Guy Ciarrocchi: The kids are not all right

Our children’s test scores are down. They haven’t even reached pre-Covid levels, which wasn’t anything to brag about then. And the students are more anxious than ever.

Pick your benchmark. Pick your trend line. Pick your anecdote. Our kids are in trouble, and so our nation’s future is in trouble. In our public schools, politics, political agendas, DEI, and virtue-signaling are now front and center — and those cultural battles are masking even greater academic and emotional development problems.

Maybe the emphasis on politics, gender, race, virtue-signaling — and the “everybody gets a trophy” philosophy — has actually caused the academic problems. At a minimum, school boards and teachers unions putting those culture battles at the forefront have taken money and attention away from falling grades — and, perhaps, have caused rising student anxiety.

Think about the times we read about school districts in the news or hear discussions on talk radio. The battles raging across southeastern Pennsylvania and beyond. They are almost never about the reality of stagnant or falling academics or plans to fix them. It’s about culture wars—sex “education” books, gender transformations, and separating students by race. Central Bucks. North Penn. West Chester. Unionville.

In Philadelphia during the Covid era, the District locked their students out of school for eighteen months or more. Some schools still have lead in the water, asbestos in the air, and no air conditioners. Understandably, these quality of life issues are at the forefront. What’s not in the headlines is that Philadelphia students are falling even further behind other Pennsylvania students, who are falling behind other American students, who are falling behind the world’s students.

The problems are deep and the trends are even more troubling. The annual review of national testing for grade and high schools — “The Nation’s Report Card” — confirms that test scores have still not even reached pre-Covid levels. And that’s after billions in “Covid cash” was spent to address that learning gap, the time away from teachers, classrooms, and classmates. 

And, after years of literally dividing grade school students into “victims” and “oppressors,” discussing sex and gender at astonishingly lower grade levels, and advising students that perhaps their parents are out of touch and it’s okay to confide in school administrators and keep secrets from parents — and use different names and dress in different clothes at school without telling parents—  “experts” discovered that our students are depressed and anxious. 

After months or even over a year of being locked-out of schools due to Covid closures, we find that students are anxious and have higher school absence rates. 

To no surprise to any of us who have been paying attention and warning of the damage that we are doing to our students by lowering expectations, keeping them out of school, deemphasizing grades, due dates and class rank, we see the damage in college and job-readiness.

Recently, the Atlantic presented an article detailing yet another warning sign. College students are unable — or unwilling — to read a book from cover to cover. Not just any college students—Ivy League and “elite” college students. Imagine what’s really happening across all our nation’s colleges? 

It doesn’t end there. Students forced to stay home with their parents because of lockdowns, allowed to retake tests and hand in projects even after “deadlines,” have challenges handling pressure. CNBC reported recently that employers are shocked that one-fourth of college-student applicants bring their parents to job interviews. 

Students’ scores are down, and districts have lowered expectations and spend time discussing race and cultural differences, sex and gender. Anxiety is sky-high.

With all due respect to The Who, our kids are not all right.

Notable by its difference, parents in the “elite” Wallingford-Swarthmore School District did notice that test scores were down  —and demanded that the superintendent fix it or get out. He got out. Maybe the superintendent was the problem, maybe not. 

Regardless, parents will have to demand changes, recognize the true problems, and accept their role in the problems, too. Replacing superintendents alone is unlikely to do much to help test scores or lower anxiety. Over the last decade across our state and nation two troubling trends have contributed to lower test scores and higher anxiety levels.

School districts deemphasized academic excellence and the outcomes should’ve been obvious to anyone with common sense. Eliminating honors classes, eliminating admissions tests for magnet schools, eliminating class ranks, eliminating grades, not penalizing students for late assignments, no longer honoring national merit scholars and accepting “close enough” math answers.

At the same time — perhaps to cover-up falling test scores or causing falling test scores — class time was being devoted to “CRT” curriculum lecturing ten-year-old white students that they were “oppressors” and explaining to ten-year-old black students that they were “victims,” while Asian students must have wondered where they fit. Discussions about sexual emotions and “mechanics,” and “exploring” genders. The bonds between students and their parents have been tested as some students are allowed to have different names at school — of their opposite biological gender — and even have different clothes, and parents are purposefully kept in the dark. The suburbs are ground zero.

These two paths of destruction are sometimes combined, especially harming black and brown students as even less is expected from them. The bigotry of low expectations is there for all to see and hear.

“They” say that kids are resilient. Well, we all better hope and pray that it is so as they try to go to college, find a job, and start a family and, one day soon, lead our nation.

Their experiment on our kids has been a demonstrable failure.

Here’s a novel approach: Focus on academics. Raise student expectations — for all students. Assist students falling behind to genuinely catch up. Start talking about how good — on balance — America truly is, and how much the students have in common with one another. Respect and engage parents.

All of these problems — the theories and culture wars causing or exacerbating the problem — are yet another reason for school choice. Letting parents pick the school where their education tax dollars go — especially for poor and middle class families. Let’s empower parents to choose schools, holding schools accountable, to help our children succeed.

Our kids are not all right — and we’d better find the answer, or America will not be all right, either.

Guy Ciarrocchi is a Senior Fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation. He writes for Broad + Liberty and RealClear Pennsylvania. Follow Guy @PaSuburbsGuy.