Dakota Beacon

Consider the Founding Fathers and the foundation from which they wrote the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution without the benefit of public education. Now, hold that thought.

How we think about K-12 education we remember from our early years when we were in school. For example, if we graduated in 1960, we tend to think of school today as we knew it then.

Times change. President Jimmy Carter federalized public education in 1979 by establishing the Department of Education as a reward for the National Education Association’s (NEA) help with his campaign. Local control of education has since dissipated. Teachers, parents, and school boards have little to say over federally mandated programs and policies imposed on schools nationwide. Controlling the distribution of dollars gives the Department of Education enormous leverage.

Once upon a time parents and grandparents assumed all was well with public education. After 1979 they slowly came to realize that kids were the beneficiaries of non-neutral political and social agendas. They now view with repugnance a public education system in slow decay and which has been declining for generations. It didn’t happen overnight. Before Carter’s actions, the transition – and corruption – of public education was in motion. John Dewey’s progressive education philosophy as taught at Columbia University trained teachers to teach what to learn -- not how to learn.

No one should buy the lie that public education needs more money. Biden’s FY2023 proposed budget for the Department of Education will fund an $88 BILLION dollar monstrosity and is now before Congress awaiting approval. Over the decades more billions of tax dollars poured into public education. After decades of huge expenditures, the results are in and the picture isn’t pretty. For the last few decades academic standards have tumbled. The gap between races widened. Student discipline plummeted.

Bottom line: There is no correlation between dollars spent on education and academic achievement. None. Beware the politician or bureaucrat who pleads for money “for the children.”

What do we have to show for our money? Not much. In general, this is what kids learn. Cultural diversity is America’s strength. The Constitution is outdated and should be changed. Big business is bad. Competition is bad. Rewards must be determined by need and not merit. Cutting taxes is bad. Sex between consenting teenagers is – whatever. Animals have Constitutional rights. Rights are created and distributed by government. Freedom is a controlled substance. Religious speech in school is dangerous. Moral judgment may be a hate crime. Genetic predisposition trumps moral responsibility. National defense promotes war. Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were racists. All opinions are equal. All sexual orientations are equal. The purpose of government is to provide jobs, housing, and living wages. A family is any collection of individuals living together. And more.

Small towns and rural communities are not excused from the national experience. To say they are “small” or “rural” and therefore can avoid public education’s malaise only masks the issue. These small and rural communities are merely trifling cogs on a very large bureaucratic wheel. All schools will dance to the tune of the US Department of Education’s piper.

Many teachers will continue to leave the profession, not because of low pay, but because they are tired of blurred boundaries between education and indoctrination. They would prefer to teach legitimate subjects rather than social agendas.

The education pendulum now swings in the opposite direction as parents -- including some teachers – increasingly extract their children from public schools in favor of a private alternative.

These books sketch the power plays for control of our children from the 60s and 70s onward.

** “NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education,” Samuel L. Blumenfeld. The Paradigm Co.,1984. An analysis of the decline of public education predicting our current situation.

** “Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers,” Rita Kramer. The Free Press,1991. Confronts the core failings of the K-12 system. Shows the politicization of education. Oppose and you will be branded “racist” or worse.

** “Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children,” G. Gregory Moo. Regnery, 1999. Exposes the power of the NEA. Displays a failed experiment in public education by showing how the system became more precious than the children it claims to serve.

** “The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation,” Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Lagemann focuses on how foundations effectively use power and private money to influence public policies.

** “The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools,” Martin L. Gross. HarperCollins, 1999. American schoolkids lag behind students in the developed world scoring nineteenth out of twenty-one countries in math competition. Almost forty percent are reading at "below basic" levels.

My generation was blind to public education’s sinister transition. Now, a new generation of parents both see and feel the impact of centralized education. They are rebelling against the “system” – and rightly so.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)