Before signing off for 2023, I have a short message: Our public schools are under attack, but they are stronger and more resilient than their enemies assume…and more effective than you are being told.  

THE CRUSADE AGAINST PUBLIC EDUCATION: Unfortunately, the right-wing anti-public education crusade has been effective, as witnessed by a recent Gallup poll showing that just 36% of the general public report being ‘satisfied’ with public schools.  However, those who know the schools best–the parents–give their own children’s schools and their teachers high marks: 76% say they are “completely or somewhat satisfied” with their oldest child’s education. That’s similar to pre-pandemic poll results.  The crusaders appear to be reaching more Republicans than Democrats or independents, because Gallup reports a particularly steep decline in satisfaction among the GOP: it fell from 49% in 2020 to only 25% this year.

The Crusade is multi-faceted and highly charged, with anti-transgender, anti-’woke,’ and anti-Critical Race Theory language spewing from every Crusader’s mouth. As Politics NYU noted recently, “With newer, more progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and overall societal dynamics becoming more prevalent in the academic space, conservative sects of society, including the GOP, feel attacked. The symbolic figurehead of the modern Republican party, Donald Trump, put it quite succinctly when he stated in Iowa this past March that he would, “prohibit the teaching of ‘critical race theory’, ‘transgender insanity’ and ‘any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.’”  Previous Republican presidents focused on educational outcomes, choice, and ‘bureaucracy,’ but not today.

THE CRUSADERS:  So how large is the army of Crusaders?  Not so big, it turns out.  Earlier this year the Washington Post analyzed the data regarding attempts to ban books and found that just 11 (eleven!!) ‘hyperactive adults’ were responsible for the majority of the challenges.  “Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6 percent of all book challengers — but were responsible for 60 percent of all filings.”  

There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy here. Most of the books being challenged dealt with all aspects of human sexuality, and many of the challengers were associated with Moms for Liberty, whose co-founder was just outed for her participation in a 3-way sexual affair with her husband and another woman.

It’s actually a rag-tag army marching under many different banners.  Some Crusaders are motivated by a desire for dollars.  The US spends close to $800 billion a year on preK-12 public education, money that’s available to those running for-profit charter schools, expensive tutoring programs, and private schools in states with voucher programs, to name only three of the ways to turn a buck.

Some Crusaders are motivated by libertarian ideology–nothing that is ‘public’ makes sense to them.  Others believe that children ‘belong to their parents,’ who may not want them vaccinated, tested, or exposed to any ideas and beliefs counter to their own.  And some–most of them politicians– are opportunists.  For instance, the Covid pandemic shutdowns, prolonged in some places, brought out the naysayers in full force; the failure of ‘virtual learning’ in many places created a tidal wave of our teaching force.  

There are two ways to defeat this rag-tag but highly motivated ‘army’ of Crusaders: 1) shout from the rooftops the good news about public schools; and 2) work even harder to make them better.

Let’s start with the good news about our schools: David Wallace-Wells, writing in the New York Times, recently wrote a thoughtful analysis of American public education. He did a deep dive into the results of the Programme in International Assessment (PISA) test, pre- and post-Covid, testing 15-year-olds around the globe. Because the essay is behind a paywall, I will quote from it at some length here.

“(W)hat it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

The performance looks even stronger once you get into the weeds a bit. In reading, the average U.S. score dropped just one point from 505 in 2018 to just 504 in 2022. Across the rest of the O.E.C.D., the average loss was 11 times as large. In Germany, which looked early in the pandemic to have mounted an enviable good-government response, the average reading score fell 18 points; in Britain, the country most often compared with the United States, it fell 10 points. In Iceland, which had, by many metrics, the best pandemic performance in Europe, it fell 38 points. In Sweden, the darling of mitigation skeptics, it fell 19 points.”

Tell this to the Crusaders and anyone else who seems inclined to believe them!

Elsewhere in his essay, Wallace-Wells makes two telling points about absenteeism and mental health: “Chronic absenteeism, for instance, is up significantly since before the pandemic and may prove a far more lasting and concerning legacy of school closure than learning loss. And the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national mental health emergency — language that has been echoed by the American Medical Association.”  

One conclusion: If you are serious about improving public schools, find out why so many kids skip school regularly–and do something about it.  Hint: absenteeism and mental health are directly connected, the through line being bullying, cyberbully, and cellphones.

2) Making schools better: I’ve been writing throughout the fall about ways to improve public schools.  You can find those suggestions on my blog, TheMerrowReport.com.  I learned only recently that the American Federation of Teachers has been at this throughout 2023, in an impressive campaign called “Real Solutions for Real Kids and Communities.”  Some of our ideas overlap, and some of what they have already suggested are on my drawing board. I urge you to take a deep dive, because it’s good stuff.

Happy Holidays, and keep the faith.