This Our View first appeared in The Lakeland Times
That notable Clinton hack and former Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe, was up for a repeat performance — and may have pulled it off — until he uttered a single sentence in a debate with now Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin:
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
With that gaffe, McAuliffe galvanized a national movement fed up with the nation’s public schools and with the government’s monopoly on education.
That monopoly not only forces most children to attend government schools whether their families wish them to be there or not but confers upon the government the infinite wisdom of what is necessary to be taught.
Through the years, the federalization of education, made tangible by Jimmy Carter’s creation of the federal education bureaucracy in 1979, has translated into a long-term failure of educational advancement and an accompanying slide in our competitiveness in the world.
According to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, over the past four decades the U.S. plunged from atop world rankings to a dismal middle-of-the-pack performance by 2018: 13th in reading; 37th in math; 18th in science; and 25th overall.
Many have hazarded guesses as to why our relative position has declined, and more than one factor is at work, but we would point out that the decline began just about the time the federal Department of Education was created out of thin air, to pursue one-size-fits-all standards and political agendas.
During that time, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the classroom to administrative overhead, ever evolving curricula rooted in cognitive abstraction, not to mention minimalism in literary assessment, and the outstanding failure but widespread use of Common Core, the quintessential example and education poster child of corporate and government partnership.
Most recent are the deliberate attempts to manipulate young minds about their gender identity — such curriculum as the Gender Unicorn in preschool and kindergarten comes to mind — and, most of all, the aggressive attempt to collapse complex social identity into the singular compartment of race — all whites as oppressors and all people of color as oppressed.
To be sure, parental discontent with such nonsense has been growing for years, particularly in the suburbs, and it was going to become a crystalized force at some point. McAuliffe provided the point.