Proving once again that he is in touch with ordinary Americans, he elected Donald Trump education to the first video message his 2024 presidential campaign. On Saturday, Trump placed an emphasis on education in elementary schools in the states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.
School achievement has plummeted during the pandemic as liberal governors have closed schools for extended periods and required mask-wearing at the expense of learning. Children have become pawns in tyrannical actions undertaken under the guise of responding to Covid.
The last full year before Covid was 2019, and that was the last year that 50 million students were enrolled in public schools. This sum it has since declinedand experts predict a long-term decline in public school enrollment that will continue for decades.
Massachusetts, long ranked at the top of the nation in student achievement, has dropped to approximately The lowest in 19 years in their performances when a Democrat-controlled state pushes leftist ideology into schools. Minority students, low-income students and children who were not home-schooled in English experienced the greatest drops in scores.
Across the country, the decline in student achievement and the rise in illiteracy is shocking. In Pennsylvania, third graders read at the expected level of proficiency dropped from 60% to 50% over the last three years.
There was a red wave in Ohio during the last election after Trump held multiple rallies there. Republicans increased their lead in the Senate, gained a majority in the House of Representatives, and won both the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat.
It’s time to cash in on that political capital by targeting Ohio’s education system, which ranks in the bottom half of the country in teaching basic reading and arithmetic skills. The first bill introduced in the Ohio Senate is to take power away from an independent state board that has failed to do the job.
The bill would allow the Republican governor to appoint a up-to-date education director to set the curriculum and stringent standards for academic achievement. Instead of diffusing responsibility, this legislation would establish one person to be publicly accountable for failures to teach juvenile people to read and add.
Trump boldly calls for allowing parents to directly elect school principals to hold them accountable for failures to teach basic skills. The bestseller in 1955 was “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” and the answer was elementary because schools do not utilize a better method of teaching children to readThat is acoustics.
Almost 70 years later, schools still don’t utilize acousticsas a result, perhaps 45 million Americans are unable to even fill out a ballot to vote as they intend to. Instead, some of these ballots are filled out for them by political hacks who don’t mind being more illiterate.
Young adults have long been ashamed of the fact that they will never learn to read, instead of asking themselves why some of their friends can read and they cannot. However, when conventional inhibitions disappear on social media, juvenile people themselves begin to publicly ask themselves why they were not taught to read.
People harmed by inadequate schools constitute a voting bloc that Republicans can and must reach to win future elections. Georgia and Arizona are two swing states that Republicans need to win in 2024 to take the White House, and both rank among the ten states with the highest literacy rates.
If people cannot read, they cannot access and process independent political information needed to consciously fill out ballots. The higher the illiteracy rate, the more ballots are filled out by ballot harvesting and mass dumping into drop boxes, and the harder it is to win, essentially.
Meanwhile, even the liberal Republican governor appears to have received a message that the public is fed up with liberal ideology at schoolrather than teaching basic skills. Last year, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox vetoed a bill that would have banned male athletes from participating in girls’ sports, as did Indiana’s liberal Republican governor.
In both states, Republican legislatures quickly overrode the vetoes, which yielded to the left. Similarly, the Republican state legislature of Arkansas overrode anti-Trump Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson’s veto of a bill banning medical interventions on children by transgender people.
Last week, Utah’s Republican legislature passed a bill banning medical interventions for transgender children, and left-leaning Republican Gov. Cox was shrewd enough to sign it into law the day after it landed on his desk. Lessons learned and further policy ground to be gained.
As illiteracy rates rise in the United States, Republicans’ up-to-date focus on science becomes a political necessity. Many traditionally Democratic voters have children in low-performing schools who are not learning to read as they should.
John and Andy Schlafly are the sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) and run the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles writing and policy work.
