The Myth of ‘Good’ Public Schools
18th September 2022
The Other McCain turns over a rock.
Most people know, although they are reluctant to acknowledge, the meaning of “good schools.” You don’t have to be Ibram X. Kendi to see the systemic racism embedded in that common bit of code-speak. When people are looking to buy a house, they’ll pay a premium for a “good school district,” by which they mean a majority-white district.
What has always struck me about this, as a longtime critic of our education system, is how little attention such parents pay to the curriculum. What upscale suburban parents seems to care about most is the relative prestige of their child’s school — is this the fashionable district? do a high percentage of students go onto college? are the SAT scores high? — and never mind what is actually being taught.
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.Notice that both of these teachers, who profess themselves “distraught” by a policy they regard as “cruel” to “marginalized” students, have been employed a long time by Bucks County schools. We may be certain that, when Becky Cartee-Haring was hired in 2006, there were no controversies about pronouns and “gender identity” in Bucks County schools. We know this because the sudden vogue of youth transgenderism didn’t begin until about 2014, and the acceleration of this trend has been driven mainly by online social media. Yet here are teachers adamantly defending beliefs that didn’t even exist when the students at Central Bucks West High School started first grade.