Imagine being stuck in a failing school with actual violence, social isolation, mind-numbing curriculums focused more on a teacher's opinions than academic development, no interesting paths available to prepare you for the real world, to enter the workforce or start a business. You're thirsty, hungry, and teachers and school staff talk to you like you're subhuman. You're quizzed on irrelevant details from depressing novels written by suicidal authors meant only to convey how miserable life is. You're ridiculed and talked about, presumptive paths available to you if you just do what the staff expects of you. An ongoing barrage of demeaning and assumptive statements by people who hardly know you.
Imagine being a 13-year-old girl, weighing barely 100lbs, and you have to go to the bathroom. There is a boy in there with a skirt who forces himself into your stall. He's stronger, taller, weighs more. He rapes you. You report it; the traumatizing event. He's at school the next day, in the girls' bathroom.
Imagine going into a school and being told your religion is a farce. Your values are evil, and your family is hurting you by exposing them to you. Sometimes these are more overt. Utah made national headlines when a teacher forced a student to remove his ash cross from his forehead on Ash Wednesday. She claimed ignorance of the Christian mark practiced by millions for over a thousand years. I'm guessing the teacher went to public school. Sometimes it's more subtle, giving a teenager a book about the history of birth control, an implied communication about sexual promiscuity. Go into any public school; you'll see a pride LGBTQIA+ flag, an overtly sexual flag. It's about one thing: having sex in a specific way. Why would that be appropriate for children? It's not, but it's there. You want to force children into that room. You want that school to be the judge. How about overt pornographic material being given or available in a school? Children will be exposed to this type of behavior and content outside of a school. The reason these are so concerning coming from a school to children, is a school as in a position of authority. They have a lot of control over a child's life and work to shape what is right and what is wrong.
Want to learn something interesting? Go and talk to school-age children in public school. Many can't tell you the basic facts about WWII, 15-year-olds have the handwriting of a 6-year-old, many know next to nothing about their own culture and history beyond a critical Maoist narrative. I'm sure a lot of them could tell you why their school needs more money and why their teacher needs a raise, I couldn't, but they have the talking points.
Safford Unified School District v. Redding, 557 U.S. 364 (2009), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a strip search of a middle school student by school officials violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. That was a case where a school strip searched a young girl over ibuprofen. National School Boards Association was clear in their position that children should be stripped searched by school staff. School boards are having parents arrested for exposing children being raped, pornography in schools, and all other manner of human depravity children are being subjected to. Want to vote one out? Good luck; it's a four-year term by then people will have moved or your child will have spent a large amount of time in an inhumane situation more akin to a dystopian novel than an academic experience.
Teacher unions are overtly Marxist organizations. They have made it abundantly clear their purpose isn't the well-being of the children, but the teachers and their agendas. Chemically castrate a child? Yes, they support that. Separate a child from any notion of traditional Christian values? Yes, they support that. These are the groups funding political agendas in your state.
Here's the rub: the schools are criminalizing parents, destroying any meaningful religious value, feeding children into predatory situations to be raped and abused, and not even pretending to make an effort to ensure the academic success of children or set them up for a self-sustaining future. You're paying for that. You're paying a lot for each child. A lot of people are making their livings off a system that completely fails at what it's supposed to do.
"The school needs to be fixed..." We need to fix the school? We need to change the system. Ok, while you spend decades "fixing the school," what do you tell the child that has to go there? If they don't, the police will find them and arrest them for truancy. They will be compelled to go to court. The judge doesn't care how awful your life is because you're forced by the state to go to the school. You should just go, it's good for you. No, these a greater number of school experiences aren't good for children and aren't setting them up for success in life.
"But homeschool, that's the answer..." Homeschool is a very specific solution. Not something that will easily work without a dedicated parent guiding every move carefully. That's not an option for most working-class families, with multiple parents working or a single parent. If you have those resources available to you, awesome, but it's not going to be there for the majority of children that would benefit from it the most. "But the same forces that corrupted the public school are targeting the private ones..." So they're targeting churches too, doesn't mean I don't go to church on Sunday.
Schools are of particular interest to critical theorists, Marxists, and anyone wanting control of the future. Most with a dedicated interest in controlling what children think seldom have their best interests in mind. A massive reason schools are loaded with such overtly Marxist and sexual predators is because those teachers didn't have options for their own education. The piper was paid for in children the last time school vouchers got nuked by referendum, that's impacting children today. Anyone opposed to school vouchers, I will take personal offense if you don't consider me to be your personal political adversary. We are not on the same team. I do not want to ever be counted with you. Nothing is more important in society, nothing. We need to do better. Will vouchers be enough to save the future? It will be a great first step, we need more and should be fighting for it, but let's please get where we should have been 70 years ago and keep going.
Does a voucher that a child can take to a new school solve every problem? No. What it does do is give them a fighting chance. Maybe you have a nicer class, maybe everyday isn't a constant source of absolute dread. Maybe you aren't forced to go into a bathroom with a rapist and see your father arrested for trying to expose it in a school board meeting. Anything that moves the needle on focusing on the child's success rather than the institution's resources allocation or the teacher union dues is worth the effort. Not everything will succeed, but at least there is a chance. At least there are options. Options that were previously only available to children from the most wealthy families. Anything that can be done should be done. Today your taxes are being used to compel the worst behaviors. If we are going to spend the money, let's spend it with what it's intended for, not to enable building projects, textbook contracts, or campaign contributions from teacher unions but to focus on giving children a fighting chance and the rest of us as well.