This is what I talked about in my magnum opus "What Is At Stake In The Next Election". Here's what I wrote in November 2016:
What about the wonderful public school system? High school graduation rates are at the highest they've ever been! That's because dumb kids are being pushed through like cattle to the slaughter and programs for smart kids are being cut so the dumb kids don't feel bad for being excluded.
26% of high school graduates are below the basic reading level. This means these kids do not have the
skills necessary to perform simple and everyday literacy activities. One quarter of all high school graduates are functionally illiterate! In 1979 only 1% of graduates were illiterate, and now it's 26% thanks to "outcome-based education." Worse still, 19% of high school graduates can't read AT ALL! One in five graduates cannot read their own name.
Remember Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act"? And it's gotten worse under Common Core, where getting the correct answer is wrong unless you use all your fingers and your toes to count by ones!
The schools have failed a significant percentage of kids. People with no education and no skills, mostly poor urban blacks and Latinos, often can't get a job (see above), and in order to make money just to survive turn to crime. They turn to crime, they turn to drugs, and then they run afoul of the police. They go to prison, they die in gangland shootings, or they die in standoffs with the police. The horrible state of public education in America, combined with economic policies that ship jobs overseas, are creating the crime that is devastating minority communities. Blacks and Latinos who vote for the Bush-Obama-Clinton policies are literally voting for their own poverty and inner city violence. If black lives really mattered, if you really want police shootings to stop, you need to solve the root causes of the problem, which means fixing the economy, fixing the schools, and securing the border. And that means voting for Trump.
The state of public education in America is appalling, and no amount of money can fix it. More money is, in fact, the problem. Schools are letting illiterate, often violent students graduate because they know they can get more money if their graduation rates and phony test scores are higher. The only solution is to go back to policies that actually worked, before the Department of Education's one-size-fits-all approach was invented; back when individual communities ran the schools and catered to the needs of the children living in those communities. Back then America had one of the greatest education systems in the history of the world, and we can return to that greatness if only we follow along the same path of scaling back government that Donald Trump has taken us on.
