It's hard to pick the biggest lie told during the pandemic because there were so many, and they were all horrifically destructive.
But among the most enduringly destructive was the line "kids are resilient," told as a defense of all the damage that adults were doing to children.
NYT:
— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) September 9, 2025
“The NAEP test results indicate ‘a stark decline’ in performance, said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the federal Education Department that administers the tests.”https://t.co/DXzB965ux0 pic.twitter.com/oLbXEWXYX6
Adults — particularly those in charge of our nation's schools — found the COVID pandemic a convenient excuse to make their lives easier and reap a substantial financial gain, and they took it.
The results couldn't be clearer. The mental, physical, and educational health of our nation's children has been permanently harmed.
The latest scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress--it should be renamed National Assessment of Educational Regress--show devastating declines in educational attainment...again. Math? Worse. Reading? Worse. Science? Worse.
We keep on pouring money into our public schools--the United States spends more than any other country per pupil other than one--and the results keep getting worse. The reason is obvious--we are putting the pedal to the metal going in the wrong direction, and wondering why we aren't getting where we need to go faster.
The 74:
— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) September 9, 2025
“The Class of 2024, which entered high school just months after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, spent nearly four years enduring lockdowns, masks, distance learning and increased absenteeism — and it shows”https://t.co/aDf9jZvaLB pic.twitter.com/NKXHzG6BvW
The scale of the betrayal is so huge that far too many people cannot wrap their minds around the problem. When teachers' unions lobby to make schools mental health centers, liberals nod along, just as they have nodded along as the unions keep grasping for more money to solve the problem the unions have caused.
Today's educational system is designed to create anti-resilience--to turn children into unhappy, ill-educated ideological automata primed to become activists. Ideological indoctrination is everywhere, and basic skills are left behind. Kids are being taught to be angry and to act out their anger through activism.
When the poor results become clear to parents, the schools demand more money to fix the problem--and all too many parents fall all over themselves to hand more money and power over to the very people ruining their children's lives.
Americans rightly believe that education is a key to a brighter future for kids, and a well-educated populace is a key to a well-functioning democracy. That's why we have kept pouring trillions of dollars into the system, hoping that the money will fix the problem.
Hint: the money can't fix the problem because the problem is the people spending that money. Chicago spends an outsized amount per pupil, yet has some of the worst outcomes in the country. The correlation between per-pupil funding and outcomes is often negative.
Homeschooled kids score dramatically higher on performance measures, and it's no surprise that they do. For all the talk of the "expertise" of trained teachers, their 'expertise' is in turning kids into ideological automata who will protest whatever the adults tell them to.
Unfortunately, not all parents can homeschool their kids, so the second-best option is school choice and the replacement of our public schools with a vibrant, competitive marketplace. Taxpayers can still subsidize the system as we do now--we just need to weed out the bad teachers and schools and dramatically slim down administrative costs, where almost all the growth in spending has occurred. In most districts teacher salaries have stagnated compared to administrative costs, with about half of all revenue never reaching the classroom.
The Democratic Party and the federal educational bureaucracy is in the thrall of the education unions. Even our public health bureaucracy bowed down to them during COVID. That has to stop.
The unions are poison. The public schools are poison. The upper-middle-class often gets decent schools, but most kids get the bottom of the barrel.
The monopoly enjoyed by public schools should be ended immediately wherever school choice is not yet the law. Poor performing schools should be closed. Hundreds of thousands of teachers have to go. Discipline must be enforced. And illegal aliens need to be deported even quicker, as English as a Second Language is expensive.
Get back to basics.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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