As a public school educator of almost 30 years, I can assure you the trouble in American public school classrooms is multi-tiered, and almost all of the tiers of trouble can be traced back to the federal government and the left's insane demand for equality of outcome rather than quality of opportunity and quality of individual outcomes. As an example, I'll cite my own high school education and college experience with that of my daughter exactly 30 years later (1987 vs. 2017). I graduated in class of 250, my daughter in a class of 16. My class had about 30 students take an applied chemistry class and that class was RIGOROUS, meaning tons of complex math, manual computation of acid dissociation constants, manual computation of the heat lost to the calorimeter, and various other complex subject matter. Fewer still took the applied Physics class, and fewer still Biology II or Chem II or Phys II. Of those students who took the upper level stuff, about 90% attended 4 year universities and earned degrees in STEM fields (Math, Chemistry (my major), Physics, veterinary, law, pre-med, etc.) The others also graduated 4 year universities, but with degrees in music, seminary, literature, or performing arts. There were NONE who floundered at college or dropped out.

Fast forward 30 years, and public school (we do all we can to add content) have almost NO ability to differentiate courses and course selection for students. For my daughter's class that meant all 16 took chemistry, physics, algebra II, geometry, and either Biology II or Pre-calculus, and all of them had to pass all of those to earn the 'advanced' diploma and keep the school system rated highly. On paper, having more kids taking those classes is a liberal bonanza. (More kids of all types taking 'upper level' classes!!!) The problem is this, though. The curriculum is so watered down to assure a high passing rate (no child left behind) that those who go to University for STEM majors almost always drop out, change majors, or have to retake courses because of their inadequate high school preparation. My own daughter, child of a Chemistry major, and a highly able student opted out of a STEM major in college after a bad encounter with mismanaged dyslexia accommodations and a really challenging Chemistry course. To her, the struggle was far in excess of the potential payoff down the road.

So we have a system that nominally prepares all students to attend a community collage and nothing more. Public schooling is effectively 'pre-comotology' or ''pre-laborer'. Add to that the incessant attacks against smaller systems through theft of tax revenue and funding formulas that encourage consolidation, and you have a system moving ever more towards a system of indoctrination instead of education. If I were in Congress, I would introduce legislation to rename the Dept. of Education to the the Department of Indoctrination, just for the publicity it would garner. The move to private schools in my state has far more to do with maintaining autonomy over curriculum, educating students of faith, teaching actual history and offering ACTUAL preparation for rigorous college coursework. It has very little to do with class, cash, or race.

And these are just the systemic problems. As others have noted, in an attempt to be more 'diverse' history books now spend inordinate amounts of time and space on persons of ethnic specificity that achieved virtually ANY degree of notoriety at the expense of teaching, oh say, about Andew Jackson and the 'war' to not create a federal bank. Or maybe, it's the Griswold v Connecticut case, the original fabrication of the mythical 'penumbra' that gets omitted. Or maybe it's just the actual text of the Constitution that is deemed optional. I mean, just why would a good little drone need to worry about the Constitution when nanny state government is all set to make all your 'decisions' for you.....

Deep breath.

I wonder how much time any of the posters here who are denigrating today’s public school educators have spent in a classroom observing what actually goes on. Most of the crap about how bad public schools are is just that, crap, and is being propagated by the politically well connected and well heeled charter/private school lobby who want to funnel our school tax dollars into private hands for profit. Public schools are non-profit. Charter and private schools are for profit enterprises where education is a commodity and the cost of providing it should be minimized to maximize profits. Guess who suffers from this business model - it’s certainly not the owners/shareholders in the charter/private schools.

Stan

No wonder kids can't learn

Young people cannot learn from history anymore because history is no longer taught as a required subject in public high schools.


Theodore " Dutch " J. Van Kirk was the navigator on the "Enola Gay" when it dropped the bomb at Hiroshima , Japan, and is the last surviving member of the crew. This really happened.


Dutch was asked to speak at a grammar school this past week. The young teacher introduced him by saying the speaker was a veteran of World War Eleven (as in WW II). Dutch stood up and walked out of the school without saying a word. End of story.


god help us

There was no war of “Northern Aggression”. South Carolina treasonously fired on Americans at Fort Sumter. The southerners couldn’t live without using slaves to pick their crops and rape them at will (at will does not mean all the time, just when they wanted to).
There was nothing honorable in southerners fighting to maintain slavery in their states, while insisting that new states allow slavery even when they didn’t want it.
There is, and never was any defense of slavery. The Civil War was all about slavery, not about constitutional rights, not about states rights. It was about the right of all men (and women) to be free.

There was no war of “Northern Aggression”. South Carolina treasonously fired on Americans at Fort Sumter. The southerners couldn’t live without using slaves to pick their crops and rape them at will (at will does not mean all the time, just when they wanted to).
There was nothing honorable in southerners fighting to maintain slavery in their states, while insisting that new states allow slavery even when they didn’t want it.
There is, and never was any defense of slavery. The Civil War was all about slavery, not about constitutional rights, not about states rights. It was about the right of all men (and women) to be free.