quickly made universal school choice a reality. This policy goal had failed to gain traction for years except in very limited circumstances until the political headwinds shifted in the wake of the education system’s failures during the pandemic.
But as much as DeAngelis recounts how the education industrial complex overplayed its hand and empowered the school choice movement to come roaring back, The Parent Revolution is a reminder that too many children are still trapped in failing government schools.
School choice is one of the Republican Party’s most popular policy goals, but it is rarely mentioned as a major campaign issue, in part because at the state level, the GOP still suffers from union-backed politicians who are stubbornly devoted to the public school system despite its many institutional failings.
As DeAngelis convincingly described in the final pages of his book, the antidote to these failings is new accountability that begins with school choice but does not end with it. From holding on-cycle partisan elections for school boards to passing legislation that ensures that parents decide how their child is educated and treated by school officials, the policy agenda of The Parent Revolution is clearly spelled out. Politicians who claim to stand for parents and families would do well to heed it.
Did lots of Jewish students attend this school?
Yes!
Where do they live as adults?
In affluent suburbs!
Most of the fault is with the students.
What percentage of NYC public school teachers should be canned?
What percentage of Baltimore public school teachers should be canned?
What percentage of DC public school teachers should be canned?
Are the curriculums of the big city school systems broadly defective?
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Or you can just avoid all this crap and homeschool your kids.
99%
99%
99%
Yes.
99% is only because there’s always the possibility that some competent teacher slipped through the cracks and wasn’t canned as normally happens.
Thanks for the ping.
School choice would certainly take care of many of these issues, quick.
Maybe eventually, and, finally!! rid the country of teacher’s unions.
Wouldn’t THAT be something?
It would be a huge step in the right direction.
Another thing that would help is dismantling the Dept of Education.
In government schools across the U.S., less than 40% of students are proficient in language and less than 35% are proficient in mathematics. What is needed is an immediate 60% cut in pay and benefits for all government teachers and administrators.
What do you think would happen if all airlines dropped you off after getting you 40% or less of the way for the trip you paid full price for? New York to Los Angeles? Sorry, you are dropped off in Cleveland. What would happen if every delivery driver only delivered 40% of the packages they were scheduled to deliver each day? They would be fired. What would happen if every retail store in America took back 60% of the items you just paid for before letting you walk out the door? Customers would no longer do business with them.
There would be government hearings and consequences for private industry. Time to hold government to the same standards.
Bring back consequences.
100% school choice nationwide would fix it.
Every taxpayer dollar going to a government school is theft. We would be better off taking every government school and partition them into individual rooms. Bar the windows, pad the walls, and turn them into the insane asylums that are so desperately needed in the country.
The only people we should be allowing over our border are teachers from Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Finland, and Ireland, because somehow they are able to produce language and math proficiency in 90+% of the students they teach and have been doing it for decades. Which reminds me, we need to “claw back” 60% of the obscene profits that were paid out in the form of retirement checks for teachers and administrators for the past 30 years. Any funds we can’t collect can come out of the teachers’ union coffers.
By forth grade they have dropped to near the bottom.
That is a system problem not a child problem.
It’s fewer, not less.
What percentage of Baltimore public school teachers should be canned?
What percentage of DC public school teachers should be canned?
You misspelled the word 'caned'.
The fault lies with the parents who put up with this expletive-deleted.
what percentage of parents vote in school board elections?
Our children attended private church schools 1st through 12th grades. The tuition was very affordable and most of the students were from lower-middle income families. I think the last year our last child was in high school - 2012 - the tuition was around $350 a month, and for multiple children attending the same school the cost was on a sliding scale. All of these schools had kindergarten - 12th on the same campus.
School choice should be available to ALL families, with protections built in to avoid government mandated DEI brainwashing. And maybe a credit for property tax paid. :-)
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