Dozens of government schools across Illinois have been unable to produce even one single student proficient in reading or math, according to new date from the Illinois State Board of Education. In hundreds of schools across the state, just 10 percent of children are proficient in the basics. And it is getting worse.

The new state data show that less than 30 percent of students in the public “education” system achieved even basic proficiency in reading, down from a measly 37 percent in 2019. Just one fourth of children tested proficient in math, down from already unfathomably poor 32 percent just a few years earlier.

This total failure to educate children on even the most basic elements of learning comes despite massive spending levels dwarfing the cost of government “education” in most other states and countries. Even as spending ballooned, academic results declined, the state board of education’s “Report Card” for 2022 revealed.

Perhaps even more astoundingly, some of the schools that failed to produce even one proficient student in either English or math were rated as “commendable” by the Illinois education bureaucracy — the second-highest ranking possible. How the schools scored so well when the students failed so miserably was not immediately clear.

Even many of the children labeled “proficient” are barely literate at best. But while the students may not be able to read or do math properly, and they almost certainly fail just as bad in science and history, they are almost all very well versed in gender theory, climate-change alarmism, race hysteria, and more. LGBT indoctrination is mandated by law across the state, too.

Breaking down the specifics of the educational disaster, there are 30 schools across Illinois — more than two thirds of them in Chicago — where not a single student ranked even “proficient” in reading. Meanwhile, more than 50 schools across the state failed to produce one single student rated proficient in mathematics. Almost two dozen schools failed to get even one child proficient in either subject.

Critics were aghast. “The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system,” explained education analysts Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner at Wirepoints.org in a commentary on the educational catastrophe sweeping Illinois.

Citing the same state data, Dabrowski and Klingner also noted that almost 20 percent of government schools in Illinois — more than 600 in total — were only able to get one in ten victims to basic reading proficiency. Over 25 percent of the schools — almost 1,000 in all — were only able to get one in ten proficient in math. And yet, they continually demand more money.

This is evidence of collective insanity, Dabrowski and Klingner concluded in their widely cited analysis of the state data. “In a sane world, schools that don’t and can’t teach a single student the most basic of skills would be shut down,” they explained. “But here, they carry on…the system thrives while students wither.”

In fact, in any other industry, not only would the entity or entities in question be shut down, the scam artists defrauding and bilking customers out of billions of dollars so flagrantly would be prosecuted for fraud and then thrown in jail. It happens all the time in other sectors of the economy not controlled by government.

Imagine, for example, a fast-food restaurant where only a handful of those who ordered a meal actually got anything remotely resembling food, while most customers were handed toxic waste or a rat carcass on a moldy bun. State police SWAT teams would be kicking in the doors by the next morning, if not before. Politicians would be tripping over themselves to condemn the horror.

And yet, what is happening with government schools is orders of magnitude worse than a mere rip-off fast-food operation peddling inedible meals. In the case of schools, the minds, hearts, and souls of innocent children are being poisoned and irreparably damaged. Meanwhile, families, churches and civilization are crumbling as a result. This is an intergenerational crime of monumental proportions.

Of course, Illinois is hardly alone when it comes to the widespread dumbing-down of children in government schools. Results from across America — even in red states — are atrocious. On average, less than one in three victims of government schools are proficient in any core subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (also known as The Nation’s Report Card).

But Illinois spends more, and gets even worse results, than almost all other states. This is a state and national crisis. Children are in grave danger. And as President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellent in Education warned in 1983, this so-called “education” is now literally an existential threat to America’s very survival as a nation.

Parents must understand clearly that choosing to send their children to a government indoctrination center posing as a “public school” is practically guaranteeing that they will fail to learn even the most basic subjects, to say nothing of basic morality. Not only will that make it tough to have a real job and support it family, it means those children will be easy to manipulate, deceive — and ultimately, enslave.

Fortunately, for those parents who refuse to accept such a bleak future for their children, there has never been a better time to get them out of the system. Homeschooling has never been easier. Excellent Christian schools are proliferating in churches across Illinois and beyond, thanks in part to the efforts of the Illinois Family Institute.

Millions of families have already fled the government “education” system in recent years. As the latest academic results show, it’s time for many more to join them.

