Did We Forget What School Is For?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled.
62% :The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination.
57% :These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return -- the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before.
56% : Read: What if America didn't have public schools?
55% : "COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education.
54% : Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country.
52% : Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America.
50% : Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think.
45% : "The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens," Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me.
44% : In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
39% : Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues.
38% : The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it's a crisis that we've just about wasted.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.