A child who reads will be an adult who thinks

STAND TOGETHER

February 15, 2023

Dear Patriots,

In the middle of another crazy week, we ask that you pause a bit to read some longer, thoughtful articles about a variety of subjects, but particularly on education in America.

1- An excellent read which makes an obvious point.

Mark Oshinskie

AMERICA’S LOSS OF TOUGHNESS ENABLED CORONAMANIA

QUOTE: Despite being subjected to much greater threats than people were from Coronavirus exposure, coal, steel and agricultural laborers pressed on because they needed income and because everyone needed coal, steel, lumber and food and fiber to build and heat houses, schools and businesses, to eat and wear clothes and to travel. Those who provided these commodities were the original “essential workers.” On balance, far more lives were lengthened and improved—not shortened and worsened—because laborers tolerated serious risk and did exhausting and dangerous work.

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, workplaces were made safer and hard work was increasingly done by machines and/or outsourced abroad. But as this occurred, many Americans lost their mental toughness and sense of history. As a society, we overshot the safety mark. This was never clearer than in the past three years of Coronamania, during which bizarre, ineffective public safety measures were substituted for sane risk/reward analysis and the general welfare.

Many contemporary people have never done physically challenging labor. Over the past fifty-plus years, increasing numbers of workers sit in front of screens and do some oddly-titled job, the process or purpose of which can be hard to explain or understand. Modernity, occupational and otherwise, has pacified people and lessened their ability to recognize true adversity, or to assess risk. Additionally, excessive exposure to the media and academia have fostered the false, yet prevailing belief that the world is always in crisis and that only “Science(!)” and the government can save us.

Having been disconnected from hard physical work, and having become dependent upon smartphones, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds and abundant “recreational” herb, many Twenty-First Century Americans have become emotionally soft, psychologically frail and cognitively challenged. Even though 7,600 Americans died daily before Coronamania, during the past three years, many thought, or at least pretended, that no one should get sick or die, no matter how old or overweight. They feared things, like coronaviruses, that aren’t fearsome.

Our ancestors wouldn’t have sacrificed normal life, an economy and a young generation so that they could work in sweatpants and their party could win elections. Instead, they would have seen the costs of extreme safety-ism, scoffed at the idea of locking down a society over a respiratory virus and understood that the human toll of doing so far exceeded any insincerely-proffered, and ultimately unrealized, benefits.

2- A good review of election frauds and a call to the GOP to get creative in fighting it.

Former Rep. Jason Lewis R-Minn.

It’s time for Republicans to get creative in the election integrity fight

QUOTE: It goes without saying that voter fraud is nothing new. Think Tammany Hall and Chicago’s “city bosses,” including Cook County in the 1960 presidential election. Or read “Means of Ascent,” Robert Caro’s masterful account of “landslide” Lyndon’s shenanigans at the ballot box during his 1948 Senate run-off in Texas.

And who can forget (except the media) the more recent FBI investigation into the corrupt “community organization” ACORN that resulted in the arrests of eight workers in St. Louis for a host of election law violations? Pretending voter fraud doesn’t exist is political strategy, not reality.

That’s why partisans screaming the loudest at so-called “election deniers” have to rely on gaslighting and online censorship. The Democrat/Media complex looks at ballot integrity precisely the same way it looks at climate change or vaccine mandates — there is no debate.

Of course, it’s political crossdressing on an epic scale. Democrats who’ve made a career of questioning elections suddenly irate over the sloppiest one in modern memory? Al Gore, just as unhinged two decades ago as he is today, repeatedly claimed that the 2000 election was stolen. Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock and Hakeem Jeffries are all serial “election deniers.”

Yet it was Hillary Clinton who actually tried to undo the will of the people.

Too many conservative talking heads are capitulating, suggesting these unconstitutional voting changes are a fait accompli, and we must “learn to live by the new rules…” Hogwash! The GOP already has two strikes against it due to geographical barriers, i.e., it’s much easier to play the ballot-harvesting game in big centralized counties where the left thrives.