The U.S. public school system was collectivist from the start, as this ongoing series on government education has extensively documented. But as the feds got involved, it quickly went from bad to worse, with the slow and steady decline in education turning into a precipitous collapse.

Today, the schools are a disaster, even by the government’s own measures. Consider, for instance, that the latest scores from the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that more than two-thirds of eighth-graders aren’t proficient in any core subject. It would be hard to do worse.

The U.S. government bears a big part of the blame. And there should be no doubt that it was deliberate.

Because the U.S. Constitution delegated absolutely no power over education to the federal government—and because the 10th Amendment specifically reserves all non-delegated powers to the states or the people—it wasn’t easy for the federal camel’s nose to get under the tent. Indeed, it took almost two centuries for Washington to get seriously involved in public schools.

But communists worked diligently toward that goal for decades. In his 1932 book, “Toward Soviet America,” Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster boldly outlined the agenda for his fellow revolutionaries. The goal: A U.S. Department of Education that would eventually replace patriotism and Christianity in school with communism and globalism.

“Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches,” Foster declared, an idea that was almost unthinkable to Americans of the day.

He also outlined what this anticipated U.S. Department of Education would do once in charge of schools.

“The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology,” he said. “The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.”

Of course, it took a long time to make that a reality. But anyone who has studied even briefly what is going on in the federally controlled public schools of America today can see that Foster’s agenda has been thoroughly implemented in every respect, all over the country. Unless dealt with, the disease will likely prove fatal.

Federal Involvement Begins

Aside from a few insignificant offices to collect statistics over the years, and Congress recommending Bibles printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia “for use in the schools” in the late 1700s, the feds played virtually no role whatsoever in education in America.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1960s, long after the government school system created by collectivists had started destroying traditional education, that the federal government took its first major steps into education.

It began in 1962 and 1963, as documented in this series, with two U.S. Supreme Court rulings declaring that it was somehow a violation of the First Amendment to have prayer or Bible readings in public schools. These lawless opinions, as admitted by one of the justices in his dissent, replaced Christianity at school with the collectivist “religious humanism” of John Dewey, one of the socialist founders of America’s public school system.

Well-educated Americans would have instantly recognized the absurdity of the ruling. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, most of the states had established churches. The idea that this amendment, designed to prevent a national religion, was supposed to prohibit states and communities from having prayer or Bibles in schools, would have been laughed at even in the 1940s or ’50s.

But by the ’60s, public education had already been in place for generations, dumbing down Americans and erasing their understanding of history to the point that such an outlandish anti-constitutional ruling became feasible.

Not long after that rogue court ruling, Congress—almost certainly emboldened by the high court’s flagrant constitutional intrusions into state and local education—launched the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson under the guise of “helping” states to “educate” all “disadvantaged” students, this statute opened up the floodgates of federal funding to K-12 public schools.

As the old cliché goes, with federal funding comes federal control. And in exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations. At this point, the feds have effectively nationalized the public school system; globalizing it is the next frontier.

There are more than 100 subsidy programs now in place under the department, which has a budget approaching $100 billion including “discretionary” and “mandatory” spending. Everything from discipline and academic standards to lunches, data collection, and even the gender of textbook writers is now subject to federal intrusion.

Once the camel’s nose was under the tent, it didn’t take long for the entire smelly beast to shove its way in. The relatively new U.S. Department of Education, which has centralized control over education in an unprecedented manner, has also played a crucial role in weaponizing America’s public education system against individual liberty.

Established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, the cabinet-level department was basically part of a quid pro quo agreement with the socialist-controlled National Education Association (NEA). The powerful union, which named the socialist and humanist Dewey as its “honorary life president,” was already acting as a sort of national ministry of education.

With the birth of the actual department, it sealed the deal.

By the time the U.S. Department of Education was established, Congress’s investigative committees charged with exposing communists and preventing infiltration of the federal government had long since been disbanded. As such, it’s difficult to determine how many actual communists worked within the department.

But as the Bible says, “by their fruits, ye shall know them.” And the fruit coming from the Department of Education has been rotten to the core from day one.

Whistleblower From Belly of the Beast

From the start, using grants and other means, this unconstitutional behemoth began working to bring all education in the United States under federal control. Worse than that, it worked to systematically dumb down the American people and transform the values of children, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a senior policy adviser on education in the Reagan administration.

