


David Brooks is the faux-conservative columnist at the New York Times. Along with his colleague David French and his cohorts George Will (at WaPo) and Jen Rubin, they give the veneer that the legacy media has people who represent conservative thought and opinion, without any actual conservatism behind them.
Like the other three, President Trump broke him, but he's still around pontificating on things he knows little about.
This week, Brooks is musing about why red states are making educational gains while blue states are languishing.
No Duh. Brooks' analysis does not even come close to the why, but he gives it the old college try.
When Democrats are at their best, they are performing one job: reducing inequality and making American life more just. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson tried to do with the war on poverty. That’s what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did with their education reform policies. Both Clinton and Obama ran as education outsiders and change agents. In between those presidencies, Democrats worked with George W. Bush on the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed with a majority of 384-45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate. No Child Left Behind was all about bringing accountability to America’s schools.
No, Mr. Brooks: when Democrats are at their best, they ruin the country, and nowhere has this become more apparent than in their wholesale co-opting of the education apparatus with critical race theory, gender ideology, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and removing civics requirements so that children are not only unmoored from themselves and any sense of identity or purpose, but have no sense of belonging to the country in which they live.
Brooks' list shows every last one of these Democrat presidents had their role in embedding all this. So, how's that "bringing accountability to America's schools" going for us? The Department of Education is being dismantled, and power is being returned to the states to customize their educational aims for their citizenry. Because while the leftist agendas took hold, the so-called reforms have all FAILED, bigly.
Brooks acknowledges the problems: screens replaced didactic analysis, reforms that removed standards in the name of "equity," and ideology over the mechanics of learning have all added to a disconnected and illiterate populace.
But here is where Brooks is gobsmacked. The reforms being used to correct these ills are coming from, <clutch the pearls>, Republicans!
We’ve now had 12 years of terrible education statistics. You would have thought this would spark a flurry of reform activity. And it has, but in only one type of people: Republicans. When it comes to education policy, Republicans are now kicking Democrats in the butt.
Schools in blue states like California, Oregon and Washington are languishing, but schools in red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well. Roughly 52 percent of Mississippi’s Black fourth graders read at grade level, compared with only 28 percent in California. Louisiana is the only state where fourth-grade achievement levels have returned to prepandemic levels. An Urban Institute study adjusted for the demographics of the student bodies found that schools in Mississippi are educating their fourth graders more successfully in math and reading than schools in any other state. Other rising stars include Florida, Texas and Georgia.
Here's the denominator that Brooks glancingly mentions, but fails to give its due weight. At least some of the red states mentioned have full, or some form of, school choice. When children are not trapped by demographics into failing models, and schools have to compete for them instead of having them automatically fill their quotas, it's amazing how that changes the calculus.
The so-called Southern Surge came about because the red states built around a reading curriculum based on science, not ideology. The schools provide clear accountability information to parents and give them more freedom to choose schools. They send coaches to low-performing classrooms. They use high-quality tutoring, and they don’t promote students who can’t read, reducing the bureaucratic strings that used to control behavior in the classroom. They also hold schools and parents accountable. In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it.
The first line in his sentence is the key: "reading curriculum based on science, not ideology." "Gender Queer" and "Heather Has Two Mommies" are no longer being spoon-fed. Actual reading of literature, the classics, is back. Spelling drills, rather than gender role-playing exercises, are required.
Who would have thought that this could make a huge difference in helping children to focus, learn concepts that will help them socially, make them marketable in the future, and allow them to advance not just in knowledge but in confidence? I think every conservative educator over the last 25 years. When the National Educational Assessment of Progress numbers came out in September, Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Sarah Parshall Perry said in an X post: "The social experimentation, lack of rigor, & identity politicking must end. If for no other reason than that we can no longer afford them."
No kidding.
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Here is where Brooks showed his ignorance on the subject and how little attention he has paid to the decades-long push for conservative changes in the education space.
