Back to School?

As the 2019-20 school year finishes the home stretch, it’s now obvious that kids will have to wait till fall before they see the inside of a classroom again. Or will it be longer? Comments made by pandemic guru Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate hearing last week were reported to suggest that he recommended not opening schools this fall.

During the hearing, Fauci noted that we shouldn’t count on a vaccine before then, though he is confident that a vaccine will be developed at some point. The media spun his words to indicate that Fauci recommended keeping schools closed in the fall. President Donald Trump publicly disagreed with that idea.

Trump wants schools opened. Except for the elitist establishment, we all do. The big issue, of course, is safety. It’s become impossible to build consensus on what constitutes “safe” and how to achieve it. Ultimately, each state may proceed as it sees fit, but many state and local agencies look to the federal government for guidance on what to do next.

The biggest concern is whether we have enough evidence or even the right evidence to make informed decisions. An article in Wired magazine laying out the case for reopening schools points to mounting evidence from around the world that children have been largely unaffected by COVID-19. In Europe, many kids are already back at school, where the institutions are regularly disinfected, and class sizes and lunch periods have been refigured to comply with social distancing.

Senator Rand Paul, a physician and COVID-19 survivor, pressed Fauci with facts shared in the Wired article and data from major health organizations regarding childhood mortality and the China Virus. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that only 1% of coronavirus patients were under 10 years old, and only 1% were aged 10 to 19 years old. Even in New York City, the epicenter for the virus in the U.S., only 10 deaths out of about 16,000 attributed to the China Virus have been those under the age of 18. More school children die of pneumonia each year.

Establishment-type elitists making the case for continued school lockdowns point to the concept that, while children may have a lower susceptibility to COVID-19, they have the potential to be carriers of the virus, bringing it home to older family members. However, the reasons why or to what extent are still unknown.

Still, maintaining an indefinite lockdown posture in the absence of medical absolutes we may never achieve is not doing our children or us any good. Long-term closure of schools has a negative effect on their understanding of important social dynamics, which are formed during school years. Long periods of being stuck at home can lead to depression and anxiety among kids as well as their parents, who must cope with their children’s stresses on top of their own. Increased mental-health problems and child abuse are the result.

Perhaps one of the most obvious points for getting kids back to school in the fall is because it will free up parents to get back to work — assuming they have that choice. Many parents have either had to leave their jobs or do home-based work while their kids are out of school. They can’t get back to business until their kids get back to school. Keeping children out of school also disproportionately affects lower-income families, who don’t have as many employment options, often can’t afford babysitters or nannies, or don’t have adequate computers and Internet connections for distance learning.

Rather than wait for a 100% all-clear to send our kids back to school, state and local governments should take this summer break to develop plans to create a safe and clean education environment. There are lessons to be learned by what some countries have done in Europe, and we owe it to our children to provide them the best education possible.

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To Teach His Own: The Rise of Homeschooling

It didn't look like recess. It looked like an elementary school jail. Instead of carefree children running around outside, the images from French journalists are almost tragic: little boys and girls, each sitting glumly in their own chalk-outlined box. To some parents, it was a sobering picture of what public education might look like in the fall. But to millions of others, it was confirmation -- the time to homeschool is now.

There's very little about life that the coronavirus hasn't changed. For everyone in the world, it's been a transformative time -- but for parents of school-aged children, it's been especially disruptive. And while having these routines turned upside down has been challenging, it's not necessarily been negative. Moms and dads have had a chance to look at the traditional learning model and consider: is this really the best option for our kids? For all the frustrations about being stuck at home, it's finally forcing parents who might never have thought about public school alternatives to take stock of what their children are being taught and how well they're performing.

And guess what? The longer this goes on, the more parents seem convinced that at-home learning is better. In at least three new polls, anywhere from 15-40 percent of families say they're ready to make the switch to homeschooling after the lockdown is over. Now, maybe that's health driven, Mike Donnelly, senior counsel at Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) says, or maybe families have really started to embrace the flexibility and autonomy of learning at home. Either way, he told Sarah Perry on "Washington Watch," America could be looking at a "500 percent increase in the number of people homeschooling in the fall, which could top 10 million kids." The numbers, he agrees, "are stunning."

For a lot of parents, the uncertainty about what the school setting could look like in the fall is concerning. They've been told things are about to get more complicated with block schedules or half-days on, half-days off. "Add that to the mandatory sanitizing every 30 seconds," Mike points out, and it's all just a headache waiting to happen. It's all helping to drive surveys like RealClear Opinion Research, where the swell of people who support educational choice is exploding across every demographic.

Of the 40 percent of families who said they'd be more likely to homeschool or virtual school after the country re-opened, a slim majority -- believe it or not -- were Democrats. A lot of people, Mike agrees, have mistakenly thought of homeschooling as a "traditionally conservative model." But that hasn't been the case for a long time. If anything, school choice is becoming a more unifying issue. In this same poll, almost 60 percent of Democrats sided with Republicans in their overwhelming support of school choice. Asked if the consensus surprised him, Mike responded, "maybe a little bit."