All of it was in line with what the mass-murdering Soviet regime was doing. Indeed, from its earliest days, the U.S. Department of Education was involved in helping to “sovietize” the American public school system, Iserbyt told The Epoch Times in an interview. This agenda has been extremely successful in facilitating the disaster now unfolding in America, she explained.

Upon taking up her post at the Department of Education, Iserbyt found documents revealing that public schools in America were introducing Soviet quackery and curricula in the classroom, with help from the major foundations. In response, the patriotic Iserbyt began leaking the official documents to the press in an attempt to blow the whistle and stop the madness. She eventually compiled the smoking-gun evidence in her explosive book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.”

“When I was there, what I saw, I realized in retrospect, ‘The Nation at Risk’ report was very important,” Iserbyt said, referring to a government report commissioned by Reagan arguing that the U.S. education system threatened America’s future. “They needed that to convince America that we had terrible schools so they could bring in the reforms they wanted.”

Pointing to the Soviet education system and the forces that worked to bring similar schemes to America, Iserbyt is also convinced that communism was the goal. U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell “wanted to put in the communist system,” Iserbyt argued. “I believe he was a communist. If you read in my book the things he said, there is no way to come up with any other conclusion.”

Among other schemes, Iserbyt said Bell was the one responsible for bringing in the methods of “education” advocated by anti-Christian behaviorist B.F. Skinner and Soviet “psychologist” Ivan Pavlov to American schools.

“These Pavlovian and Skinnerian methods destroy free will by treating people like animals to be trained and to give reflexive responses to stimuli,” said Iserbyt. “This is animal training, not education. This is what was being used in communist countries to train and brainwash their populations, not educate them.”

Because of the Department of Education, it’s being used all over America, too.

“Their agenda was to have absolute control of the American population through these changes in teaching and instruction being brought into the schools through the Department of Education,” she continued, pointing to the important role of the Carnegie Endowment in negotiating with the Soviets on education. “So they claimed all these national reforms were needed to change education from what you know in your head, to what you can do, which is Soviet-style workforce training.”

Iserbyt also witnessed how great educators with valuable experience who loved liberty, such as Edward Curran, who led the National Institute of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, were purged and driven out. Meanwhile, collectivists and quacks continued moving quickly up the ranks.

“The political appointees—most of them were rotten,” said Iserbyt.

To impose the radical “reforms” on America, Iserbyt said she witnessed the Department of Education handing out all manner of enormous grants to fund dangerous quackery, data-gathering, and “efforts to transform the values of children away from traditional Americanism” through education.

“I believe these were very abusive toward traditional values,” she said, pointing to her important short publication, “Soviets in the Classroom, America’s Latest Education Fad.”

The Extremism Continues

Today, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Department of Education remains firmly under collectivist control. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, an analysis by The Hill revealed that 99.7 percent of all political spending by Department of Education bureaucrats went to Hillary Clinton—the highest of any federal department.

Even after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took up her post, the left-wing extremism from the department continued to spew forth. Indeed, on Feb. 12, 2017, the department’s Twitter account posted a quote by Communist Party USA member W.E.B. Du Bois—with his name misspelled, no less, drawing national ridicule.

Among other absurdities, Du Bois claimed the USSR, led by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in human history, was the “most hopeful country on earth.” During the darkest depths of the “Great Leap Forward,” Du Bois even held multiple meetings with mass-murdering communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and the two were always pictured with smiles on their faces.

These are some of the people who control U.S. education. Under the previous administration, the department, using “stimulus” money to bribe states into compliance, even imposed Obama-backed national standards on the nation—standards that are aligned with international schemes, too. Common Core will be dealt with in a future article in this series.

With around 4,000 employees, the Education Department’s budget has been ballooning since it was created. And that’s despite President Ronald Reagan promising to abolish it, and President Donald Trump saying on the campaign trail, “If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”

There’s currently a bill in Congress, H.R. 899, to abolish the department. When asked why the bill was needed, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the chief sponsor, replied in an interview, “How much time do you have?”

“The left understands that this is where you win or lose—in the schools and in the teaching of the children,” the Kentucky congressman continued.

