Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
In January, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ belief in grade-school teachers’ honesty and ethics had dropped to 64%, an all-time low. Then in July, another Gallup poll showed that just 28 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools – the second-lowest this figure has been...
By Larry Sand
The results of the first post-lockdown National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on June 1, and they showed anything but progress. Most subgroups took a big hit, but Blacks and Hispanics suffered the greatest damage. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test, said, “These results are...
By Larry Sand
This article previously appeared on frontpagemag.com. My father was a liberal Democrat. He worshipped FDR and didn’t care much for the GOP. His parents were staunch Republicans, and the political discussions I remember from the 1950s were always entertaining – if not a bit confusing – to this eight-year-old. Importantly, while my dad was a liberal,...
By Larry Sand
This article originally appeared on frontpagemag.com Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi...
By Larry Sand
Parents are abandoning schools in large numbers, but teachers are not. School reopening time is almost upon us, and large numbers of parents have opted out of government-run schools. Over the past two school years, k-12 enrollment has declined by nearly 3%, or about 1.3 million students nationwide, according to a recent study by the American...
By Larry Sand
Educators don’t get much for their $1,200 yearly dues. In the aughts, after blindly being a dues-paying National Education Association member for years, I opened my eyes, and discovered that I’d been wasting my money. The teachers unions were primarily about politics, all of which went in a leftward direction. One in-your-face example at the...
By Larry Sand
Many American schools of education are not worthy of existing. On June 29, the California Department of Education, in cooperation with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the State Board of Education, announced the first-ever release of statewide teacher assignment data. The report revealed that as of the 2020-21 school year, “83.1 percent of teacher...
By Larry Sand
SCOTUS declares that if a state subsidizes private education, it cannot disqualify religious schools. The latter case revolves around Maine’s town tuitioning law, which allows parents living in districts that do not own and operate elementary or secondary schools to send their children to public or private schools in other areas of the state, or even...
By Larry Sand
“Many teachers have left the profession and gone into other work of various kinds because they could make more money. Frequently the best teachers are the ones who have left the profession because they have been able to command exceptional salaries elsewhere.” (H/T Tom Gantert.) The above quote is taken from the front page of the...
By Larry Sand
According to a study released in mid-May by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, “one in six students attend a school where over 90% of their peers were of the same race in the 2018-19 school year.” The publication of the report was timed to mark the 68th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme...
By Larry Sand
It’s no secret that education in America has been in bad shape for some time, and now, low student proficiency has been exacerbated by the hysterical response to the Covid outbreak. Most recently, the results of a Harvard University study, which investigated the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by...
By Larry Sand
This article originally appeared in For Kids and Country. It has been a decade since the landmark Vergara lawsuit was filed, and its denial in the courts has led to ongoing failure in California schools. Back in 1975, I lost my 6th-grade teaching position in New York City. As a newbie, it was explained to...
By Larry Sand
This article originally appeared in For Kids and Country. Social Emotional Learning (SEL) was always a bad idea, and now that it is politicized, it’s a nightmare. As a longtime teacher, I have seen firsthand that education is a fad-filled field. Culturally responsive education, inventive spelling, new math, experiential learning, balanced literacy, etc. are educational...
By Larry Sand
This article originally appeared in For Kids and Country. Union membership is way down, and their collective future is not rosy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership in January, and the results were not pretty for organized labor. There are 50,000 fewer union members in the private sector than in...
By Larry Sand