The late Nick Coleman used to accuse my fellow Northern Alliance bloggers and I of trying to \u201cburn down the public schools\u201c for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the teachers union and the administrative\/industrial complex weren\u2019t necessarily working in kids best interests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s taken 15 years – but it sounds like all the smart parents agree:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Enrollment in public schools nationwide declined by 3 percent last year. But it was the numbers for kindergarten enrollment that should chill the blood of teachers\u2019 unions and school district officials. Kindergarten enrollment tanked by 13 percent last year, and it\u2019s only expected to get worse this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n One school district in Brooklyn, New York, has seen its rosters fall from 345 students in 2018\u201319 to a projected 225 this September, with kindergarten enrollment collapsing from 76 to 37. Because school funding is pegged to enrollment, that school stands to lose a sizable chunk of its funding \u2014 funds to pay teachers and other support staff.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And yes, it\u2019s not the pandemic itself that\u2019s causing the collapse in enrollment. It\u2019s the policies put in place to assuage the desires of teachers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n My theory: progressives, when they get in the power, always, always, always overreach. Sometimes it even hurts them<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of which would be another reason to view 2020\u201321 to be the apex<\/a> of teachers union power, to be followed by inexorable descent. They got their work-at-home carveouts, their school closures, their preferred party running the federal government, their vaccine fast-tracking<\/a>, their fingerprints all over the \u201cscience<\/a>,\u201d and their hundreds of billions<\/a> in federal largesse. And as a result of all that influence, they created a product that\u2019s literally repellant to millions of parents, even at the cost of free. Their ranks will almost certainly thin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n If I had known what I was doing, I would\u2019ve spent a lot more time and effort trying to put together some sort of \u201chomeschool pod\u201c when my kids were that age – sharing the effort with some of the other parents who had gotten disgusted, even back then, with the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The late Nick Coleman used to accuse my fellow Northern Alliance bloggers and I of trying to \u201cburn down the public schools\u201c for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the teachers union and the administrative\/industrial complex weren\u2019t necessarily working in kids best interests. It\u2019s taken 15 years – but it sounds like all the smart parents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,309,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-indoctrinate-u","category-school-choice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79409,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79408\/revisions\/79409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}