Schools are a measure of the health of our democracy

Educating our children is our essential duty – for their futures, their families, their communities, and our country. For all the furious debate about schools, what’s clear is that we have to do better.

- Jesse Jackson

Since COVID, children have been testing lower in national math and reading tests. That’s true across the board – topperforming students show about the same declines as those with lower scores. The closure of schools during COVID and the increased absences from schools since have had an enduring effect.

That underlines how much we rely on schools to educate our children. Parents play a major role, particularly in the first years of life. Whether there are books in the house, whether children are read to makes a difference. How well children do depends dramatically on how well their parents and community are faring. Higher-income parents with more flexible hours and deeper pockets offer their children many experiences. Parents juggling three or four jobs, pressing to make ends meet, in communities suffering from insecure housing and mean streets find it much harder.

Our modern commercial culture doesn’t help. Social media offers infinite distractions and even shorter attention spans. Pictures replace words. The young grow up in an amoral commercial ad culture that glamorizes consumption -- buying, not investing, debt, not saving. The right-wing “war on woke” seeks to ban books that too few children read while ignoring the salacious 24/7 commercial culture that forms and deforms their values.