As beneficiaries of teachers union contributions, why didn’t Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman and Bob Casey Jr. send their children to public schools? One reason was recently on display in Coatesville. As reported in this newspaper, shots were fired at a school bus in an apparent attempt at grudge settling. A football game was canceled. These events brought to mind a mass teacher resignation in Harrisburg.
As it happened, educators were being assaulted without repercussions for perpetrators, the majority of whom were minorities. The disinclination to discipline the offenders was the product of a mandate from the Obama Department of Education which threatened a loss of school district funding if students were penalized disparately i.e. in numbers greater than their racial percentage of the student population. As one could have expected, mayhem became a normalized feature of public school education. Woke Loudoun County, Va., boasts MS-13 gang members in its classrooms.
Similarly, the Biden Department of Education threatened to withhold meal funding if LGBTQ dictates were not adhered to. As many are likely aware, such mandates, accommodated by progressive administrators and school board members locally, have resulted not only in invasions of privacy but far worse, beatings and sexual assaults by the deranged.
The weaponization of school funding by the left is front and center in arguments supportive of a shuttering of the U.S. Department of Education.
The other explanation for Shapiro-type aversion to public education is the quality of the product offered. With teachers union support, 10 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have been permitted to opt out of standardized testing. In Massachusetts, long a bellwether for educational excellence, measurements of subject proficiency, prerequisites for graduation, are on the cusp of being discontinued with teachers union support. In Baltimore, not one student in 13 schools tests at grade level and not for lack of funding.
The elimination of objective measurements of performance dovetails nicely with the equality of outcomes goal inherent in DEI agendas. If one wished to collapse a society to the benefit of say China, DEI would clearly be a means for doing so. Such unfortunately has had the effect of transforming the teaching profession from noble to ignoble and is likely a contributing factor to teacher recruitment shortfalls.
Worthy of mention is the degree to which available education resources have been compromised by the influx of aliens lacking fluency in English. Small communities like Charleroi, Pa., have been confronted by budget shortfalls on the order of $400,000 in the interest of providing translation services.
Food for thought. Many of those complicit in compromising safety and quality in our schools did so as school board members. Those positions provided springboards to higher elected offices in our legislature where exponentially greater damage is being manufactured. I can think of at least two locally who are up for re-election.
Mark Furlong,
North Coventry
