Earlier, I recounted how -- five years ago this week -- the world as we knew it shut down. It was five years ago yesterday that the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of Wisconsin's lockdowns.
Like many others, it was 'two weeks to flatten the curve' and the shuttering of schools lasted well into the 2020-2021 school year. At the time, my boys were all at Milwaukee Public Schools, one of the districts that opted to reopen virtually in the fall of 2020. This was despite the fact it had been long established children were neither an at-risk population for COVID infections nor were they a major vector of infection.
During that time, I worked as a nurse and spent three very long days taking care of patients both COVID positive and otherwise, only to spend my days 'off' (I use that term loosely) navigating remote learning for three increasingly stir-crazy boys.
In the fall of 2021, my boys had had enough and -- on the verge of tears -- begged to go back to school. I enrolled them in private schools that were open and mask-optional, and we didn't look back. Unlike many of their public-school peers, they've largely thrived and the learning loss from COVID has been negligible.
Throughout all of that, the Department of Education led the anti-science, anti-child policies that kept a lot of kids out of school for far too long.
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So now that the Left are renting their garments over the pending closure of the Department of Education (DOE), it takes tremendous audacity for MSNBC to publish an article calling that a 'betrayal of America's children.'
Really?
Many of America’s global competitors — and adversaries — are no doubt cheering President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. They know that countries who out-educate the rest of the world will out-compete it. And now brand new Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Trump want to neuter, if not completely shutter, the entity that helps give all children in the United States access to the great public school education they deserve. On Tuesday, the department announced plans to cut nearly half of its staff. McMahon says these catastrophic firings, alongside hundreds of so-called 'buyouts,' are about 'efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.' The reality is far more cowardly.
We'll start with a history lesson.
The Department of Education was established by Jimmy Carter in October 1979. Before that, America existed for two hundred years without it and somehow managed to educate her children. And educate them well enough that we invented flight, created the atomic bomb and landed on the moon.
When the Department of Education opened its doors on May 4, 1980, America was the world leader in education. We now sit at 31st.
In many states, there are districts where few, if any, students are reading on grade level. In Illinois, there are thirty schools with zero literate children; in Maryland, the same can be said of many schools in the Baltimore district (but they'll have condom vending machines in elementary schools, so don't you worry!)
And in Wisconsin -- my home state -- fewer than one in three students can read on grade level, and Black students come in dead last. Meanwhile, our governor has decided that using the word 'mother' and 'women' in legislation is offensive to the trans community, so we're now 'inseminated persons.'
But don't worry about the racial disparities in education, the Chicago Teachers' Union assured us that re-opening schools after COVID was rooted in 'sexism, racism, and misogyny' (while their union president went on vacation, of course).
Meanwhile, folks like Randi Weingarten and the Left pushed for Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical transgender curricula in schools. Weingarten denied that CRT was being taught in schools and choked on posts from the AFT calling CRT an 'irreplaceable lens with which we can view our difficult history.'
Parents who opposed the inclusion of pornographic LGBTQ books in school libraries were lambasted and classified as 'domestic terrorists' under the Biden-Harris regime and the DOJ lied about it repeatedly.
Meanwhile, the Left attacks private, charter, and homeschooling as a threat to children, a threat to education, and unfair. Meanwhile, kids churned out by the public school system are getting into elite colleges where they're not able to read at a college level.
All of this happened during the 45-year tenure of the Department of Education.
That, if anything, is the real betrayal of children.
And here's hoping Donald Trump makes education great again.
