Working with MassResistance, I have been privileged to work with parents all over the United States. I even connected with a number of activists in Miama-Dade County, who had been fighting against their countywide school district earlier this year.
Miami-Dade County schools wanted to push all kinds of LGBT perversion in the children. They even wanted to replace Hispanic Heritage Month with LGBT History Month. Disgusting.
The parents also told me that their school district superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, was hired by LA Unified School District!
Wow, what a small world.
Things are not working out so well for the new hire in Downtown Los Angeles, either. Check out this report from EdSource:
Enrollment decline: LAUSD’s Carvalho says families leaving the state or choosing to home-school
Where have all the students gone?
They have fled from the poisonous, decrepit, failed system that is government-run education in Los Angeles County. That’s what!
California’s K-12 enrollment decline of more than 270,000 students since the pandemic began is largely attributable to people leaving the state, not enrolling children in transitional kindergarten or kindergarten, or deciding to home-school their children but failing to file the paperwork to account for them, the head of the state’s largest school district and other experts said Sunday.
The pandemic allowed parents to see what their children were REALLY learning in the classroom. Parents from all over Los Angeles County alone showed me all kinds of terrible lessons that the SJWs disguised as teachers were pushing on their kids.
The fact that learning was Zoomed into the home gave parents unprecedented access to learn what their children were taking in, and these revelations helped parents rise up against all kinds of perverse lessons and curricula, including Critical Racist Theory, Critical Perv Theory (LGBT, Queer, etc.)
“In Los Angeles, in a very, very obvious and evident way, the greatest loss was in (transitional) kindergarten and kindergarten students,” LA Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told a gathering of education journalists. “You have to really accept that parents made a decision, ‘I’m not going to send my kid to pre-k or kindergarten.’”
Notice how this report makes it seem as the parents’ decision was unthinking, unfeeling, or arbitrary. The truth is that parents are taking into account the long-term needs of their children, and they don’t want them to suffer in a pandemic-driven school system that puts the desires of government employees and politicians ahead of children and their parents.
Regardless of where the students ended up, their learning has been harmed, Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee said. Dee’s research described how the youngest students were most affected by not returning to school following Covid. His work was highlighted in a collaboration report that included EdSource, The New York Times and Big Local News, a data journalism project at Stanford.
Not sure what to think of this statement at first glance. How do academics measure real educational achievement nowadays? The metrics for assessing student performance in homeschools and home-school co-ops deserve more attention and a different kind of metric, I think, since it’s about more than mere test scores.
“Enrollment data shows a disruption that students are experiencing, and those disruptions matter because research literature shows switching schools, particularly in a reactive manner, impacts development,” Dee said.
The disruptions are the fault of school districts and the administrators who shut students out of their education. Don’t blame the parents!
And “missing out on early childhood educational experiences can be really consequential,” Dee added.
Kids are still missing out because in too many districts, they are still required to wear masks. Covering up a child’s mouth impairs their speech and cognitive development. It’s just so vile!
Across California, the number of students enrolled in the public school system dropped below 6 million this year for the first time in two decades. As districts navigated the sudden shift to virtual learning amid the pandemic, declines steepened as many families faced extra barriers, considered alternatives to the public school system or chose to delay enrollment for their youngest learners.
These barriers didn’t come out of nowhere. These barriers are the result of selfish politicians and bureacrats–and teachers–who put their wants ahead of the needs of children. No, adult teachers do not need to wear masks, and NO, they have no right to demand that the students in their classrooms wear masks, either. They were perfectly capable of teaching without all the COVID-19 restrictions and regulations. A lot of greedy teachers unions and their enablers wanted to milk the government systems for as much taxpayer dollars as possible without having to work.
The enrollment declines, both in California and nationally, are going to lead to fiscal impacts and school closures in the years ahead, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.
GOOD!
“You’re going to have to sell buildings when they become empty. You’re going to have to exit staff because you won’t need the number of teachers that you have,” Domenech said. “Parents didn’t want their children in school because they were afraid.”
GOOD! And they have only themselves to blame. This is some of the best news I have read yet, especially considering how difficult it is for parents to get pro-student responses from school districts, administrators, and teachers. They brought this mess on themselves, and they deserve to suffer from it.
But, he added, the impact of the pandemic on students is profound.
“The whole virtual learning experience was a fiasco because school districts were not prepared for virtual learning,” Domenech said. Nationally, there’s “a pulling away of students from the public school system because of the impact of Covid.” But he said it’s unclear how many of the students will return.
Virtual learning is that, virtual, i.e. not real. Children need constant contact and interaction with their teachers and peers to improve their learning and development.
The three men spoke Sunday afternoon at the national conference of the Education Writers Association in Orlando, Florida.
In Los Angeles, enrollment has been steadily declining for two decades. The district has 58% of the student population it had at its peak in the early 2000s, now at 430,000 students.
Los Angeles Unified is one of the worst school districts in the country. The learning outcomes are terrible, there is no accountability, teachers and administrators have a long record of ignoring, enabling, or even enacting abuse against students. The politics of the school board, the teachers union, the administrators, and the state legislature has created a hostile, untenable situation in which constant rancor is the norm, not the exception. Worst of all, the needs of the students is completely ignored.
