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Good Friday Morning! The Oval Office with foreign leaders is becoming must-watch television in Trump’s second term. Hilarity and embarrassment are likely outcomes. This week, Trump sat next to Turkish President Erdogan and remarked, “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody…” and moved on. Erdogan just sat in stone-faced silence, even though everything Trump said was true.
Erdogan has overseen fake coups, election fraud, and more to maintain power as long as he has. It’s an open secret in the Middle East and the European continent. And Trump backslapping him on that point is pure comedy.
This week, I’m going to take a detour into educational policy and walk through how it is reflecting a deep divide in the country – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- James Comey indicted. The DOJ’s decision to indict James Comey and other Biden officials from that era was utterly predictable. Will it stick? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I don’t think this had to happen. Three years ago, I wrote that Biden needed to follow the example of Gerald Ford, who pardoned Nixon, and do the same for Trump with a pardon. Biden needed to end the lawfare and prevent retribution from becoming the norm. Instead, Biden and Democrats doubled down on trying to jail Trump. That effort and Biden’s endless lies reelected Donald Trump (No one is above the law!). Any media member or Democrat who claims the Comey indictment is “unprecedented” in any way is lying. It was the most predictable outcome. As I said three years ago, “In terms of raw political power, you cannot expect one party to continue to raid or investigate the other party without an in-kind reaction from the other side.” Welcome to the other side. I don’t expect Donald Trump to pardon anyone because, as he said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, he hates his enemies.
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Where you can find me this week
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Charlie Kirk’s Memorial Shows Two Americas – Conservative Institute
Greta Thunberg Gets Mugged By Reality – Conservative Institute
Left-Wing Violence Claims More Lives – Conservative Institute
America Splits On Education
This week, I wrote a column about how Charlie Kirk’s memorial reflected the divide between two Americas. There’s a spiritual element to that divide. The divide I want to cover this week is one of policy, specifically in the area of education. The culture war between red and blue states is masking a larger dynamic: Republican-run states are rapidly outpacing Democrat-run states on education.
What do I mean by outpacing? Simply this: you’re getting actual education with skills in Republican-run states, and the polar opposite of that in Democrat-led states, where progressive methodology is running headfirst into scientific reality. And the irony for Democrats is that the exemplar state on education used to be the butt-end of jokes.
They’re calling the Mississippi Miracle. As states like California see lower and lower percentages of kids able to read, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently (Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all) – Mississippi has gone from dead last to a top 10 state.
And it’s not just Mississippi; other southern states are following right behind: Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee all have rapidly increasing education rates, while the rest of the country is collapsing. The impacts of COVID-19 are still being felt in parts of the country, with specific areas standing out.
Kelsey Piper wrote about this in a piece entitled, “Illiteracy is a policy choice. Why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner?“
The system has three core pillars.
First: rely on actual science-based.
The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research. This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound.
In news that is shocking to no one who has dug into the hard research: hooked on phonics works. The new-wave education methods swept in by progressives and teachers unions bombed spectacularly.
Second, train the teachers to implement these policies effectively.
The second pillar, White told me, is “a scaled system of training those teachers on that curriculum — most teaching you get as a teacher is not training on the curriculum.”
Mississippi improved its training through a 2013 law mandating that elementary school teachers receive instruction in the science of reading. It also sent coaches directly into low-performing classrooms to guide teachers on how to use material. “Mississippi started with teacher training. Tennessee and Louisiana added teacher training in different years,” Karen Vaites, founder of the Curriculum Insight Project, told me. Without the training, the effort to find and buy high-quality curricula can go to waste.
They specify that teachers aren’t sent to useless training. They’re pushed to do the same thing because everyone is aiming for the same goal. The videos you see now of far-left radical teachers pushing ideology are being sidelined for things that work.
Finally, the third pillar is accountability.
The third pillar is everyone’s least favorite, but it’s equally crucial. “Number three is clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level,” White said.
Accountability, of course, means standardized tests, requirements that students master reading before they are advanced to the fourth grade, and rankings of schools on performance. Accountability is no fun; when there aren’t active political currents pushing for it, it tends to erode. But it’s badly needed.
In Mississippi, a child who isn’t capable of reading at the end of third grade has to repeat the grade — a policy called third grade retention. Alabama and Tennessee have implemented it too. Research has found that third grade retention doesn’t harm students in non-academic ways and tends to help them academically — but, of course, it’s upsetting for kids, frustrating for families, and unpleasant for educators. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of why it works.
It turns out that when you start holding students back, parents suddenly become more involved in their kids’ lives. It forces everyone to focus on getting that student across the finish line.
