By Amy Cooke
Forty-one years ago, under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, the National Commission on Excellence in Education found “a nation at risk.”
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves…. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.– A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, April 1983
The commission knew an undereducated voting populace was an existential threat to our constitutional republic because those citizens lack critical thinking skills. An MIT professor recently resigned from his “dream job” because, in part, he “refuses to teach students who lack basic critical thinking skills.” Undereducated students are easily manipulated and weaponized against freedom.
The commission believed if they alerted Americans, the nation would rise to the challenge and demand changes in K-12 education because complacency would lead to disaster.
We failed. Problems in K-12 education have deteriorated since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983.
Headlines over the last decade about America’s academic decline are alarming. US students rank poorly internationally in core subjects. Concerned parents have witnessed curriculum converted to indoctrination taught through the lens of social justice, institutional racism, and transgender ideology. Local school board meetings are ground zero for discontent.
The education industrial complex, including the National School Boards Association (NSBA), benefits from keeping local school boards marred in culture wars and parents in the dark to deflect from their decades of decline in student achievement.
The organic response to a chaotic, failing K-12 education system has been parents exercising educational choice options and fleeing the public school system. After North Carolina recently ushered in universal vouchers, though funding is not unlimited, a record number of families applied for opportunity scholarships this year. No one can blame them.
Even with educational choices expanding every year, most students are still in traditional K-12 schools, roughly 75% in North Carolina. That percentage will drop. Even if it drops to 50%, that’s still a huge number of students reliant on a system on which taxpayers spend billions. It will be at our peril if we abandon them to languish in a system that prioritizes culture wars over academic achievement.
Now, there’s a new response — School Boards for Academic Excellence (SBAE). SBAE is a newly formed national nonprofit organization laser-focused on student achievement. The mission is to build a network of state-based organizations that empower student-focused school board members that prioritize academic excellence. SBAE is the antidote to the NSBA’s woke ideology.
As SBAE’s board chair, I’m proud to introduce our founding executive director, David Hoyt, who will lead the growing movement of groups that sprouted up over the last several years across the nation. SBAE and the state groups stand shoulder to shoulder with like-minded board members and parents offering help and support to those who want to return public education’s focus to teaching rather than indoctrinating kids.
For interested school board members and parents in the Carolinas, there’s an SBAE-affiliated group. Carolinas Academic Leadership Network (CALN) is the brainchild of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina as well as the South Carolina Policy Council and the Palmetto Promise Institute in South Carolina.
Pre-COVID, 53% of North Carolina students were at grade level or above in math, which is still too low. However, post-COVID, the percentage plummeted 20 points to crisis levels. While South Carolina students have performed a little better, it’s not by much. Despite South Carolina’s 84% graduation rate in 2023, only 29% of those graduates were deemed ready for college or a career.
With each generation, we are weakening our country. And we may never get a better opportunity than today. National and state school board associations are at odds with parents and many school board members.
Local school boards drive academic policy. They have the power to ensure schools are producing the well-educated workforce we need. SBAE and CALN’s mission is to make academic achievement the highest priority through professional development and networking opportunities.
Like-minded school board members represent our best hope of turning the tide and ensuring that academic excellence is once again the hallmark of America’s education system.
SBAE and affiliated groups realize this is an ambitious and challenging long-term plan, but we’ve done this before. The school choice movement has been four-plus decades in the making. We can do it again to save the students in traditional K-12 and our constitutional republic. Too much is at stake for us to ignore.
Amy Cooke is the board chairwoman for School Boards for Academic Excellence (SBAE) and the chairwoman for Carolinas Academic Leadership Network (CALN). She is the retired Chief Executive Officer of the John Locke Foundation and Publisher of Carolina Journal and founder of the public policy consulting firm East x West Strategies.
Another opinion blaming the school system and not the real culprit, PARENTS. Parents need to do their jobs being parents and stop pawning that responsibility of on the school system because they don’t want to do the difficult job of parenting. But then again this opinion comes from the Opinionated John Lock foundation, who has deflect blame for political posturing.
Sorry, but having been in the public school system for over 30 years I can tell you public schools are a failing bureaucracy. They care only about test scores, which are invalid as well as clearly a center for social programming. They have left their original purpose of teaching “how” to think and replaced it with “what” to think. You don’t have to look any further to our own inept board of education to see the dysfunctional it’s of public schools. It is nationwide. No wonder charter, private and home schooling numbers are going up every year
I can only hope and pray that parents will support this initiative. As an instructor at the post-secondary level for 34 years I witnessed the steady and alarming decline of college-ready high school graduates. It was and is astounding how little scholastic knowledge they have, especially when compared to high school graduates of 50+ years ago. Although I must say that it isn’t the students’ fault. It is the fault of school boards, educational administrators, teachers and parents. They each talk a good game, but the only thing that matters is the end product AND that speaks for itself. I could go on and on but I won’t. If we don’t turn it around and quickly, we will become a peripheral nation subjugated by powers that genuinely educate their children….read China.
Amen.
Of course, all the rhetoric about the decline of public schools ignores the reality that national test scores (NAEP) have remained largely the same for many decades. It’s just political propaganda meant to demonize public schools.
It’s very easy to manipulate “ test scores”. I’ve seen it first hand. You can dismiss it all you want, that’s fine. Of test scores are the only thing you use to judge whether or not public schools are good then you have other issues.
I don’t just judge schools just by test scores. In fact, there’s way too much testing nowadays, pushed by politicians and school board members as the only solution. I bring them up to show that the claim schools are now declining lacks evidence. It’s simply just another talking point meant to demonize public schools.