Massie also noted that under the current administration, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make abolishing the department a bipartisan endeavor. Liberals and progressives, of course, don’t want Trump in charge of their children’s education, any more than conservatives want Obama or Biden running it.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”

The group U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is working to end all federal involvement in education, too.

“Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for half a century now, it has failed,” USPIE President Sheri Few told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.

“We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory.”

The U.S. Constitution and common sense both demand that the federal government gets out of education. That would be a great step forward. However, as this series has documented, the government education system has been controlled by collectivists from the very beginning. That means getting the feds out, by itself, won’t solve the systemic problems plaguing education in the United States today.

Still, ending all “Fed Ed” may be a decent place to start. And with Trump in the White House, perhaps both sides of the aisle could work together on this, as a first step to much more far-reaching reforms.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Widespread illiteracy and the ignorance it produces represent an existential threat to the United States today. But it wasn’t always this way.

And it can be fixed.

Fortunately, neither the cause of this crisis nor the solution to it is a mystery—at least to anyone who has studied the issue.

To blame for this dangerous phenomenon are socialist “educators” going back to the mid-1800s. In particular, it was their quack methodologies ostensibly aimed at “teaching reading” to children.

The answer to the illiteracy crisis is simple, though: America must go back to what worked for thousands of years and continues to work today: systematic phonics instruction.

Americans were almost certainly the most literate people on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s.

In fact, the earliest settlers in Massachusetts, the Puritans, were so passionate about reading that in the 1640s, they passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act” mandating that everyone learn to read. The thinking was that, without knowledge of the Bible, the devil would be more easily able to deceive their communities. And so, it was understood that every town must strive for universal literacy.

This passion for literacy translated into what would become the most literate society that mankind had ever produced up to that time.

According to University of Montana scholar Kenneth Lockridge’s study, “Literacy in Colonial New England,” 90 percent were literate by 1800, with numbers approaching 100 percent in cities such as Boston.

Even among women, that was true. According to estimates by Joel Perlmann of Bard College and Dennis Shirley of Boston College, virtually all women born in the early 1800s were literate.

At the time, Americans realized that as well. In his groundbreaking 1812 study “National Education in the United States of America,” Du Pont de Nemours estimated that even among young people, not more than “four in a thousand are unable to write legibly—even neatly.”

And in 1800, the Boston Review reported that no other nation in the world had a larger percentage of its population with at least basic literacy skills and an understanding of the “rudiments of science.”

Considering documents such as the Federalist Papers, which were addressed to the common American man, it’s also clear that the level of literacy by the late 1700s was extraordinary—especially by today’s standards.

Remarkably, this was all accomplished with virtually no government involvement in education at all. In fact, most children learned to read from their families using simple but highly effective resources such as Noah Webster’s “Blue Back Speller” and the “New England Primer.” These two tools taught reading using phonics while providing valuable moral lessons.

Literacy Crisis

By the middle of the 20th century, everything changed.

A crisis in literacy was brewing that’s without precedent in the history of the world. Literacy rates began plummeting, particularly after World War II. And today, the government’s own data shows evidence of a catastrophic decline in reading.

In 1993, the U.S. government conducted the most comprehensive literacy study ever performed up to that time. And the results were shocking.

On Sept. 9 of that year, citing the study, the Boston Globe reported that “nearly half of Americans read and write so poorly that it is difficult for them to hold a decent job.”

Many other analysts concluded, based on the findings, that almost half of the nation was either illiterate or at least very close to functional illiteracy. In short, the United States had been handicapped.

Another federal study performed a decade later found similar results.

The numbers are even worse in certain areas, and among America’s youth.

According to the federal government’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about one-third of high school seniors are proficient in reading.

And in Washington, D.C., a recent State Education Agency report revealed that two-thirds of the adult population is functionally literate, falling to 50 percent in some wards. In response, top D.C. officials took a trip to communist Cuba to see how that murderous regime “educates” children.

Of course, there had been a sneak preview of what is now being observed in Boston under then-Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann—a collectivist Utopian who led the government takeover of schooling in his state and beyond—in the mid-1800s.

But the quackery there had been quickly and ably exposed by experienced and professional educators, limiting the damage.

Quackery Pushed by Collectivists

The root of the problem stems from the method used to teach reading. The writing system in English is based upon phonetic characters, with each letter representing one or more audible sounds. For instance, the letter “b” makes a “buh” sound, while a “p” makes a “puh” sound.

