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Trillions Down the Rat Hole and Johnny Still Can’t Read
By Carole Hornsby Haynes February 10, 2025
Despite the trillions spent on American K-12 public education, students have become some of the worst educated in the world – a far cry from our colonial ancestors who were the most literate in the world.
Blame is placed on COVID school closures that were prolonged by teacher unions, yetthe collapse of public education has been quietly occurring for many decades with schools becoming indoctrination centers instead of places of learning.This was inevitable. The founding purpose for public education was to promote socialism and secular humanism to achieve the long term goal of statism.
Teachers are using the classroom to create the New Man with children as the guinea pigs. They are brainwashed in colleges of education where Pedagogy of the Oppressed, authored by Paulo Freire, is one of the most important foundational texts. Freire, a Brazilian Marxist education theorist, believed the classroom should be used to inspire a revolution from the bottom up by using race rather than social class as the dividing line between the oppressed and the oppresssor.
Freire’s philosophy is prevalent in public classrooms that teach community organizing and recruiting a Marxist student army under the guise of “Action Civics.” In Illinois, state law requires public school teachers to indoctrinate students in Critical Race Theory in order to get and keep a teaching license. The 2021 bill -- “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” – is Marxist activism in schools on steroids.
The long march to dumb down students for easy compliance with government control has been highly successful. Dashing hope that student achievement is on the upswing, the recently released 2024 NAEP scores prove that America is in serious trouble. Reading scores for fourth and eighth grade students declined further and math scores for both grades were stagnant. One-third of eighth graders, the largest percentage ever recorded, cannot read at basic level.
Teacher unions blame the lack of money for the low scores and demand more school funding.Others are claiming inequality since the scores of high performers remained about the same while scores for low performers plummeted.
In Texas some illogically claim that Education Commissioner, Mike Morath, and the Texas Education Agency are responsible for low academic achievement. Never mind that local school boards set the goals for learning and assessing progress, that districts determine what materials will be used in their local schools, and that principals are accountable for their classrooms. It gets worse! Parents say principals claim they have no control what materials they use or what happens intheir classroom because -- the TEA is responsible for that!!
Never mind that millions of uninvited foreigners storm across the Southern border into Texas, flooding the public schools where they are guaranteed a free education. Numerous foreign languages are spoken within a classroom by children who are unaccustomed to our culture – in some cases, they don’t know how to use a toilet. Teachers are communicating via Google Translate while American students sit idly by – bored and learning nothing.
Trying to maintain some semblance of order in a room filled with non-English speaking children from widely different backgrounds and academic levels is overwhelming for a teacher who is already under high stress. There is an exodus of teachers, leaving schools badly understaffed. American parents are responding by yanking their children out and turning to homeschools or private schools.
Parents are not amused with these preposterous claims about low scores. After all, they have been at war with school boards over their daughters being attacked by mentally confused males in girls’ dressing rooms. To add insult to injury, they have been labeled “domestic terrorists” by their own government and hounded as dangerous criminals. Their children attend classes where non-whites viciously bully whites for being “racist,” aided and abetted by radicalized teachers.
With DEI (aided by $1 billion in federal funding since 2021), Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, Marxist indoctrination, politicization of core subjects, biopsychosocial assessments, federal law changing the purpose of education from academic to social emotional learning,Common Core, whole language in lieu of phonics, classrooms filled with non-speaking illegal immigrants, and schools that encourage multiculturalism rather than assimilation, why would we expect any academic learning to be occurring in a public classroom?
Despite all of the negative news about public education, the tide seems to be turning with the numerous executive orders of President Trump to end DEI, Critical Race Theory, indoctrination and transgenderism in K-12. Most important of all is that, at last, massive changes to the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) are being made. Our long term goal must be to shut it down completely and return education to the states and local communities as mandated by our Constitution. Schools must return to the basics of learning sans the socialism garbage.