Commentary: Six Ways to Improve Schools
America’s schools won’t recover through more spending or slogans, but through a return to proven basics—clear instruction, firm discipline, accountable teaching, and classrooms focused on learning.
As someone who attended public school in the 1950s and 1960s, taught in elementary and middle schools in the early 1970s, and then from 1984 until I retired in 2009, I have seen firsthand the utter devastation of our nation’s schools. What follows are six things we must do to change course.
Eliminating the radical political and sexual agenda is imperative.
Over the years, imposing left-wing politics on students has become fashionable. Diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates, which pay no heed to quality and instead treat racial bean-counting as the sine qua non of our culture, are all the rage.
Many students in K-12 are taught that white heterosexual men are responsible for all oppression in our society. At the same time, advanced classes and standardized tests are eliminated because they purportedly promote racism. Also, sex and gender claptrap are omnipresent.
The Heritage Foundation reports that 16 states mandate transgender lessons for children. The organization’s “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy” report highlights the education standards and frameworks of states that promote gender ideology, defined as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”
A return to phonics nationwide is paramount.
Louisiana spends far less per student than most states, yet its fourth graders outperform peers in reading in nearly every other state. The state’s turnaround is rooted in a back-to-basics approach that mandates phonics-based reading instruction. Colleges of education have overhauled teacher preparation, and every K–3 teacher and principal in Louisiana must now complete 50 hours of training in the science of reading.
Even California, an educational backwater, has seen the light. The recently enacted AB 1454 will adopt evidence-based reading instructional materials and training. The state was an early adopter of the whole-language approach to reading instruction in the 1980s, which advocates argued was easier and more natural for students, focusing on the meaning and context of words rather than breaking them down into sounds.
However, the whole language approach was an abject failure. Under this regimen, California students’ reading scores rapidly declined in the 1990s, with only 12% of 4th graders at or above reading proficiency in 1992 and 11% in 1996.
Order in the classroom must be restored.
As a former teacher, I have seen the damage caused by disruptive students. When a child misbehaves, the whole class stops learning because the teacher becomes a disciplinarian rather than an educator. Also, the presence of a misbehaving peer causes other students to act out. Blue states typically view school discipline as a necessary evil to be limited as much as possible. California, for example, prohibits suspensions for low-level misbehavior, such as willful disobedience.
Similarly, Massachusetts imposes prerequisites on the use of suspensions, directing administrators not to suspend students from school as a consequence until alternative remedies have been tried and documented. In practice, this makes suspension a last resort rather than a baseline tool for classroom management. (While suspensions are not a cure-all for bad behavior, they at least allow willing learners to do so.)
We must pay greater attention to teacher quality.
Starting with our schools of education, we must produce higher-quality teachers. While it’s true that the average teacher has more education than the average private-sector worker, much of that additional schooling occurs in our schools of education, which renowned economics professor Walter Williams referred to as “the academic slums of most any college.” A paper in the journal Education Policy Analysis Archives supports Williams’ assertion, finding that education majors face considerably “lower grading standards” than other college students.
Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, adds that states are not devoting enough attention to teacher effectiveness and need to ensure that teachers are prepared and supported from the time they enter teacher preparation programs to the time they enter classrooms.
One way to improve teacher quality would be to adopt pay-for-performance, or merit pay. Currently, most teachers are paid under the teacher union-mandated step-and-column method, in which teachers—regardless of talent—are paid for their years of service and for completing often meaningless “professional development” classes.
Teachers need to leave their union.
The teachers’ unions are probably the worst thing to happen to education in the last 50 years. They are not concerned with teacher quality but rather with protecting poor-performing educators and pushing radical ideas on children. As disclosed by Defending Education, a parent advocacy group, the National Education Association trains teachers to advance gender and racial ideology in classrooms and to fight Republicans and parent groups who ‘harm us all’ by trying to stop that agenda, according to leaked materials from a recent training event.
Participant handouts for the NEA’s “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice and Transgender Advocacy” training accuse the right of using an “arsenal of racist dog whistles” and “transphobic tropes” to “whip up fear” and cause harm. The materials coach teachers on how to indoctrinate children into progressive dogmas, including gender ideology and pronoun use, among other woke nonsense.
These unions should never have been allowed to exist in the first place, but getting rid of the behemoth won’t happen. The best way forward is for teachers to stop supporting them.
Cellphone bans must be implemented.
Data on the effects of school phone bans confirm what teachers and administrators have long suspected—that classroom phones are a significant cause of misbehavior and disengagement.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) finds that students who spend less than one hour of leisure time on digital devices at school score about 50 points higher on its math test than students who spend more time glued to their screens.
Cellphones also create a general distraction, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, director of the PISA survey, maintains that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Additionally, 45% of students said they feel “nervous” or “anxious” when they don’t have their digital devices nearby.
In sum, students who spend more time on their phones do worse in school, distract other students, and feel worse about their lives.
The above is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is a good start. For the good of our children and the country, we must implement them immediately.
Originally published by American Greatness.
Larry Sand is a retired 28-year classroom teacher who also served as the president of the nonprofit California Teachers Empowerment Network from 2006 to 2025. He now focuses on raising awareness about our failing education system.