By Gary Wickert
The woke religion of diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) has destroyed America’s public education system and is well on its way to transforming America into the world’s next Third-World nation. America is fast joining the ranks of those sovereign states with maldeveloped industrial bases and pitifully low Human Development index relative to other countries. And we are just letting it happen.
Our country no longer even resembles America. It is hard to believe that this sentence isn’t written by the Babylon Bee, but the truth is that out of 55 Chicago Public Schools, not one student met grade level expectations in either math or reading during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a new Wirepoints report. Not even one. Please re-read this paragraph.
Chicago has 649 schools within the Chicago Public School System. Of those, an astonishing 22 schools have zero students—not even one outlier—who met grade level expectations for reading. The school district, led by woke, liberal educators who care more about inculcating young students with gender confusion, critical race theory, social justice propaganda, and identity victimology than they do teaching mathematics, language, reading, science, history, and literature. During the 2021-2022 school year, according to a recent Wirepoints report from the Illinois State Board of Education, fifty-three (53) schools could not point to even one graduating student proficient in math. The report is not referring to just 53 students who were not proficient in math—a catastrophic failure if even only that were true—it is saying that 53 entire schools couldn’t produce one educated student. Not one student from those 53 schools, however, failed to learn that America is a systemically racist country, that White people have privilege and an unconscious bias, that America is a patriarchal society, and that gender is a choice. Every one of the graduating, under-performing students had been thoroughly trained to fight phantom racism with real racism, to identify based on their sex (or imagined sex) and skin color.
Deniers and proponents of this insanity try to blame COVID as the big reason for the low scores, but a look at the 2019 numbers show that the reading and math numbers were only slightly better than they are now. Meanwhile, thirty schools did not have any students read at grade level during the 2021-2022 school year, the report stated.
The state of Illinois is coming to the rescue, however. You will be comforted to know that school boards throughout the state worked overtime with the woke Illinois Federation of Teachers to help pass a new legislation requiring multiple classes about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in state and national history. Teachers boasted about passing non-regulatory guidance on protections for transgender, nonbinary and gender non-conforming students under the Illinois Human Rights Act. The bill, sponsored by all Democrats and signed by a Democrat governor, also rewrote the entire history curriculum to highlight the contributions and experiences of other historically marginalized communities, including people of color, women, immigrant communities, and people with disabilities. The insanity got even worse. The state which has not had a balanced budget this generation, spent millions of taxpayer dollars on a state-wide School Climate Survey which didn’t ask one question about the math or reading curriculum, but instead asked only whether LGBTQ students in Illinois perceived the word “gay” in a negative way, and whether or not the students perceived that they were begin taught classes with a positive perspective about LGBTQ people.
Public education is not only a failure; it’s become worse than no education at all. A country full of illiterates and under-educated citizens who also are not infected with the lies, bigotry, and socially-destructive ideology children today are being saddled with, would be a much more productive and less divided country. It’s sad, but true. Can anybody explain why we need government employee labor unions? Virginia school unions are trying to ban homework and grades in the name of “equity.” A woman named Suparna Dutta was appointed to the Virginia Board of Education last July. She didn’t last long, as the Virginia state Senate blocked her appointment just one week after she defended the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and criticized socialism and communism during a board meeting. She was even accused of being “aligned with white supremacists” for her favorable views on America’s founding documents. This is no longer America.
In my home state of Wisconsin, schools have embraced Critical Race Theory (CRT) to an extent that is little understood by the public. Tony Evers, the democratic governor, used to be the state superintendent of schools. In that position, he oversaw the 2017 implementation of an “equity lens for public instruction and culturally responsive teaching”—both of which draw from and overlap with CRT. You can’t make this stuff up.
The last great idea emanating from public educators--Common Core--was a complete failure and is currently the most expensive thing filling the public dumpsters. This nonsense was created by the Council of Chief State School Officers (which nobody has ever even heard of) in 2009 and 2010. This massive educational failure cost the nation $80 billion in school funding, but as is often the case in government—nobody was fired or held responsible.
The problem with public education today is racism--but not in the way you might think. We decriminalize truancy and fail to expel violent gang member and those who obstruct learning for others and make the teaching profession dangerous and unenjoyable. The racism within our schools isn’t offering a culturally biased curriculum or failing to reach out to struggling minority students. The racism infecting our government-run schools is the soft bigotry of white paternalism; woke, white liberals dumbing down the standards, expectations, and requirements to the point where everything is dropped to the lowest underperforming denominator. All because white liberals spread the lie that minority students are not smart enough to compete, only they blame the inability to compete on racism. As a result, white liberals believe minorities must be given a crutch in order to succeed—a stain of stigmatism that will harm even the most hard-working and successful of minorities. In the woke universie, minority students aren’t expected to achieve, and in fact, are told they cannot achieve. The problem with public schools is the same problem with any government organization which rewards laziness and apathy and punishes hard work and result. Concern for educational results is completely abandoned in the name of liberal, Democrat-fueled “compassion.” No result; but boy do those liberals feel good about themselves. Meanwhile, minorities who attend private schools and achieve great things in spite of the woke mob’s low expectations are frequently assumed to have been given a free pass and are rarely given credit for their hard work—the worst tragedy of the entire public education debacle.
Public schools not only fail to hold individual students of all backgrounds for poor performance, but the entire government-controlled public school system has not been held accountable for its lack of performance going back as far as World War II.
Most of America doesn’t know what goes on in inner-city public schools. My mother was a teacher in the Milwaukee Public School System, and I heard all the stories. Violence, failure, and disrespect are not only ignored, they are actually rewarded with special treatment. I challenge anybody reading this article to watch a YouTube video entitled “Expelled From Every Other School.” It shows what goes on inside the schools on Chicago’s West Side, and in particular, inside the Moses Montefiore Academy. White liberals love to give these worthless pits posing as institutions of education high-education-sounding names like “Academy” or “University”, but their obsession with everything woke prevents them from actually making the real changes that would make a difference. It’s all virtue signaling. The “academy” shown in the video is now gone some six years already. Calling it an “academy” and refusing to expel even the most violent students in the name of battling “racism” apparently didn’t educate the children.
The good news is that necessity is the mother of invention. Parents are pulling their children out of these over-inflated, spider holes of woke indoctrination by the millions. Last year public school enrollment fell by 3%, wiping out a decade of enrollment growth and the biggest decline since 1943. Homeschooling rates doubled in one year alone. Parochial schools are seeing enrollment growth unparalleled in the last fifty years. Virtual schools and charter schools are growing exponentially. And it isn’t only students leaving; teachers are leaving by the thousands. Nobody wants to be on a sinking ship.