What’s fascinating about this is that we’re coming full circle to the No Child Left Behind era, when demanding accountability from schools and teachers opened a hornet’s nest. Back then, teachers’ unions held more sway everywhere. But since COVID-19, we’ve witnessed a wholesale collapse of union power, especially among parents in red states.
The pandemic ripped the blindfolds off everyone regarding the state of the American education system. And the picture isn’t pretty. Kids can’t read, and teachers got exposed.
That brings me back to the divide point on Charlie Kirk. On that story, the left has refused to acknowledge the reality of what happened to Kirk. Or what has happened with this ICE facility shooting this week. The left is ignoring or is in outright denial about what happened.
Predictably, the same is happening in education. Because here’s a stone-cold truth: if you know what makes children’s educational outcomes better, why aren’t you doing it? We have hard evidence and science on these states. Kelsey Piper asked the same question in her piece. She writes:
“This is just a politically awkward story,” education policy expert Andy Rotherham told me. “It’s all these red states. This is a very ideological field. People struggle with calling balls and strikes.”
Vaites agreed. “I think the story is going untold for the same reason journalists ignored the successful school reopening stories in Florida and the rest of the Sun Belt in August 2020: The appetite to tell positive stories in red states is low.”
“We have been slow to learn the lessons of successful states when the politics don’t line up,“ Weaver told me.
There’s also just a pervasive sense of complacency about schools in blue states and cities, where, at least until recently, local school boards have been more interested in issues around equity than measurably improving learning outcomes. Some of that is burnout from the last round of education reforms, which were viewed in progressive circles as assaults on teachers’ unions that focused too much on teaching to the test. But I routinely see people on the American left say that our schools are doing well, and I’m not sure whether they are unaware that one-third of our graduating seniors can barely read and interpret passages of text or just think that it’s fine.
I want you to note something. We aren’t just witnessing Trump Derangement Syndrome. We’re well beyond that.
The point we’re sitting at now is that Republican-run states, which once had terrible educational systems, are making rapid advancements. And because Republicans are the ones doing it, Democratic-run states are ignoring one of the most remarkable educational turnarounds in history. In fact, they’re letting their own educational systems implode.
This is a way in which there’s a truly unsolvable divide in the country right now. Remember, No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan thing. Bush brought everyone together because Americans generally agree on improving childhood education, regardless of party affiliation.
I can’t say that’s true anymore. If your success is partisan-based, it can’t be accepted. Democrats have dug so deeply into the false narratives of their superiority across everything, they’re now getting left in the dust, and that blindness is costing school children.
Piper has a paragraph that sums it up: this is a choice.
The most successful literacy-focused charter schools serving poor, historically low-performing populations hit 90% to 95% literacy rates. Even many students with significant intellectual disabilities can become proficient readers with the right instruction. No state has figured out how to do that statewide, but it’s a useful reminder of what is achievable: with good instruction, almost every single student can learn to read. Until we are reaching rates like those nationwide, we are condemning hundreds of thousands of children to a life of limited opportunities completely avoidably.
Charles Krauthammer wrote of geopolitics that “decline is a choice.” It’s true in so many arenas. We’re watching a real-world social experiment play out where Democratic-run states are denying educational advancement because Republicans did it.
If this trend continues, we’re going to witness the divide between Democrats and Republicans widen further, because no one wants to live in illiterate states with bad education systems. Add that to everything else the left is doing wrong in these states, and you get a toxic mix.
We’re two Americas in more ways than one, and the impacts are beyond the basic cultural issues.
Links of the week
The Feminization of American Law – Chronicles
Turley on Comey Indictment: Obstruction Count Suggests There Was Conduct Besides Obviously False Statement On Leaking – RealClearPolitics
CNN’s Enten: The American People Don’t Want Kamala Harris, Her Favorability Rating Is “Swimming With The Fishes” – RealClearPolitics
Fertility Declines Are a Cultural Problem: To boost birth rates, we need to address the narratives that demean family life. – City Journal
Democrats are driving young men to kill ‘Nazis’ who aren’t Nazis – NYPost
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Dems when Trump was indicted… versus themselves.
Satire of the week
Woman Sets Timer To Make Cleaning More Stressful – Onion
Hamas Calls On Democrats To Tone Down Violence – Babylon Bee
How to Stop People Pleasing Unless Someone Seems Like They Want You to Start Again – Reductress
New Disneyland Attraction Just Roped off Area for Couples To Scream at Each Other – The Hard Times
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Ending Explained by A Redditor Who Hasn’t Seen the Sun in Three Months – The Hard Drive
Obama Drones Allowed Graze On St Stephen’s Green After Freedom Of Dublin Award – Waterford Whispers News