Where the hell are the Democrats? One gets the impression that many of them have spent the last decade deciding that social justice ideology is more important than reducing inequality. What was Joe Biden’s big K-12 education idea? Zippo. In 2024 there was nothing but a howling void where Kamala Harris’s education agenda should have been.
I believe that the howling void between Kamala Harris' ears may have had something to do with her lack of agenda. But, I digress.
Democrats do not believe in freedom: they believe in government control. How do you control people? You don't teach them how to think, reason, or aim higher; you teach them how to parrot concepts, read prescribed dogma, and follow orders. You do not ground them with a sense of belonging to a country or respect for a family. You teach them that their country is evil, interfere with parental control, and do your darndest to keep them under the thumb of the state.
Illinois politicians tried to undermine and destroy homeschooling in the state with House Bill 2827, which required all Illinois private schools to report personal information about students to local and state authorities. Guess who sponsored the bill? They all have Ds behind their name.
House Bill 2827 was filed by state Rep. Terra Costa Howard, D-Lombard, and has been co-sponsored by 15 other Democratic members of the House as of March 5. Teachers unions – ardent opponents of parents’ ability to choose alternatives to public school – have invested over $3 million in the 16 sponsors’ campaign committees, according to records with the Illinois State Board of Elections.
California attempted the same legislative jujitsu with Assembly Bill 84, targeted at charter schools and non-classroom-based learning (i.e, homeschools).
A dangerous bill is making its way through the California Assembly that could lead to the closure of charter schools and non-classroom-based (NCB) independent study homeschooling programs. Assembly Bill 84, written by Education Committee Chair Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), would gut charter school funding and place even more bureaucratic oversight and hoops for these schools to jump through.
Under the guise of promoting “accountability” and “transparency,” a potentially noble goal, this bill deals significant damage to the funding and operation of charter schools statewide. Any Californian who cherishes the freedom to make intentional educational choices for their children needs to fight this bill.
But the poster children of Democrat success, not just in its aims, but in its "reforms" failures, are the legions of students protesting everything from Hamas and "Palestine," to ICE, to a fraudulent illegal alien school superintendent being caught red-handed and arrested.
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These are not students who have the ability to critically think or learn — and that is the Democrats' goal. Because of President Trump's championing of school choice, education's return to the states, and a return to actual learning rather than indoctrination, real education reform has finally been given the attention it deserves.
But the hapless Brooks, ever intent on finding Democrat shining lights to prove his theory, has latched onto prospective 2028 presidential candidate Rahm Emmanuel (a Democrat). In a speech in Iowa(!), he co-opted much of the education reform language that conservatives have been preaching for decades. As a Democrat, there always has to be "free stuff" in the mix, so Emmanuel ensured his message contained it.
Fortunately, there are some bright spots.
A few days ago I was scrolling through my phone (yes, I have my own addictions) when I came across an astonishing video. Rahm Emanuel was speaking in Iowa and was asked about school reform. He proceeded to rip through a series of ambitious and credible ideas: Return K-8 to the fundamentals, like phonics, the way Mississippi is doing. Completely reinvent high schools, which haven’t changed in a century. Put a special focus on keeping freshmen on track, because once they are juniors it’s too expensive to try to get them on a better course. Create incentives for students who earn a B average to get books and transportation for free. Bring college into high school with dual credit programs so they can gain confidence and do advanced work. Make high school degrees contingent on students having a letter of acceptance from a college, the armed forces or a vocational training program so they have a plan for the day after.
Why is Brooks so invested in seeing the Democrat dominance in education preserved? The dumbest of reasons.
We can’t live in a country in which the party that dominates the rural areas has a proven educational agenda while the party that dominates the urban areas doesn’t.
We've already been living in that country, David. That is why the dismantling of the destructive blue state educational agenda will require that the proven conservative educational agenda be applied across the board. Thank God we finally have a Republican administration in place that can help see that happen.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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