So, from the time this writing system was developed thousands of years ago by the Phoenicians, teaching an individual how to read has involved giving the student the knowledge to sound out letters, blend them together, and then decode words.

A great Christian minister and educator, Rev. Thomas Gallaudet of Connecticut, after learning from a French minister in Paris, pioneered a new system. It would come to be known variously as the “whole-word” method, the “look-say” method, or the “sight-word” method. It seems clear that Gallaudet had nothing but the best of intentions, even if his ideas ended up producing so many problems.

In his capacity as director of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb from 1817 to 1830, Gallaudet worked to refine methods to teach reading to children who were deaf and mute. Because deaf children are incapable of hearing sounds, obviously, teaching them to associate certain sounds with certain symbols—letters in this case—wasn’t feasible.

So instead, he taught the children to look at whole words as ideographs or pictographs, similar to the Chinese writing system, as if the words themselves were the symbol, rather than a group of symbols each one representing a sound. Instead of teaching a child that the word “hat” includes three symbols, each one representing a specific sound, Gallaudet would show them the entire word, along with a drawing of a hat, encouraging children to memorize the whole word and its meaning.

For deaf children, this was an enormous leap forward. But Gallaudet and others theorized, incorrectly, that this same method might help non-deaf children. Gallaudet even created a reading primer based on these ideas, and began promoting his methods in educational circles and publications.

Just a few short months after being selected to serve as the commonwealth’s first Secretary of Education in 1837, Mann, a collectivist who seemed always ready to embrace quackery, would oversee the introduction of this new system into the government primary schools of Boston.

It was a disaster.

Basically, children suddenly struggled to learn how to read, with many of them displaying symptoms that today would be diagnosed as “dyslexia.”

Within a few years, the schoolmasters of Boston joined forces to expose and repudiate the quackery before it did more damage. In a stinging paper, more than 30 school chiefs wrote that “such a change, as that proposed by Mr. Mann and others, is neither called for, nor sustained by sound reasoning.”

The critical comments, made in the “Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace Mann,” pointed out that many of the arguments made in support of the whole-word method were “fallacious” and “based upon false premises.” Others were irrelevant.

And the results were clear, too: “There has been a great deterioration during the trial of the new system.”

That was the end of that—at least for a while.

Resurrecting the Quackery

Incredibly, some 50 years after being exposed as harmful, the whole-word method would be resurrected by “education reformer” John Dewey, a hardcore socialist who is almost universally recognized as the founding father of America’s “progressive” public education system.

While Mann may have genuinely believed that the whole-word method would work, it appears very likely that Dewey suffered under no such delusions. For one, the method had been conclusively debunked in the 1840s under Mann. In addition, Dewey used the method on children in his “experimental” school in Chicago, with results similar to those obtained in Boston generations earlier: children unable to read properly.

Dewey also left smoking-gun evidence of his desire to intentionally destroy the high literacy rates among children that existed throughout America at that time. In his controversial 1898 essay “The Primacy Education Fetich [sic],” he openly argued that schools should de-emphasize the teaching of reading, which he believed led to individualism.

In fact, he said children in the early grades were better off not receiving much instruction at all in the so-called “3 Rs”; reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, Dewey, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, thought young children mostly needed to be properly socialized to become functional members of the collective.

He knew his ideas would not go over well with parents, teachers, or taxpayers of the era.

“Change must come gradually,” Dewey wrote in that essay. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

So instead, he went to the Rockefeller dynasty and the elites.

Years later, Dewey disciples—a motley collection of socialists and racist eugenicists—would create “reading” primers based on the whole-word quackery. William Gray at the University of Chicago, where Dewey led the education faculty for years, would produce the “Dick and Jane” series. Meanwhile, Arthur Gates at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where Dewey went after Chicago, would produce the Macmillan Readers.

It took a while for them to catch on in America. But after World War II, with plenty of taxpayer cash to burn, school districts across the United States, many being influenced by Dewey and his minions, started buying up the books and imposing the whole-word method on millions of innocent students.

Literacy rates promptly collapsed.

By the 1950s, the crisis was so serious that the public was starting to ask questions. And in 1955, Rudolf Flesch published the explosive book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” blowing the lid off the quackery.

