Education is on the November ballot and so is our future
Millions of parents across the country tuned into the presidential debate and didn’t hear a single question from the moderators to either candidate about one of the most important issues affecting them and their children: the future of education in the United States.
Whether it was intentional or not, the omission unquestionably amounted to another leg up that Vice President Kamala Harris has gotten from the institutional media doing everything they can to help her across the finish line. We all had to sit through nonstop one-sided "fact checks" against former President Donald Trump. We got to hear Harris’s obviously rehearsed answers to seemingly choreographed questions about race and climate change.
It is a disservice to voters and students around the country that there wasn’t a single question about education. It is one of the most important factors to our nation’s future economic prosperity. Without children equipped with the basic skills of reading, writing and math, we have no workforce equipped to compete in the global economy.
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We didn’t hear a thing about what either candidate thinks about educating the next generation of American citizens or how that should be done. This is especially egregious since most parents are desperate for solutions that will turn their kids' schools around.
According to Pew polling from April, about half of Americans are concerned that our education system is going in the wrong direction. At the same time, a majority of those who think that education is going the wrong way believe so because, they say, schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects. Most of that group also expressed concerns that teachers are bringing their personal political views into the classroom.
This stands against the backdrop of last year’s reading and math scores plummeting to their lowest levels in decades for 13-year-olds on a national scale. That same year, ACT scores for high schoolers dropped to a 30-year low. Yet per-pupil spending in government school systems is hitting record highs across the board.
Those aren’t just statistics. Those are realities for countless American parents across this country who keep seeing their tax dollars flow into school systems that indoctrinate their children politically while failing them academically year after year.
At the same time, educators are still dealing with the shockwaves of COVID-19 and the disastrous lockdown policies. Broken education systems that were already failing kids when they were in the classroom put them on Zoom and degraded their education even further. Now that kids are back at their desks, the pre-existing problems in those systems are still waiting to be addressed.
What many schools do teach now isn’t education but indoctrination. They teach skewed accounts of American history that demonize our founders and our core principles. They teach accounts of race relations that paint students as either oppressors or the oppressed. They teach gender ideologies that conflict with both basic human biology and parents' own values and religious views. They fill school libraries with explicit, pornographic material meant to indoctrinate and sexualize students.
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This is all propped up by an iron triangle of government bureaucrats, teacher union bosses and politicians who do everything they can to give these groups more power to shut parents out of the process and more money to do it. Harris is just one of those politicians. She had one of the most radical progressive voting records in the Senate and never took a vote the teacher unions didn’t like. That’s why the AFT was so quick to endorse her.
Parents and students deserve a change; we all do.
This is an area where Trump’s policy agenda would have wiped the floor with the vice president’s position in the debate. Like crime, immigration and so many others, this is another area where she and her other radical progressive Democrats are completely out of touch with what the American people want and where they don’t care about what American students deserve.
Trump’s track record on education is unquestionably pro-parent and pro-student. As president, when he talked about the importance of education, he actually followed up and took action by issuing executive orders to expand school choice. He put together the 1776 Commission to confront political indoctrination and radical ideological theories with patriotism based on an accurate and honest reading of American history.
And his view for a second term is even more ambitious. The principles he has laid out focus on everything the education cartel does not want: parental rights, merit-based pay and employment for teachers, putting education over indoctrination and more freedom to choose education approaches that don’t fit into government school cookie-cutter approaches.
When I talk to parents in Oklahoma and around this country, Trump’s approach is the one they want to see implemented. The other has been tried for decades and found wanting over and over again. That’s a conversation that the American people deserved to hear last week, and it’s one that definitely needs to happen before November.