"What we found over the years is that the homeschooling movement has diversified broadly. It's diversifying across income, ethnicity, philosophical [and] religious beliefs. You're seeing a transformation happening in this coronavirus. It seems like it's accelerating [the support]. And we're excited about that. I know that... there are people struggling for a lot of reasons right now... But, you know, this is a time when families can come together and become families. And I'm seeing that even with my own homeschool family, we're together a lot more than we ever have been."

Over the years, there've been a lot of misconceptions about homeschooling that HSLDA is trying to debunk. Before the pandemic, Mike points out, most people thought homeschooling was just about that: staying home. "That's just not true. We're as busy -- maybe busier -- than others." There's a whole three-dimensional level of learning with co-ops, outdoor activities, sports, and field trips that he hopes people will begin to see as part of the homeschool platform once some of the restrictions are lifted. Add that to the ability to control the messaging on hot-button topics like sex ed, biology, gender, creation, and sexuality, and it's no wonder homeschooling is winning every popularity contest.

For the far-Left, who's desperately trying to keep kids in the grip of their radical curriculum, the surge in homeschooling is their worst-case scenario. They know as well as we do: the future of the liberal agenda depends on generations of children living under the daily drumbeat of extreme indoctrination. "Public education remains the single biggest monopoly in America," Cal Thomas warns. At least in this sense, the rise of homeschooling, "the coronavirus might be a blessing in disguise."

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Former centrist PM left Australia a dud school curriculum

In his recent memoir, A Bigger Picture, Malcolm Turnbull presents an ego-centred, delusional account of the way he single-handedly solved the school funding issue and ensured Australian students’ dismal performance in international tests would improve.

Wrong on both accounts. Not only was the Gonski 2.0 funding model flawed, inequitable and guilty of penalising low-fee schools, especially Catholic, but the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools also proved to be a dud calculated to dumb down the curriculum further, ensuring even lower standards.

Chapter 40 of the former prime minister’s book centres on the May 2, 2017, press conference announcing a new school funding agreement titled Gonski 2.0, named after the report’s chairman, David Gonski, and the intention to appoint Gonski as chairman of the education review.

Turnbull lauds the event as a political masterstroke as Gonski had been chosen by the ALP’s Julia Gillard when education minister to review school funding and the “I give a Gonski” slogan was a key plank in the left-leaning Australian Education Union’s campaign to attack conservative governments.

By securing Gonski’s involvement, Turnbull boasts: “I’d ensured that all those ‘I give a Gonski’ posters, banners, corflutes, T-shirts and hats were heading to the recycling bin. Because we didn’t just ‘give a Gonski’, we had his support: he was standing right next to me as we announced our new school funding policy.”

While Turnbull writes he had settled the funding wars as schools now had a model that was “genuinely national, consistent and needs-based”, nothing could be further from the truth.

Stephen Farish, the expert responsible for developing the methodology employed by Gonski 2.0 to quantify how much funding non-government schools received, admitted it “clearly isn’t working”. Under Turnbull as prime minister wealthy independent schools were treated the same as low-fee, less privileged Catholic schools.

Even worse, Simon Birmingham, the federal education minister at the time, and Turnbull knew the Gonski 2.0 funding model was inequitable as months earlier the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria had published a paper — Capacity to Contribute and SES Scores — proving the model reinforced disadvantage.

Significant is that the analysis and conclusions reached by the CECV paper subsequently were endorsed by a commonwealth review of school funding chaired by Michael Chaney that concluded the Gonski 2.0 model was so corrupted it had to be replaced by a more equitable way of deciding funding to non-government schools.

By ignoring the CECV’s paper, in addition to endorsing a flawed funding model, Turnbull also demonstrated how politically inept he was by igniting a nationwide campaign led by Stephen Elder, then executive director of Catholic Education Melbourne, arguing for a more equitable funding model.

In addition to launching Gonski 2.0, Turnbull announced the curriculum review to try to achieve excellence in Australian schools by identifying the most effective way to raise standards.

Describing Gonski’s experience and qualifications to determine how to overcome Australia’s academic underperformance as measured by international tests, Turnbull called Gonski “my old school friend, debating partner and neighbour” and “one of Australia’s leading capitalists and a director of banks”.

Not mentioned in Turnbull’s book is that the eventual report published in March 2018 was flawed, substandard and guaranteed to lower standards further.

Instead of explicit and rigorous year-level standards where students would be graded and evaluated in terms of performance, the review embraced costly and unproven educational fads such as progression points and developmental learning. Students would no longer pass or fail as the focus turned to formative assessment and personal growth.

The report also undervalued what American academic Jerome Bruner described as teaching “the structure of the discipline” in favour of content-free, vacuous so-called 21st-century generic competencies.

The review ignored findings by the National Research Council in the US in the acclaimed publication, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, that a “fundamental understanding of subjects” was essential if students were to become “self-sustaining, lifelong learners”.

Jennifer Buckingham, then a senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, wrote at the time that “the solutions posed in this report will take us further in the wrong direction. If implemented, the Gonski 2.0 report will just be another chapter in the story of Australia’s sad educational decline”.

It’s understandable why failed politicians such as Malcolm Turnbull want to ensure their version of events dominates the historical record. But A Bigger Picture shows how he failed Australian schoolchildren.

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