“The teaching of reading—all over the United States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks—is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense,” he explained, lambasting the whole-word method and the literacy crisis it produced.

The ensuing scandal caused many schools to restore traditional phonics instruction. But the Utopian advocates of reading quackery did not go away.

Less than 20 years after Flesch exposed them, legendary educator and reading expert Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld would expose them again in “The New Illiterates.” In the book, he systematically analyzed the most common reading primers then in use across the United States, highlighting the problems and showing the enormous damage being done to children.

Again, scandal ensued. And again, quackery advocates rebranded their schemes as “whole language” and offered minor alterations, then went right on handicapping American children by the millions.

Incredibly, some especially unhinged “educators” argued that teaching children to read properly was all part of a vast “right-wing” conspiracy.

Now, brain scans performed with new technology have actually shown the damage being done to the physical brains of children victimized by the quackery. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuro-Imaging Unit at Saclay in France, demonstrated the harm and explained that reading must be taught by systematically teaching children the correspondence between sounds and letters.

The education establishment pretended not to notice. And the absurdity continues.

Today, key elements of the “whole-word” method still haunt public schools across the United States, often under new terminology such as “balanced literacy” and “guided reading.” Under the national “Common Core” education standards imposed on the United States by former President Barack Obama, kindergarten children are even required to memorize “sight words.” This causes a whole-word reflex to develop that can produce lifelong reading disabilities, despite having a bit of phonics mixed in.

Perhaps more incredibly, even though the methods have been totally discredited since the 1840s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) claims children all over the world should still learn a “sight vocabulary.”

Consider: People who can’t read can’t readily educate themselves. They are much easier to control and manipulate, too. And perhaps that is the point.

With Mann, it’s entirely possible that this was all an innocent mistake. Certainly, that’s true of most teachers in the United States today as well who haven’t been trained to teach reading properly.

But the fact that this giant “mistake” continues to be supported by the education establishment to this day—and that it always seems to be socialists, communists, and collectivists pushing it—suggests that there is a much more nefarious agenda at work.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

As if the sexualization and radical politics were not enough cause for alarm, the latest data shows public schools are failing Illinois children academically, too — and big time! Indeed, the vast majority of high-school graduates are unprepared for basic college work.

According to a recent report by Chicago Public Media, almost two thirds of the new students enrolled in Chicago-area community colleges placed below college level on their placement exams. That means they must complete remedial education to proceed, even under the watered-down “college” standards that exist today.

Furthermore, even though the colleges only offer two-year degrees, just one in ten of those students in remedial classes — euphemistically dubbed “developmental education” — end up graduating within three years. By contrast, the figure is about one third among students not in remedial education.

One developmental English professor at a community college in Chicago, Tara Whitehair, was quoted revealing that many students lack even a “basic foundation” in “literacy.” Comparing that to the “foundation for a house,” Whitehair said it “takes time” to bring students up to that level.

In previous generations, graduating from 2nd or 3rd grade without strong literacy skills would have been unthinkable. Today, however, according to the government’s own literacy data, many high-school graduates would struggle to read their own diploma.

Other professors interviewed for the story confirmed the extent of the disaster. “When I ask them to go to a [reading] and say, ‘What is this text saying? Put this into your own words’ … they can’t,” Wright College English Professor Carrie Mocarski said. “They can’t comprehend the writing. … Generally we’re not talking about academic journals, we’re talking about newspaper articles.”

The reporter confirmed the dismal situation. “Students also haven’t learned to write academic essays,” reported Kate MgGee in an in-depth piece about “Starting College Behind.” “Many don’t know how to craft a thesis statement or cite research. They struggle with sentence structure, topic sentences, vocabulary and grammar.”

If these were 3^rd graders, or even perhaps 5^th graders, it might be understandable that they struggle with sentence structure, grammar, or vocabulary. Yet it completely boggles the mind to contemplate how anybody could graduate from junior high — much less high school — without being able to write a thesis statement or cite research.

The problems begin early, though. According to 2019 results from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as “America’s Report Card,” less than one third of American 8th-grade students are proficient in any core subject. That includes math and English. In 4^th grade, NAEP data show well over a third of children are “below basic,” which means they cannot read at all.

