US education was in crisis before the Covid-19 pandemic; now it is worse.
Progressives love to play the race card against Republicans on every occasion, but in the real world, especially the world of education, it is the progressives to whom that inflammatory accusation best applies.
K-12 public education in Democrat-controlled cities fails to educate minorities and compares poorly with comparable Republican cities. This is documented in the study (pdf download), “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All” (Brightbeam, January 2020). The study reports that “Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities, respectively. In San Francisco, for example, 70% of white students are proficient in math, compared to only 12% of black students reaching proficiency — a 58-point gap. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading compared to 23 percent of black students — a 60-point gap. By way of contrast, three of the 12 most conservative cities — Virginia Beach, Anaheim and Fort Worth — have effectively closed or even erased the gap in at least one of the academic categories we examined.”
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