Of all the policy issues where the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is stark, perhaps the most surprising is education: He’s all-in for parental choice; she’s committed to serving the interests of the teachers unions.
And polling shows a majority of Americans are on his side, after decades when the Democratic had a strong edge on education.
But the pandemic was a huge eye-opener for millions of us: Not only did we see the unions and their office-holding pawns vociferously demand to keep schools closed as fully and as long as possible — long after all the science showed that it posed zero risk of spreading COVID — the “remote learning” offered in the place of real schooling gave us a window on what our public schools were teaching.
Strong supporters of public education in the abstract saw how badly it served their own children, as so many teachers didn’t even try to actually teach online.
The bitter result: US kids lag their peers around the world.
On the 2022 math exams by the Program for International Student Assessment, for example, American 15-year-olds ranked 28th out of 37 industrialized (OECD) nations, even though we spend far more per-pupil than peer countries.