How Democrats Corrupted Public Schools
– By Howard Sierer –
For most of the last 100 years, Democrats were seen as champions of public schools, supporting an institution near and dear to the parents of school children. But they’ve let the culture wars they started distract from education’s fundamental mission. Further, they’ve downgraded merit and academic achievement after unnecessarily extending school closures during the COVID pandemic, setting back the education of millions of students.
The Democratic Party claims that our country is systemically racist, encouraging many school districts and educators around the country to insert “critical race theory” (CRT) into their curricula. CRT goes way beyond benign pedagogical practices such as teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, the Tulsa Race Massacre, redlining, and so on. CRT was infused, from top to bottom into every subject including math and science, with concepts drawn from the anti-racist playbook.
An army of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants have been making their living training school district staff and teachers to implement this creed and incorporate it into their curricula. CRT teaches that “[a]n unwillingness to recognize the full force of systemic racism as determining disparities between groups is a denial of the reality of racism today (and evidence of ignorance at best and racism at worst).” In other words, those who criticize CRT are by definition racists.
Yet it’s clear that most Americans reject CRT’s fundamental teachings. A University of California survey reported that a staggering 92% agreed with the following: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.”
CRT is politics, not education as traditionally and properly understood. It has little to do with what most parents want schools to do: develop their children’s academic skills and knowledge base so they can succeed in the world. Democrats have been hurt by their increasing identification with this ideological project rather than the traditional goals of public education.
Like most parents, I want to get ideology, whether from the left or right, out of schools. The job of schools is to give students the tools to make informed judgments, not tell them what those judgments should be.
The country needs public schools that emphasize what students have in common as Americans instead of what divides them. As education scholar Richard Kahlenberg writes, civics instruction in public schools should focus on teaching the core of the American creed: the veneration of liberty and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
The Democratic Party, in its quest for what progressives call “social justice,” has turned its back on merit and educational achievement, especially as measured by standardized tests. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed by Democrats as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to social justice.
The message to aspiring students and parents who see educational achievement as their route to upward mobility and success in life is clear: students can no longer rely on hard work and objectively good academic performance to attain their goals.
The following statement was given to 18,000 Americans in an RMG nationwide survey: “Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism, and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.” Seventy-four percent of them agreed while only 16% disagreed.
While the Democratic Party opposes charter schools, I join many others who are longtime supporters of school choice and charter schools. I believe it is important to give parents more choice of where they can send their child to school, through both more options within the local school system and a wider array of charter schools. Fostering school choice both satisfies parents and improves educational achievement.
More choice is especially important for low-income parents whose children generally do not fare well when attending schools that lack a middle-class presence. Interestingly, children from low income families who attend charter schools do as well or better on standardized tests than do their fellow students from middle class families.
Democrats worked to keep public schools closed far too long during the COVID pandemic despite the science at the time.. Pushed by their allies in the teachers unions, Democrats ignored the justified warnings that extended school closures would severely harm student learning and social development, especially for poorer children.
The returns are now in, and it is clear that the warnings Democrats ignored were, if anything, too mild. The liberal Atlantic magazine says “School closures were a failed policy.”
This was no minor error made by Democratic officials in the fog of pandemic confusion but a profound tragedy for millions of children that could have been avoided or at least substantially mitigated. To add to the shameful episode, parents in many communities around the country who wanted the schools reopened faster were frequently demonized by progressives as heartless, anti-science right-wingers who didn’t care about public health. The wounds from this still fester today.
The Democratic Party has fumbled the ball on public education. Until the party as a whole recognizes that implementing progressive policies is dramatically at odds with the nation’s parents, its candidates will find themselves at odds with parents (and grandparents) who not long ago were reliable supporters.