But data shows those students did not migrate in large numbers to private and charter schools, the superintendent said. Charter schools in the district also had an enrollment decline of about 2% during the pandemic, he said.
Charter schools are going woke, too, and parents are breaking away from that mess, too. Charter schools alone are not the solution. School choice will impose competition on all schools, certainly, but most importantly curricular integrity and
LAUSD’s enrollment decline has only increased since the pandemic hit. The district lost “9,000 kindergartners when the pandemic hit,” Carvalho said. “That’s a huge, a huge number.”
The district has hired people to go into neighborhoods to try to track down missing students and interview their parents, he said, describing a massive push in which he and other top administrators have joined others to try to keep track of 30 children each.
If this does not sound creepy to you, I don’t know what to tell you. The school district spent more money that it does not have to hire people to “track down missing students.” TRACK DOWN?! What is this? Now school districts are extending their police-state machinations outside of the classroom and pressuring/bullying parents! We all know where this is leading: these observers, “trackers” are going to find out whether the parents are providing any kind of education. If they think that the level of education does not meet their “standards,” the CPS can come in and take the kids away. This is just awful.
Every parent who gets a visit from these trackers must slam their door in their faces and tell them to get off their property.
In some cases, he said, district workers have found that undocumented families left the country during the pandemic “because there was no opportunity to work. The kids left with the families. And they left by the thousands.”
More good news! Illegal aliens are leaving the country. LAUSD worked so hard to attract illegal aliens, because for that corrupt district, it was never about love of California, the county, or the country; it was all about raking in more taxpayer dollars based on the attendance disbursements. This is beyond disgusting.
In other instances, he added, families left California for other states such as Florida “because of political ideology and lower taxes. If they had the means, parents made decisions.”
There! Finally someone has the guts to put in print that California sucks, and the Democrats own these failures.
They went to another state where “their child could go to a school that was more aligned with their own beliefs in terms of medicine and in terms of schooling.”
And let’s not forget the fact that Florida opened up their schools throughout the entire season. They refused to shut down the schools, and they banned school districts from forcing students to wear masks. Best of all, Florida weathered the COVID-19 spread with little trouble and enjoyed comparable, if not lower rates of infection compared to hard-core lockdown blue states.
Perhaps the biggest problem in figuring out the decline student by student is the lag in parents letting the district officially know they have decided to home-school their children by filing an affidavit with school officials.
“Parents are taking their time to file the documents,” he said.
The parents should be more churlish. They should not have to tell anyone anything. Of course, the problem for the last seventy-plus years is that school districts have their parens patriae role, i.e. they can assert a limited parental role when the child is outside of the classroom.
Statewide, during the height of the pandemic, a record 35,000 families had filed an affidavit with the state to open a private home school, but the numbers dropped the following year, according to California Department of Education records. That level is still much higher than the 15,000 affidavits filed in the years prior to the pandemic.
Let’s hope for more private schools popping up all over the state of California. No one in their right mind should want their children to suffer in a decrepit, underperforming government school.
According to LAUSD’s enrollment analysis conducted as a part of Carvalho’s 100-day plan that launched when he became superintendent in February, LAUSD has seen the most significant declines by grade at the elementary school level and the most significant declines geographically among west and central local districts over the last six years.
The spread of enrollment decline is really good news, because it goes to show that this decline is not just in supposedly white neighborhoods. Central sections of Los Angeles Unified have predominantly black and Hispanic populations. Parents care about their kids, period. It has nothing to do with skin color or income level. Parents care about their kids, and no amount of cultural marxist wrangling can change that.
The district has also noticed that the largest drops have been among middle-class families, but that analysis does not take into account the students who left to attend the City of Angeles virtual school during the pandemic.
WOW! Notice the journalistic sleight of hand here. More like a “slight,” indeed, insulting poor and working-class families, as if they do not care about their children at all. Most of the kids who were the most affected by the virtual learning were no doubt poor and working class families, since it was much harder for them to have one parent at home to supervise the children during their in-home Zoom lessons.
LAUSD doesn’t consider private schools a large factor in its enrollment decline because local private school enrollment has also been on the decline for the past few years, dropping more than 6% since 2017. Reflective of the national trend, homeschooling in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan statistical area doubled to 8% in 2020.
Homeschooling has become so much easier because of the wide availability of resources via the Internet, social media, and trading applications online. What was a difficult transition for many parents twenty or even ten years ago has become so much easier because of the wide array of curricular choices and programs online and via homeschool co-ops.
Final Reflection
There is so much winning following the steady implosion of government school enrollment around the country. For decades, the school districts have been failing students and insulting parents. Bureaucrats, administrators, and politicians have put the demands of special interests ahead of the needs of children. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed parents past the breaking point, and they finally rose up demanding the best for their kids. They do the right thing to the degree that they can homeschool their children AND deprive the local school districts of any further funding.
The State of the Union 