So recently I saw a new Thomas Sowell video cropped up on Youtube entitled: “Sowell EXPOSES Why American Education Is a Global MOCKERY”. Sowell is an interesting guy. Sometimes when I watch a video of his I think yeah, right problem, weird conclusion. It’s like you took your car to a mechanic and he said, “Spark plugs are bad so we should drop your gas tank.” You’d think “What?” I won’t link to the video, as America’s most prominent African-American conservative intellectual does not need my help in publicizing his views.

Basically Sowell applauds getting rid of the Department of Education. I don’t disagree, because in my opinion, it can’t do what it should be doing anyway. But Sowell seems to think it is responsible for teaching woke ideology instead of Math. He says it has pushed grade inflation and a lowering of standards. As a former teacher in a public school, I have thoughts. Why does every conservative think the government has no conservatives working in it? Any check of the number of Liberty University graduates working in government should be a clue, or the number of Federalist Society members. But no, whenever a conservative talks about government it is just chock full of liberal soy boys. Give me a break.

There is no national curriculum. No national standards. Public schools are run locally, and while every state has some kind of state standards (which all differ) districts are supposed to adhere to, their curriculums differ wildly. Try to find a teacher who has been told by the Federal government to teach a certain topic or a certain way and I think you will come up empty. But grade inflation has indeed happened and so has a profound drop in rigor. So who’s to blame?

In his 1992 book “Schools That Work”, George H. Wood identifies common characteristics for successful schools. Parental involvement is one of the most important. Indeed, I would call it THE most important. How a parent views their child’s education is critical. Few children are successful if a parent does not care about the child’s success at school. I often said over my career that the only difference between kids who are failing and kids who are in National Honor Society is the attitude of their parents to education. I’ve met a lot of bright kids who dropped out of school, and a lot of hard working average kids who were successful. We have now been handing kids standardized tests for over 35 years. What have we learned? Well, if you kid lives in the suburbs he will probably pass, the richer the suburb, the more likely. If he lives in a rural area it’s a toss-up, and if he lives in an urban area he is less likely to pass. So does that tell us suburban schools are better? That inner city teachers are bad? Nope, it tells us about parents. Most inner city kids have no educational support system. And modern urban culture is anti-intellectual and anti-educational. It is hard to focus on school when you have one or both parents incarcerated, and perhaps multiple substance abusers in your family. Same with rural kids, but the problems are not as pervasive. So parents are the single most important thing in a child’s education. We don’t talk about that because it isn’t politically correct for either conservatives or liberals to blame people for problems who also may vote. So we blame the schools.

So what about grade inflation? What about falling standards? Well, who controls education? We have local control, so parents are the ones who influence the school’s the most. We have grade inflation because parents DEMANDED it. “My son is going to college; he can’t get a “D”! Same reason school discipline disappeared. “My daughter was just expressing herself with those short shorts! How DARE you single her out!” “My son NEEDS his cell phone at school; you have no right to take it!” and so on. I taught at an upscale suburb, it was mostly people in the trades when I started. Plumbers, electricians and auto workers made up most of my parents. But as the demographic became more white-collar and college educated, the entitlement of both the students AND the parents went up. No more dress code, no cell phone policy, and pressure from the administration as to grades. Most superintendents and principals are just trying to keep their jobs, and so they will capitulate to ANYTHING a loud and abusive parent wants. I remember when the last really good assistant principal we had took a girl’s cell phone who had been caught using it in class many times. Since it was the end of the day he told her she could have it back the next day. He would keep it in his desk overnight. He received a call from the superintendent that evening, who told him that the parents had already secured a lawyer and were prepared to sue if he did not apologize to the girl.

What about woke ideology? Well, same cause. If you live in an area that is mostly minority, using education that is centered on minorities can keep kids interested in education, to a degree. If you live in a very liberal area, parents may want their children to learn about minority oppression. But no one has (at least to my knowledge) sent out a notice from the Federal government to teach some liberal ideology. Our state does have standards to teach about the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement, but that’s important history, not ideology.

The truth is that all the problems Sowell speaks about are caused by parents, not government. It permissive parents who feel they have no responsibility to their child’s education. Some do not even think they have and responsibility to their child’s behavior! One only needs to look at crime statistics. Crime overall has dropped, juvenile crime has risen drastically. Since we cannot put forward a national curriculum the Department of Education is unnecessary. Government is NOT the problem, We are the problem.

However, want to see how a state government can influence education? Wonder what Sowell thinks of this…

Oklahoma Draft Standards Ask Students to Find 2020 Election ‘Discrepancies’