No wonder America’s children are fleeing public schools
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. This piece originally appeared on Washington Examiner.
On April 11, a public school in DeWitt, Michigan, sent a letter home with its first grade students notifying parents about a plan to teach the 6-year-old children about gender ideology. Not only is this topic a reprehensible overreach of government-funded schools, but it is extremely age-inappropriate. In first grade, children do not even have the language foundation to understand what a pronoun is.
Like many people across the country, parents in that district have awoken to the public school teachers’ and administrators’ efforts to politically indoctrinate their children from an early age. Fortunately, parents were paying attention and there was an outcry in the district that forced the school to cancel the ridiculous lesson.
The DeWitt incident and the many others like it in public schools across the nation are symptomatic of the decline in educational standards in America. No longer do public schools focus on foundational concepts that will help students achieve basic literacy and mathematical proficiency. Instead, they cultishly “teach” sociopolitical viewpoints from the very beginning of the children’s public school education.
Leftist activists in public schools try to teach these gender identity concepts to our children as though they are socially accepted facts. In reality, in case it needs to be clarified, men cannot have babies, and the pronoun they/them for a single person is grammatically incorrect. Also, the large majority of people don’t believe any of this ideology and agree that gender is determined by sex at birth. The vast majority of parents are not on board with the government telling our children otherwise.
There are many basic things our taxpayer-funded schools should be — but are not — teaching students instead, such as how to read. In Kentucky, for example, where Democratic leaders including Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) have tried to kill school choice measures, just 47% of Kentucky’s elementary school children are proficient in reading, in comparison to 45% proficiency the year prior. Fifty-three percent of Kentucky’s children cannot read at grade level. Yet Beshear has held up these statistics as supposed proof that Kentucky’s public schools are succeeding.
When a 53% literacy rate is something to brag about, parents rightfully search for alternative educational avenues for their children.
So it is not surprising that the share of children ages 5 to 17 enrolled in Kentucky’s public schools dropped by almost 8 percentage points from 2012 to 2022.
Meanwhile, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that, nationally, the decrease of public school enrollment over the same time period was 4 percentage points despite the growth in overall population. Across the nation, 87% of children were enrolled in public school in 2022, compared to 90.7% in 2012. Families clearly are in search of something better for their children’s education.
There are many other metrics to demonstrate that public schools are failing academically. Recent findings from the Economist reveal that, in addition to problems of grade inflation, our standards for public school graduation have depreciated significantly. As graduation rates have increased from 74% to 87% between 2007 and 2020, the average SAT scores have substantially decreased. In other words, while public schools are indoctrinating our children, they are in tandem provably sacrificing educational standards to inflate grades and public high school graduation rates.
With such low standards for public education, is it any wonder so many families are fleeing the public school system?