Despite spending an astonishing $17,000 per pupil annually, the 12^th highest in the nation, Illinois is slightly worse off than the atrocious national average when it comes to NAEP scores. But it is not the money that is the issue — some of the highest spending districts, such as Baltimore and Detroit, have among the lowest scores in the nation.

Other data confirms the fact that American children are getting dumber and dumber with each passing generation. The SAT, for instance, must be regularly re-centered to conceal the ongoing plunge in scores and educational levels.

According to recent ACT’s data, which also relies on standardized testing, just two out of five high-school graduates were ready for college work, with the numbers continuing to drop. Only about one in four graduating students had the “foundational work readiness skills needed for more than nine out of 10 jobs recently profiled in ACT’s JobPro database,” ACT researchers found.

Incredibly, instead of addressing the real problem — a fraudulent K-12 “education” that leaves students unprepared for anything except collecting welfare and contemplating “gender identity” — lobbyists are working to scale back or even eliminate remedial education completely. More tax-funded “financial aid” to the students, even when the overwhelmingly majority will never graduate, is also being advocated, along with more hand-holding by ever more “advisors.”

Others wring their hands and blame “poverty,” “systemic racism,” “oppression,” and all sorts of other real and imagined problems. And yet, Americans today are dumber than ever before, despite the nation and its people being richer and less racist than ever before. Data from the 1800s, for instance, reveals that Americans were far more literate than compared with today.

With government schools pumping out illiterate and innumerate graduates by the millions after bilking taxpayers for more than $200,000 per child over the span of 12 years, the question must be asked, “What are the schools actually doing?” The answer is simple: indoctrinating, sexualizing, and confusing the children on an unprecedented scale.

In any other industry, these sort of abysmal numbers would be prosecuted as fraud and extortion. But when it comes to government schools, the education establishment simply demands more money and more victims. This is absolutely outrageous. It should not be tolerated for another instant.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has issued its “Nation’s Report Card” on America’s schools and the data is clear. Private schools — which are mostly religious — outperform their public-school counterparts in science scores in almost every subcategory, including physical science, life science and earth science.

But, I thought religious schools were backwoods bulwarks of knuckle dragging science deniers?

After all, if you listen to the likes of Rob Miller, the superintendent of Bixby Public Schools in Bixby, Oklahoma, you’d never think it possible that religious schools could even teach science — much less teach it better.

“School choice,” he said (and by inference he implicates all private religious schools), is little more than a ruse to empower theocratic parents, “who want to use the Bible as [a] biology text.” According to Mr. Miller and his cabal of establishment elites, education will be irrevocably damaged if we — God forbid — don’t forbid God in the classroom.

Our “Nation’s Report Card,” however, appears to disagree.

In fact, rather than confirm Mr. Miller’s bias, the actual science of the matter seems to shine light on, dare we say, Mr. Miller’s bias.

When the test results are in, it appears it is conservatives who are actually the ones who are pro-science and not their detractors.

This should not surprise you.

After all, it is conservatives who believe in reason, rationality, and the reality of the tangible, the physical and the material. Today’s progressives argue for the opposite. They deny science in favor of the social. They ignore the empirical evidence of physics, physiology and genetics. They disregard objective data while they celebrate “feelings” over facts. They disparage truth while claiming it is true that nothing is true.

It is conservatives who know there is a right answer and they pursue it to its logical end. They are willing to constrain themselves to live within the laws of nature and nature’s God. They know morality is tethered to an immutable “measuring rod outside of those things being measured” (C.S. Lewis). Progressives, on the other hand, know nothing can be known. For them, there is no “right” answer and that’s the only right answer. Their law is that there is no law. Everything is grounded in emotional constructs and driven by power, politics and individual passions. Morality is an illusion and to disagree with them is, well, immoral.

It is conservatives who are pro-women because they acknowledge the biological fact of the female. They know that women are real. Progressives are misogynists. To them, a female is little more than a leprechaun or unicorn; a fabrication and fantasy, of any dysphoric male who wants to play dress-up and make-believe.

Conservatives defend the rights of women. They believe in the science of x and y chromosomes. Accordingly, they argue that their mothers and daughters, sisters, wives and girlfriends, have the right to their own bathrooms, showers, scholarships and sports. Progressives deny women such rights because they deny science and they deny that anything is right.

