The public school system has failed American kids. Now what?

OPINION:

Writing in the London Times on Sept. 29, author Evan Barker wrote a sobering account about her experience in a Kansas City, Missouri, school two decades ago:

“Every day is a fight for survival, not a place to get an education. During passing periods, I’d hurry as fast as I could to avoid being ’jumped.’ I’d walk down the hallways seeing fights break out with alarms blaring and the school’s lone police officer running through masses of pupils after a kid had been beaten up. It’s impossible to learn when you’re constantly in survival mode.”

The next day, the Daily Mail published a piece headlined “Huge room full of distraught children confront school district over violent behavior at chaotic New York school.” This was not a troubled New York City school, but a high school in upstate Henrietta, south of Rochester. Students “claim the entire student body has been desensitized to fights, substance use and physical threats.”

This is useful context for Nicole Hannah-Jones’ recent reentry into the national conversation. In her article “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” she discusses her daughter’s experience in a New York City school. In brief: absent or incompetent teachers; misbehaving and violent students; kids who can’t read or write.

Ms. Hannah-Jones deliberately placed her daughter in New York’s Public School 307, hoping the presence of enlightened parents such as herself would make them better. It didn’t. Neither will more money. Her daughter’s elementary school spends $52,000 per pupil, so each classroom costs taxpayers more than a million bucks a year.

For that, they should expect teachers who show up, grade papers and keep kids under control. They also could hope for better than 17% proficiency in math and 28% in reading at a school with a ratio of only nine pupils per teacher.

Harvard economists Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer found that class size, per-pupil expenditure, teacher certifications and advanced degrees are not correlated with school effectiveness. What is? “Frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time and high expectations.” The proof of this concept is in the field.

In New York, charter schools – where discipline and accountability are possible – outperform regular city schools in reading and math. These are not bastions of “white privilege,” but highly diverse schools with 95% non-white students. In London, Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School continually churns out top exam results, with a student body that is mostly non-White and non-wealthy.

As a former teacher, my heart sinks for the millions of American kids held captive to left-wing ideology. Their teachers no doubt read Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” in teacher college, because research shows it is one of the most often assigned books in colleges of education. There, they learned not so much how to teach but how to foment activism.

Many of the good teachers move to better schools or simply give up teaching. The worst stay, protected by their labor unions from ever being fired.

The national teachers’ unions want lifetime employment with no accountability. They spend millions to elect politicians who will pay them more and expect less. They resist efforts to fire teachers for poor work or conduct, implement performance pay, or test teachers’ competence and knowledge. And of course, they most bitterly resist charter schools, school choice, or other attempts to give parents a choice to escape failed schools in the public K-12 system.

Meanwhile, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals that students have made no gains since they began tracking performance 30 years ago. iPads, PCs and now artificial intelligence are not magic bullets that can replace study and discipline. Faddish nonsense such as Critical Race Theory, equitable grading, emotional and social learning, ethnic studies, and multicultural awareness takes valuable, limited time away from reading, writing, math and science.

We owe it to our children to end this expensive failure and resume what works. As I wrote in “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)”, the solutions are obvious, but the teachers’ unions will fight them to the death: no phones in class, student discipline, testing, teacher competency, longer hours, more homework and parental responsibility.

It’s not rocket science. But if we fix K-12, maybe we’ll get some more rocket scientists out of the wasted talent stagnating in schools such as P.S. 307.

• Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and author of “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey).”