As a new academic year has started again in New York State, attention is turned once again to school performance. If you haven’t been paying attention to what has been happening in our schools, I can only ask that you start. What is happening to the academic standards in our state and our country is deplorable.
Social-emotional-learning (SEL) is an ideology that believes that a holistic method to teaching children is a better driver to success than the three R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic). SEL teaches that school staff must interact with a student on a deeply personal level so that they feel welcomed and accepted in their schools. The thinking is, if a student feels at home while at school, they will perform better. That truly is the nutshell version, no doubt academics will say this is oversimplified. I can tell you it is not.
SEL has been in our schools for decades, it may have been called something different but the premise was the same. Within the last ten years, and the last three especially, the focus has become Transformative SEL. This form of SEL has led to parents showing up to school board meetings across the country. They did not know that is what it was called at the time, they just knew what they heard in lessons over Chromebooks sounded off, really off. The distance-learning allowed parents to see what their kids were taught. It exposed attitudes and materials from teachers that shocked parents.
As parents started looking into policies and procedures of public schools, we learned just how bad it was. Even before the destructive lock downs of 2020, the best reading proficiency of third graders in one school district was 60%. The lowest reading proficiency reate was 21% with the overall average between the 11 districts was 37%
This county is mostly rural or small towns. Experts like to compare poverty rates with academic success. I researched my county, and reports show that 57% (average) of students live in economically disadvantaged circumstances. Statistics like this are used to prove the trauma of poverty is what is holding our students back from academic success.
The other factor holding our students back from learning how to read and write, at third grade, is that they are racist, homophobic, transphobic and generally not accepting of people different than themselves. This is where Transformative SEL comes in to teach students how to accept all people, whatever they believe or how they live their lives. If students learn to not judge and only welcome every lifestyle and creed, then they all will be more successful readers.
If only this utopia could exist. If only this premise would be true. If only… Instead, my county alone spent $334 million for 13,000 students in the 2021/2022 school. And we are told the proficiency rates are even lower now due to the forced lockdowns. As a reminder, that $334 million is tax payer dollars. Taxes collected from all residents, including the 57% living in economically challenged times.
SEL was funded more with so-called covid money (ESSER funds), more than any health safety measures to prevent the spread of any virus. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on retraining staff and children to not be racist or biased against anyone because of their sexual preferences. The Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE) went even farther than just accepting others for their lifestyles. CSE encourages students to identify themselves as the sexual creatures they are, starting in Kindergarten.
Any parent or concerned citizen that speaks out about these programs are immediately deemed ignorant, and domestic terrorists. All because we have connected the dots between the phenomenal amount of money spent on these social programs. We see this approach to learning isn’t doing what the experts say it will. It does not make learning more accessible or easier. It actually is doing the opposite and we have the statistics to prove it.
In 2011, the average reading proficiency of third graders in my county was 65%. Compare that to 37% in 2019. Administrators like to brag that SEL isn’t new and its been in schools for years. What they think is an admonition of my ignorance, is actually a rebuke to what a failure SEL is. The New York state government, under the thumb of the New York State Education Department (NYSED) continues to collect more in taxes and spend more on this indoctrination. Indoctrination doesn’t improve academic performance. To the contrary, it dumbs down this generation to be uneducated emotionally unstable children.
It would depend on the study you look at, but students reporting mental health issues (depression, anxiety, etc) has increased 24-37% (NIH) in 2021. While that can be attributed to the lock downs, that is not the entire picture. Students have been back to school for over a year and those numbers are not improving. In contrast, if you look at school budgets and the amount of money spent on administrations, to include social workers, mental health professionals and counselors, you will find an exponential increase. 50-65% of all school budgets go to salaries and benefits with the vast majority of those are not teachers.
It is not insane or inappropriate for parents to ask schools why their budgets are increasing for administrators while the academic performance is dropping substantially. The amount of push back parents are receiving when asking these types of questions at Board of Education meetings should be a direct indication of the lack of concern for results in policies and programs. The government has never been efficient at evaluating its own performance, and no outside evaluations are accepted by these same institutions. One must ask why.
We have been told that education is not a political issue and all the so called attacks that are happening at local school boards are unnecessary and without purpose. Parents have cited statistics like those aforementioned here should not be political in nature. SEL directly affects our children and the posturing, if not threatening nature, of school administrators towards parents is what is unnecessary. It would seem that the government funded schools are making this a political issue more than parents.
It has been stated that one of the best things coming out of the covid lock downs in New York State and across this country is that parents started paying attention again. Go to a local BOE meeting whether you have children in the schools or not. It is your taxpayer money that is funding the purposeful illiteracy in our country. We as a state and as a nation must fight back for the education of our children. Ignoring this issue will ensure destruction of our children and our country. That is not hyperbole, that is fact.