When I began covering education in Georgia 28 years ago, most legislation focused on proven drivers of student success including teacher quality, relevant curriculum and adequate funding. State education reform commissions pondered such questions as middle school design, high school size and ideal pupil-teacher ratios.
Today, legislators talk more about school bathrooms, book bans and pronouns, issues that don’t bolster academic achievement but do rile up voters. The conversation has changed because the goal has changed. No longer are lawmakers committed to sustaining and improving public schools; they want to supplant and replace them with vouchers and other diversions of public dollars to private entities.
This politicization of public education has not helped students in Georgia, but it has raised the profiles and vote counts for politicians including President-elect Donald Trump, who maintains schools now teach students “to hate their own country.” As board chair of the America First Policy Institute, Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, endorsed a more patriotic and positive approach to U.S. history.
Among his spurious education claims on the campaign trail, Trump said public schools were providing gender-transition surgery to students, which some voters apparently believed despite the reality that schools can’t even give kids aspirin without parental permission. Yet, Trump said, “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.”
In the next four years, we can expect similar political theater and hyperbole to steal the spotlight from pressing concerns. At a time when the workplace favors STEM graduates, the Georgia Legislature devoted more committee hearings to keeping transgender girls off school sports teams than keeping skilled math teachers in classrooms.
No real evidence was ever offered at the hearings two years ago that transgender athletes in Georgia endangered the competitive balance in high school sports. Legislators relied on rare instances in other states to make their argument that Georgia needed to impose a preemptive ban.
On the other hand, we know for certain from Milestones scores that 56% of students in Georgia test below proficient in algebra, a course that is linked to whether students attend and graduate from college. Algebra is also the gateway to higher level math courses that lead to higher earning potential. A year ago, the Program for International Student Assessment scores showed only 7% of American 15-year-olds were capable of math at advanced levels.
The Legislature also prioritized granting parents greater veto power over their children’s school reading lists, another solution in search of a problem. Many of the books under siege aren’t even on class reading lists; they are simply in the libraries. And those books aren’t being checked out in droves.
In fact, many teachers have ceased to assign books to students, asking them instead to peruse excerpts, passages and poems. Why? Because kids are losing the reading muscle; they have no desire to get lost in a book when the wilds of TikTok await them. Even college professors at elite campuses complain their students rebel at lengthy reading lists and easily give up when a book becomes taxing or complex.
The real issue facing Georgia and other states is not what kids read, but whether they read at all and if there are any effective ways to stem the dramatic decline among America’s youth in reading for pleasure. If not, we have to figure out how children who now spend hours each day watching videos can become competent writers and spellers without reading. (Some futurists argue artificial intelligence will do all their writing and spelling for them.)
Elected officials understand there’s political gain in lashing out at schools as liberal boot camps. Their exaggerations and falsehoods have eroded public trust in schools, although Colorado voters this month rejected enshrining “a right to school choice” in their state constitution, Kentuckians nixed a ballot initiative that would have enabled tax credit scholarships, education savings accounts or vouchers and Nebraskans repealed a $10 million school voucher program approved by their legislature.
I hope school leaders and teachers in Georgia can be heartened by the support they receive in their own communities and ignore the looming political pantomime. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll in January found about three-quarters of Georgians expressed some confidence in the state’s K-12 public schools.
The public’s faith in the federal government is not as enduring, according to the Pew Research Center. While 77% of Americans in 1964 said they trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time, the percentage declined in the past 16 years, dropping to 22% this year.
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