Wokester apocalypse: Public school enrollment plunges in California — and everywhere else
Have the wokesters finally reached a tipping point?
Leftists of multiple stripes have been making public schools horrible places, and now students are bolting.
In California, that's making news. According to the Associated Press:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California public schools have experienced a sharp decline in enrollment this year as the pandemic forced millions into online school, according to data made public Thursday.
The drop came as the state's school districts dawdled in bringing children back to the classroom, making California one of the slowest in the country to reopen schools.
The California Department of Education data shows that the number of students at K-12 schools dropped by more than 160,000 this academic year, most of them at the K-6 level, to a total of 6 million.
The drop is by far the biggest decline in years and represents the clearest picture yet of the pandemic's devastating toll on California public schools.
"The annual snapshot of fall enrollment shows a sharp one-year decline as the state and nation grappled with a deadly pandemic that disrupted all aspects of public education," the education department said in a statement.
But it's actually happening all over. Detroit, New York City, Baltimore, D.C., Austin, Tucson, Minneapolis, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Janesville, Wisconsin, Chautauqua County, upstate New York, plus the entire states of New Jersey, Iowa, Vermont, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Hawaii, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Washington, Virginia, and quite likely all of the others are reporting public school enrollment drops. I didn't have time to finish going through the list.
In California, it's white students who are bolting most. The AP reports that they constitute 22% of school enrollment but account for half of the exits. They're moving on to private schools, whose enrollments are up, or to homeschooling, which is available to anyone with a literate and motivated parent. Or else just moving to a better state. It suggests that poor black and Latino kids, who form far larger demographic groups within the California districts, might just be not bolting because economically, they can't. They may have a parent who has to work in a low-salary service industry job or else live in a household with no literacy skills to facilitate homeschooling from the adults. Based on other factors, to be cited below, they'd get out if they could, too.
And that's, according to press reports, all because of the pandemic — which is bee ess right there.
Far from this being the pandemic, which, scientifically speaking, affected children very little, it's the ruling elites' barbaric response to the pandemic. That was visible enough in the state-imposed lockdowns on the public schools, and in the outrageous behavior of the rabidly left-wing teachers' unions and the campaign cash-fattened politicians who love them.
Lockdowns themselves were terrible. Besides being unscientific — recall this little incident, cited by Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen:
[H]is handpicked director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, said last week that "schools can safely reopen" and "vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for the safe reopening of schools," the Biden White House slapped her down, with press secretary Jen Psaki insisting that Walensky was speaking in her "personal capacity."
No, she wasn't. Walensky was speaking in her capacity as a government scientist during an official briefing of the White House covid response team. And her comments came just days after a team of CDC scientists published a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of numerous studies which show "there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission."
...they were also terrible for kids. Kids' grades plummeted, and many never showed up for the online Zoom sessions at all. Worse still, mental health problems rose, and children became depressed, unable to perform the vital task for them of making friends. For kids, that's a positively critical need, as children are biologically wired at that age with an openness to making friends, quite unlike older people. Child depression rose; child suicides soared. The lockdowns were also exceptionally hard on parents.
The highest declines in enrollments, across all states, and certainly in California, were among the youngest children. Very young children are unusually unsuited to online learning, and anyone who's ever taught them (and I have) knows they need to physically interact: to touch, to see, to pass around, to feel, to hear, to sing, to smell, to speak, to raise hands, to dance, to participate, to mush clay, to paint, to move — it's how they naturally are. They don't do virtual, and they don't like concept stuff. (It's why they're so wonderful.)
That's just the lockdowns alone. Parents tried to complain, parents tried to say something, but they always got ignored.
To add insult to injury, there were also the teachers' unions and the school boards in their pocket, which had to be the last straw for a lot of parents.
Remember these charmers?
Ever wonder what school board members are saying in private about parents with kids in schools unhappy about the forever-COVID school closings?
An unwitting Zoom recording from the Oakley School Board of Contra Costa County, in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area, cleared the air on that: ...
Wow. Just wow. They not only mocked parents behind their backs, but seemed to bond together as they did it.
That repugnant group was just the start.
The unions themselves were beyond-vile in their behavior, as RedState contributor Jennifer Oliver O'Connell, in an excellent piece, noted here:
This is a nice way of saying that the California Teachers Unions held parents and students hostage while they made demands for social justice contingent on their return. Demands like funding BLM, and Defunding the Police. While doing this, they still collected bonuses for teaching 45-minute Zoom classes, and maligned parents who wanted their children to actually be taught in person.
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