Public schools must rebuild trust with parents -- or continue to lose students to homeschooling, private schools, microschools and other alternatives, writes Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute.
Social conservatives aren't the only parents who suspect teachers and schools are "spending more time preaching than teaching," he writes.
Ed schools encourage teachers to see themselves as activists "committed to diminishing the inequities of American society," writes Pondiscio.
. . . the rise of increasingly assertive diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas in the aftermath of summer 2020 racial activism, exemplified in many schools’ commitment to purported anti-racist pedagogies and curricula, coincided with pandemic-driven remote education. With lessons beamed onto kitchen tables daily, the black box of classroom practice was pried open.
Many parents didn't like what they saw.
"Educators must also understand and take to heart that, legally speaking, they have limited latitude to impose their views on a captive audience of students," writes Pondiscio. He and colleague Tracey Schirra urge "schools and districts to consider adopting a code of ethics that encourages schools to teach essential yet controversial topics while valorizing viewpoint diversity."
A joke:
How do they say "F. U." in Los Angeles?
"Trust me."
It does not take 12 years at $15,080 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State (i.e., government, generally) provision of History, Economics, and Civics instruction actively threatens democracy and, in totalitarian States like Cuba and North Korea, actively suppresses democracy.
The $764 billion per year K-12 credential industry is the second largest command economy left on Earth. The $764 billion per year K-12 credential racket has become a make-work program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction, consulting, and supplies contracts for politically connected…
I don't know where he thinks he's pulling this from. Schools are more popular than ever and the decline is from a number of things and Pondiscio just spent 20 years working for organizations who got what they wanted and the public hated it and ripped it out.
Many parents are finding relevance in this:
It is the diversity in the population that has brought the political prize nature of public schooling to the fore.