It’s like the people behind public schools are finally admitting that the point of the enterprise is to funnel money to Leftist causes and pretty much nothing else.

Apparently, there is a growing movement to reduce the school week from 5 days to 4. It’s starting small, but there is momentum according to Axios.

A research group at Oregon State University is tracking the trend, which started in remote schools that had trouble recruiting teachers because the idea seems to have caught on. Especially with teachers and administrators, unsurprisingly. The group noticed that what was once a method used to deal with a crisis has gained momentum because, well, it is nice for the people who run the schools. Students apparently like it too.

Naturally, they wondered, is this actually good for the people for whom the schools are run, and not just the ones running the schools?

Of course not. In the midst of a crisis caused by kids being out of school, the people in charge think it would be nice to spend less time in a fraught environment.

Four-day school weeks are most popular with rural, Western districts, though the trend — which gained steam during the COVID-19 pandemic — is also catching on in metropolitan areas.

• Almost 60 Texas school districts have made the switch or approved it for the 2023-2024 academic year, along with nearly a quarter of those in Missouri.
• Suburban districts in metropolitan Denver, Independence, Missouri, suburban Phoenix and metropolitan San Antonio are now taking the plunge.

Every. Damn. Thing. that came out of COVID policy is a disaster. Name one thing that got better. I can’t. It’s like the government’s response to COVID was designed to destroy American society, which, in a way, it was.

COVID policy was designed to remake society into a utopia for the people in charge. The laptop class created a world where they were separated from their servants, who showed up to their door literally faceless to deliver food and necessities while they themselves remained in their pajamas.

When they went out the door to socialize with their own friends, all the pesky proles were forced to remain faceless drones, masked as the better sort could sit at a table unmasked laughing at the proles.

Teachers, who unfortunately are not (in their opinion) quite the laptop class but a necessary constituency were named honorary members and allowed to teach remotely. Teachers are the shock troops for the Left, and now alternative methods of keeping the public school teachers happy.

So the Elite are cutting their hours. Work 4 days a week!

Four days a week is sufficient to get the propagandizing in, and you only have to sacrifice the academic instruction to keep things on track. So they have.

Unsurprisingly, students who attend these schools have lower academic achievement, and may in fact have worse mental health. The latter is not yet clear–there is a world of difference between 4 days a week, which probably doesn’t harm mental health, and 0, which clearly did.

The 4-day school week “unambiguously hurts student achievement over time,” Christopher Doss, a RAND policy researcher, tells Axios.

• He and a colleague, Andrea Phillips, studied outcomes in six states (Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota) and found that “students in 4-day school week districts fell behind a little every year.”
• After eight years, the damage to student achievement would equal the learning loss caused by the pandemic, they estimated.
• Moreover, “we didn’t really find that students were engaging in hobbies or extracurricular activities” during their extra time away from school, Phillips tells Axios.

Americans love their public schools and public school teachers. Our own experiences as children buttress this. We have fond memories of those teachers–usually few–who made all the difference in our lives. I have one in particular who made a huge difference in High School. Most of us have.

But the public schools are a menace to society. There are still plenty of fine teachers, of course, but the institutions themselves are utterly corrupt and dedicated to the destruction of our society.

In just the past couple of days, I have given you 2 examples: the Colorado Teachers’ Union coming out into the open as a dedicated communist organization; and the story I wrote earlier today about the school district in Texas that has covered up the sexual abuse of a 6-year-old child.

Public schools exist to serve the people who run them and the Elite who use them as ideological factories and as a recruiting ground for activists. That is their purpose.

If you still believe that the public school system exists to actually educate children you are sorely mistaken. The rot may not yet be universal, but it is irreversible. The termites have eaten the structural integrity away from the load-bearing walls. Best to burn the whole thing down.

It’s not that private schools are always better–often they are not–but they are not a system designed to destroy things. Many schools are great, most are adequate, and the rotten ones are isolated from the rest. Set some basic academic standards and then let parents choose the best school for their child.

Presto chango. It won’t be perfect–but at least we are starting in a place where the system is designed to destroy children and please the people running the schools.