Conservatives believe human life is an empirical fact and, therefore, they fight against killing our youngest children. Progressives, on the other hand, actually claim that, in spite of moving legs, arms, fingers and toes, that such a baby is not human.

Conservatives look at the lessons of history and learn from them. Progressives ignore the lessons of history and mock them.

Conservatives warn of the failures of socialist regimes. Progressives shrug at over 100 million dead and laud socialism as a moral good.

At every turn, we see more and more evidence that it is conservatives, and not progressives, who care about evidence. Conservatives follow the truth. Conservatives don’t deconstruct it. Conservatives adjust their lives to reality. Conservatives don’t ignore it.

Time and again, the daily news proves it: Conservatives are much more interested in logical debate and an open exchange of ideas. Conservatives welcome a good argument while progressives want to silence the dissenting voice.

Religious conservatives understand the common sense of Chesterton: “The object of opening the mind, is to close it on something solid” and “he who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” Progressive secularists recoil against such common sense because, apparently, it makes too much sense.

Conservatives understand that, in the end, feelings don’t matter; facts do. Progressives simply respond by crying, “You hurt my feelings!”

Endnote: It is becoming clearer every day that progressive elites are just as religious as those they criticize for being too religious. In the end, both the left and the right believe in God. The conservative believes in the one he sees in the Bible. The progressive believes in the one he sees in the mirror. One worships the Creator God. The other worships the god he’s created. One is humble and admits he looks through a glass darkly, yet thinks clearly. The other can’t think his way out of a paper bag and is totally blind. One’s mind is redeemed; the other’s is deluded. One follows science because of his reverence for God. The other denies science because he thinks he is god.

Here’s the basic question: Which one would you rather have teaching your sons and daughters about science?

Dr. Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is a columnist for The Washington Times and author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).

This article was originally published at WashingtonTimes.com.

About two thirds of eighth graders in American government schools do not even rank as “proficient” in reading or math, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress. In some districts, less than eight out of 100 students were proficient in either subject.

The results were hardly surprising to anyone who monitors the dismal state of what the government euphemistically refers to as “public education.” Indeed, the fact that even a third of American victims of government “schools” can be considered “proficient” in reading or math is more of a surprise. But even that minority may be attributable to the dumbed-down metrics used.

Breaking the numbers down, the NAEP, more commonly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” revealed that barely one third of eighth-grade students in 2017 America scored “proficient” or above in reading. Much of that failure has to do with the teaching of “sight words” in government-schools across America, a scheme that has been exposed as quackery since it was first tried over 150 years ago.

In mathematics, the numbers are even worse. The 2017 results showed that fully 67 percent of eight-grade students in America are not “proficient” in math. By the time students hit 12th grade, the situation is even more alarming. According to the NAEP, just one in four American high-school seniors was proficient in math last year.

The NAEP is a test administered by the feds every two years to what they describe as a “nationally representative sample” of students across the country. Around 150,000 students at each tested grade level take the test. Unlike other federally controlled testing schemes, the NAEP is not considered “high-stakes,” because poor results do not negatively affect teachers, students, or schools. But they nevertheless reveal some important facts.

“The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news,” explained George Mason University Professor Walter Williams, a longtime critic of the abysmal failure of public “education” in America. “Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.”

Professor Williams, who highlighted the even more disastrous proficiency rates among black students, noted that the problem goes even deeper. “It’s grossly dishonest for the education establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented graduation rates when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not represent academic achievement,” he wrote. “At best, they certify attendance.”

That means universities are perpetrating a fraud of massive proportions by admitting all these illiterates into higher “education.” But when the obvious goal of government-controlled schools and colleges is to prepare social-justice warriors and anti-American revolutionaries — all at taxpayer expense — it should be obvious why such elaborate frauds would be used to keep Americans in the dark.

As The Newman Report and FreedomProject Media have documented extensively, the victims of government schools will be highly proficient in believing in global-warming alarmism, gender ideology, LGBT propaganda, globalism, humanism, socialism, and more. But as the latest NAEP results show, the schools are utterly failing to teach even the basics — reading, writing, and math — that would allow students to educate themselves. That is 100 percent deliberate.

Parents, you have been warned.

This article was originally published by FreedomProject.com