What comes after the end of public schools?
Anyone who cares about the education of children should be asking that question. So of course it’s one that the teachers unions don’t want us to discuss.
New York City schools are in trouble. As The Post reported Friday, “the city Department of Education expects to enroll roughly 28,100 fewer students this fall.” Enrollment at the city’s regular public schools already fell during the pandemic, and this new projection suggests it’s not improving any time soon.
And New York leads a large pack: California, Illinois, Oregon, Mississippi and Michigan have all seen serious losses of students departing their public-school systems.
Why? A Gallup poll last week showed only 28% of Americans have “a great deal or a lot” of “confidence in U.S. public schools.”
Much of this is tied to long closures during the pandemic. Teachers unions, with people like American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten leading the charge, pushed hard to keep schools closed for far too long. The shutdowns (and the travesty of remote learning) smashed public trust and it simply isn’t that easy to rebuild. Researchers at the American Enterprise Institute found that the longer a school district stayed remote, the larger its enrollment drop.
But parents tell me they have many reasons for saying “enough.”
The people who can afford it will go private, the people that can’t will have their kids go to a babysitting program that will basically be a pipeline to prison. Politicians will be happy to pocket the savings from less kids or hand it off to their friends in the private sector to solve the constant education problems created by the politicians.
Voucher system
but where you going to use the voucher on the lower shore.