America owes much of its prominence and prosperity to the fact that it has led the world in popular education. Even without a public school system, we had the highest literacy in the world in the 19th century. We were among the first to provide public school to the young through the 12th grade. We were the first to open the doors of
colleges and universities – significantly through the GI Bill after World War II – to children from all levels of income.
Today, however, public education in the United States is under siege. Public school teachers and librarians have become punching bags in the political wars. Teachers are underpaid and overstressed. College is priced out of reach for more and more children, with administrators and facilities consuming even more of the resources–while professors and graduate assistants fall behind. Schools are now battlefields in our partisan political wars. Job satisfaction for public school teachers is at a 50-year low. Thousands are leaving the profession, and fewer and fewer college students are taking it up.
Florida offers a good example. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, has made the “war on wokeism” a centerpiece of his presidential political campaign. He has signed into law multiple “educational gag orders” – criminalizing classroom discussions on race, gender, and history that might make white students “feel guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress.” School libraries are purged of books, with librarians at risk if they don’t fall in line. Even the teaching of Shakespeare has been censored in some districts as too racy for children to hear (the same children who too often share far more shocking material on social media).
Florida teacher salaries are ranked 48th in the country. Now, teachers are not only unpaid but they are assailed, vilified, and threatened – not only with the loss of a job but with potential criminal charges.
The result – not surprisingly – is that the brightest and best teachers are headed north. When DeSantis became governor in 2019, the Nation Magazine reports, Florida already had a teacher shortage in grades K through 12 of 2,217. When he began his second term four years later, that number had more than doubled. This August, the Florida Education Association reported the number of unfilled positions at an unimaginable 7,000. The destructiveness of DeSantis’ war on wokeism is likely to be felt for a generation.
As public institutions engaged with children, schools have always been centers of controversy. In the South, segregation enforced separate but unequal schools, dividing children by race. In the North, as Jonathan Kozol detailed, public schools reflected the “savage inequality” of neighborhood disparities in wealth and race. Busing is routine across America, but it became a lightning rod when courts ordered busing to try to integrate schools in metropolitan areas.
In the countries that rank the highest in educational proficiency–teachers are treated with respect and paid well. In Finland, which ranks highest in international testing, gaining admission to a teacher’s college is fiercely competitive. Teachers are supplied with the resources, the teaching aides, and the classroom ,…
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