Good-bye, Department of Education

Today, the Trump administration is beginning to put the Department of Education out of its misery. Nearly five decades old, that department has been a conspicuous failure. If we examine the academic performance of American schoolchildren over the past few decades we discover that our children are doing worse than most of the civilized world.

Surely, it is worth worrying about. For all the investments that companies are making in American industrial capacity, one needs to keep in mind that we need to provide the human capital to make them function. In many cases, we do not have it.

As for the state of American education, we can see the problem by opening yesterday’s newspaper.

The New York Post reports:

More than one-third of New York City public schoolkids — or some 300,000 students — were “chronically absent” last year, according to a blockbuster study out Thursday.

The bombshell findings come as New York students’ test scores in math and reading remain mediocre, despite the state funneling more money into education than any other in the nation.

The number of K-12 students deemed chronically absent — or out for 10 days or more in the 180-day school year — has spiked from 26.5% in the 2018-19 term preceding the COVID-19 pandemic to 34.8% in 2023-24.

That means more than 300,000 students out of roughly 900,000 in the country’s largest public school system are frequently missing in action, according to the analysis conducted by the Manhattan Institute.

The rest of New York State was just as bad, or even worse.

The results were even more dreadful in upstate school districts, where extensive absenteeism skyrocketed from 41% to 62.2% in Buffalo — Gov. Kathy Hochul’s hometown.

Severe absenteeism shot up from 44.7% to 59.2% in Rochester and 34.7% to 46.8% in Syracuse.

Apparently, one of the culprits is work-from-home. Parents who are working at home are more comfortable keeping their children home from school.

According to Eva Moskowitz, the Covid-Era school shutdowns, produced through the aegis of the teachers’ unions, told parents and students that attending school, being in class in person, was not really all that important.

She writes in the New York Post:

Despite the fact that the danger to children from COVID was minimal, regulators imposed absurdly restrictive measures on schools at the behest of the teachers union, which resulted in school closures.

Parents got the message that regular attendance wasn’t important.

Although parents bear some blame for failing to get their kids to school, so do the schools these children attend.

The report notes there are many schools that have low rates of absenteeism despite serving primarily minority and low-income students.

For those who do not live in New York City, students at the Success Academy charter schools run by Moskowitz have consistently shown excellent performance in standardized tests. The students are chosen by lottery and normally come from disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Given that they are conspicuously successful at educating children, the teachers’ unions are violently opposed to Success Academies and other charter schools.

This to say, Eva Moskowitz knows what she is talking about:

We insist that our educators model good attendance by rarely being absent themselves.

We celebrate “Zero Heroes” — students with perfect attendance — as well as classrooms that achieve 100% attendance on any given day.

We communicate with parents every time a scholar is late or absent with a phone call or text.

If a student’s attendance is poor, we’ll have an “upstairs dismissal” in which we require the parent to come into the building when they pick up their child to discuss the attendance issue.

The key to all of this is holding educators accountable.

We track attendance rates at each of our schools daily.

If attendance is lagging, we’ll work with the principal of that school to improve it.

We refuse to accept chronic absenteeism as an inevitable reality — because it isn’t.

It’s also important to remember that some children stay home because they feel school is unsafe or that it’s a waste of time because instruction is constantly interrupted by disruptive students.

We need to provide students with schools that they want to attend.

If we allow COVID to permanently reset expectations for school attendance, it will be one of the saddest legacies of this terrible episode in our nation’s history.

We mustn’t let this happen.

The Education Department was created by Jimmy Carter to privilege the teachers’ unions. It’s time to recognize its failure and, by the by, to abolish teachers’ unions.