
The staggering amount of money being poured into public school systems and the vast amounts of power being wielded by public school unions (they now run Chicago) is in sharp contrast to the actual student population.
Not only are students learning less in schools than they did in years past, but student enrollment continues to drop in major cities and even when students are enrolled, they’re not showing up. In huge numbers.
More recently, in the 2022–23 school year chronic absenteeism in California showed a slight improvement, dropping to 25% from 30% in the previous year. Still, in the year before the pandemic rates were 12%.
That translates into 1.5 million students. About 1.1 million of them are black or Hispanic.
But what’s really striking here is that younger students have stopped showing up or maybe never did.
Prior to the pandemic, high schoolers had the highest rates of chronic absenteeism but now the problem is particularly pronounced in the early grades—notably in kindergarten, where the rate is highest at 36%
That’s unusual because it’s high schoolers who usually have the capacity to play hooky. Parents, even the worst parents, are usually happy to send kids to kindergarten. If they’re not showing up, what’s going on?
Either the parents are truly messed up or these kids may be fictional and exist only in welfare databases. Or the kids have already broken loose at an incredibly young age.
California elementary school students already fail at basic reading.
Results from the state’s latest academic achievement tests, released last October, revealed that fewer than half met standards in English language skills and scarcely a third met those in mathematics…
“In California, only 58% of fourth grade students can read at a basic level based on the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP),” according to the report. “That number falls precipitously for California’s historically underserved students.
These are catastrophic numbers and they’re only going to get worse because unions and administration remain obsessed with DEI and dismantling standards.
Meanwhile, taxpayers are being gouged to the bone to fund the luxurious lifestyles of contractors and consultants, and the vastly inflated salaries of public school teachers, many of whom do little more than go on strike to demand more money.