As I’ve said before, the GOP can still prevail in a few, heavily Red districts. But the combination of months-long early voting (before seeing John Fetterman debate) and COVID-inspired universal mail-in ballots makes it hard to see how Republicans win another close statewide race.

It’s time to get creative.

3- This is an issue that you may want to read more about and get involved with on the local and state level. When you read this and then the three items below, you start to see that education may indeed be the pivoting issue in future elections.

Daily Caller

There’s One Key Issue That Could Decide The 2024 GOP Primaries

QUOTE: Education issues such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology are likely to become a key factor in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries as candidates attempt to appeal to the GOP base, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Education is going to be a big issue in the Republican primaries mostly because it has (finally) dawned on folks on the right that the interests of State schools might not always align with the interests of the parents. That has probably been true for 100 years; not sure why it has taken so long for folks to figure that out,” Michael McKenna, president of MWR Strategies, told the DCNF.

Republicans have also made up serious ground on Democrats on the education issue, with voters just barely preferring Democrats to manage education over Republicans, according to a polling memo from the Republican National Convention.

“Voters are most concerned with kids not learning enough basic life skills AND the long-term effects of COVID on emotional and educational development. While masks on seven-year-olds and CRT is a concern, it is not the driving force. If Republicans solely focus there, they are missing a wide swath of voters open to the Republican message on education,” the memo read.

4- Speaking of education, this is an enlightening piece on the current dismal situation in America’s public schools. And how there is some hope due to homeschooling. Read the whole thing!

Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute

American Public Schools, RIP

QUOTE: But here is what is extremely strange. According to the Wall Street Journal, “an analysis of enrollment data conducted by Stanford University in collaboration with the Associated Press found that there were no records last school year for more than 240,000 school-age children living in 21 states and the District of Columbia, which provided recent enrollment details.”

How is this possible? “There’s this chunk that we just can’t explain,” said study author Professor Thomas S. Dee.

The most likely explanation is rather obvious. Some parents might have picked up and moved out of the country. Many changed states of residency and just never got around to re-enrolling. Others just decided to drop out and not notify the school district, as they are supposed to else be declared truant. But after the utter chaos of the lockdown period, and the demand that if kids come back they have to be masked and even vaccinated, hundreds of thousands of families just decided to say: forget it. They don’t even trust the system enough to file a paper with the school district.

How incredible: homeschooling until relatively recently existed in most places under a legal cloud and was widely put down by elite commentators, even as homeschool kids have so clearly outperformed everyone else in test scores and later achievements. And yet, nearly overnight, what was previously considered outlier behavior suddenly became the norm if not the mandate.

I simply cannot believe that anyone planned for this to happen. What’s not clear is how the heck all of this was permitted to happen at all.

5- WHO has been in charge of public education for the past 30 years?

Hot Air

Baltimore: not one student at these 23 schools can do math at grade level

QUOTE: Public school teachers need a raise. Sure, why not? It’s a tough job, and if they can get most of their students to learn the basics it makes sense to pay them well.

But what if, say, not one of their students can perform basic tasks at grade level?
Not even one. Nada. Zip. Bupkus.

That’s the situation in Baltimore, where the city brags that they have some of the highest teacher salaries in the country.

After FOX45’s Project Baltimore’s report uncovering 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students who tested proficient in math, some leaders representing the city aren’t talking about the problem.

The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program. Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state; 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, meaning 93% could not do math at grade level.

Project Baltimore analyzed the test results and found 23 schools – including elementary, middle and high schools – that didn’t have one student performing at grade level.

Baltimore schools as a whole did better than those 23 worst-performing schools: a whopping 7% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient at math.

So not everything is terrible. Just 93% of everything is terrible.

6- There has been a method of teaching reading that has worked for generations. But, the left wanted to experiment with a new way. The results are in. They are disastrous.

The Free Press

Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read

QUOTE: Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.
But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.