Public Education is Over: It’s a nationwide change that isn’t going away

It’s not just the actions at Lakota schools in Northern Cincinnati that brought me to where I am now. I have spoken to dozens and dozens of people over the last few weeks regarding the Darbi Boddy school board drama, and I feel really sorry for the people who have been hoping that public education could be saved somehow. But as I have said to all those people and more, I just don’t see the controversy at Lakota. I see personality problems, but as I’ve said, whenever you get a clash of change agencies crashing into a very static institution, things are bound to get pushy. I never thought otherwise of the school board at Lakota. Instead, there are national trends that are forming in the background that are very much part of the Lakota story. What is about to happen at Lakota, with major resignations coming up due to the pressure of the changes, is going to happen in all public schools. I hoped to be wrong about it and hoped that with a decent school board, some form of public education for the people who do love it might last. But it’s quite clear to me that public education is impossibly broken and that the role of a modern school board is to manage the decline. Long gone are the days when Friday Night Football would rally behind the great local quarterback who threw 400 yards and four touchdowns to unite the community behind the sports page on a Saturday morning. And college recruits were in the stands handing out scholarships like Halloween candy. No, those days are over, forever. The people I have talked to as fall out from the controversies at Lakota are all well-intentioned. But they do not see the obvious because it’s simply too painful for them. They do love public education, and they really don’t have the heart for what’s coming.

Of course, you do want to know what’s coming and why now is such a pinnacle time. Well, institutions are collapsing along with the economy, which is overall the net result of over a century of failed progressive philosophy. They have gone all in, and the public has not been with them. All this became exposed during Covid, the progressive teacher unions, and the highly paid superintendent class that sort of functioned as a barrier between the radicals and the elected school board members. Once the rhythm was broken in the public education cycle, and people learned to live without it, there was no way ever to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. At best, public schools were going to be fragments of their former selves. But then parents learned just how radical the government schools really were. It used to be that many people, including Glenn Beck, were put off by my position on public education at the height of the Tea Party movement.    I was saying that public education was doomed to fail back in 2012 and 2013 when Beck and I had a mutual friend, Doc Thompson, who was trying to broker talk between us to do some radio work on The Blaze, as I used to do on Clear Channel Radio. I was too much of a rock thrower for Glenn Beck at that time of his life, and all avenues between The Blaze and me were cut after President Trump was elected. Soon after, Doc Thompson was mysteriously killed by a train while working directly for Beck in Texas. I was indifferent to Beck. He was a never-Trumper then, and of course, I was all about Trump, so there hasn’t been an opportunity to reconcile. Well, I had Beck’s show on in the background the other day, and he was telling everyone what I said a decade ago, “take your kids out of public schools; they are dangerous for your children. Do it now!” Just ten years ago, it was fringe when I said such things. Now it’s a mainstreamer conservative talk show host with many millions of people listening to him daily saying it. Times have changed a lot, and people are finally starting to listen. 

As I said during the Trump administration, if Covid hadn’t been set loose to destroy the fourth year of the president and hopes for re-election by destroying the American economy, the Department of Education was poised to be dismantled. States were preparing to apply a new funding model to the public school systems, where the money follows the child, not to the school. This would force the unionized institutions to compete for effectiveness. Lakota certainly wasn’t happy about that, and in many ways, Covid saved them from that eventuality. With Joe Biden in the White House, public education won’t see changes, but that’s not saying much. Biden, as of this writing, is at 28% approval. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules has shown serious proof of direct election fraud funded by Facebook, and institutional politics is trying desperately to keep it all undercover.

Meanwhile, more and more mad moms are getting elected to school boards, moms like Darbi Boddy at Lakota. Even if the school board convinced her to resign, there are hundreds just like her who are winning seats all over the country, and all want the same thing. They want to protect their kids from what they have come to see as an institutional menace to their children where school boards stand between them to keep the peace, to keep those Friday night football games something the community continues to do. But that all came to a crashing end with Covid, and parents found other things to do. 

In the last election, I supported school board members to help bring solutions, people I knew who liked public education more than I did. So a part of me really wanted to be wrong. I knew I wasn’t, but I wanted to be. As they are now, public schools will not survive the transition to a system where the money travels with the student, which will eventually happen. That gives the school boards the task of keeping that managed decline as good as possible so that the failure of public schools does not destroy entire communities. The communities around Lakota have much more going on than being destroyed by a school. Add to the high gas prices, the sudden shortages of items that people used to take for granted, and a political system at the federal level that people didn’t support to begin with; all the old progressive institutions are going to fail, just as the Biden administration is failing. Now that they have their dream candidate in the White House with both houses of Congress under their control, they went too far. They used Covid to grab for powers that terrified many parents who had been on the fence for their entire lives only to come face to face with their greatest fears, the pincushion, rainbow-haired LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ teachers who wanted to turn their tomboy daughters into a Tom and to cram it down their throats and demand that they like it. Well, people are tired of government ramming things down their throats, and they will take it out on their local communities, specifically their public schools. If they can’t get to Joe Biden, they’ll get to the local school board, who they see as just as much of a menace. And more and more, the moderates will be pushed off and replaced by mad moms seeking to protect their children the way angry mommas do. And there is no putting that anger back in the bottle now that people have admitted it to themselves. Public education is over. What we are seeing now is just the beginning. 

Rich Hoffman