OPINION:
The office of Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has convened a rare special grand jury to investigate D.C. Public Schools, focusing heavily on truancy, attendance records and graduation rates.
It is about time. Attorneys general across the country should consider taking Ms. Pirro’s lead.
America’s K-12 schools remain a train wreck, but they do not have to be.
Among the most important aspects of our constitutional republic is education, specifically, how we teach our nation’s youngsters, how we prepare the next generation to carry on the tenets of our country’s founding: equality, rights, limited government, opportunity and rule of law.
President Trump is uniquely qualified to lead the charge to rid our nation’s schools of incompetence, failure and disruption, and to return them to academic excellence, strong teaching and safety. U.S. attorneys general can play an active role in reversing school and community decline.
In my book, “Dead Last,” I detail the importance of infusing character development within a school’s curriculum, which led to turning around a persistently failing school in the Baltimore-Washington corridor — a school typical of failing schools across America, including our nation’s capital.
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, this underachieving school located in a state police “Hot Spot” community (so designated because of the level of criminality) soared to a new standard of excellence. Every student group within the multicultural community met or exceeded state academic standards, a feat rarely achieved by schools.
America is more at risk today than it was during the Reagan administration, when a research report on education commissioned by the secretary of education found that 13% of our 17-year-olds could not read.
Today, 65% of 12th-grade students perform below reading proficiency and 78% perform below mathematics proficiency. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals that as youngsters matriculate through America’s K-12 schools, they perform less well each year in key academic areas, continually falling behind their counterparts in other developed nations.
One might think that the adults charged with the education of our youngsters would be all about improving the poor student behavior that teaching staff find so disruptive, shoring up academic deficiencies with proven instructional interventions, supporting first-rate teachers, cultivating an appreciation of academic rigor and emphasizing the important role of parents in the education of their children.
If you thought that, however, you would be wrong.
Benighted lawmakers, school officials, teachers and school administrator unions and classroom activists posing as teachers have doubled down on dumbing down education. They continue to saddle our youngsters with woke indoctrination, radical gender ideology, restorative justice, critical race theory and left-wing activism. It is a nonsensical and dangerous movement, and its claims are false.
Such divisive identity politics is injurious to our youngsters and families. It steals meaningful time and attention from the academic lessons students need in reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and other academic and related arts disciplines.
In school districts that have bowed to activist pressure, school leadership has been replaced with advocacy.
The lack of character and the callous disregard by school officials, politicians and others for what is right and wrong, legal and illegal, are at the root of academic school failure and community disorder.
“Dead Last” cites an investigative report that found that grade marks for some 5,500 students in a Maryland public school system were altered days before graduation. Another investigation found that some students in the District of Columbia were marked absent for more than 100 days — one was marked absent for 151 days.
Fully half of the “graduates” in this high school missed more than three months of the school year with unexcused absences, yet every student received a high school diploma.
The U.S. attorney is right to be concerned with the extent to which offending youngsters and gangs make entire cities unsafe. Inept parents, incompetent school officials and feckless politicians allow and/or accept wholesale truancy that spikes criminal behavior, alcohol and drug abuse, bullying and teen pregnancy.
Ms. Pirro is right to convene a grand jury to investigate the years of systemic underperformance in D.C. schools. Other attorneys general should see fit to do the same, lest we continue losing a generation of children, which will be at America’s peril.
• Stephen Wallis is a nationally recognized school principal and author of “Dead Last: The Triumph of Character, Passion, and Teamwork in Education.”
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