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It Is Time to Exit Illinois Public Schools: A Businessman’s Perspective

Business leaders are tasked with developing and executing strategies that lead to desired results, namely, to maximize shareholder value in a manner that is honest, moral, and upright. Successful businesses measure their performance in myriad ways and use these results to implement changes, if needed, to achieve desired results. The ethos of the business world is defined by accurate measurement of results, high performance and achievement, continuous improvement, and maintaining a competitive edge. This high-performance orientation in American businesses has resulted in the U.S. being the largest, most successful economy in the world. Why is this not the case for the Illinois public school system?

The facts available to measure the performance of Illinois public schools reveal alarming and ongoing under-performance.  The 2021 academic proficiency results are in, and Illinois public schools have gone from bad to worse. More important, the Illinois public school system knows the proficiency scores across the state but does nothing to address the root causes of poor performance. This failure constitutes performance-arrogance–not performance-orientation–which defies logic. Only in the public school system can one find such poor results on the key metrics of performance without ever seeing meaningful efforts to improve.

Statewide average proficiency scores at the 11th grade level for 2021 are shown below. Proficiency, in this case, means that a student scored at either “proficient” or “above proficient” based on standardized test scores.

On a statewide average basis, Illinois public school students are not even at the 50th percentile of proficiency in the three subject areas tested. It seems statistically impossible to be this bad.

In the business world, if only 1 percent of a workforce were proficient at their job, that business would be wiped out by competitors who operated more effectively. Competition in business leads to high performance. Illinois’ public school system has few competitors and, therefore, little pressure to perform. As a result, it continues to underperform, producing students who are not academically ready to compete in the real world.

Unbelievably, the graduation rate for Illinois public schools in 2021 was 87 percent. A system that cannot come close to even average proficiency levels in three core subjects, graduates almost all those same students! In business we say that “facts are friendly and made-up facts are friendlier.”

Made-up facts give the appearance of performance when in fact they are misleading and should be ignored if improvement is desired. The graduation rate in Illinois public schools is a doozy of a made-up fact. The proficiency scores prove students are not performing at grade-level, so it is clear that the graduation rate is a result of “social-promotion,” where schools push students to the next level regardless of their mastery of material.

The days of admitting and addressing failure are gone in our public school system.

In addition to very poor academic performance, curricula are woke, Marxist, sexualized, and anti-American. The dumbing down of curricula continues as Common Core, the 1619 Project, inappropriate sexual education, and critical race theory (CRT) rule the day.

Grammar, classic literature, true American history, and civics are just some of the important topics removed from public schools today. Our schools have become leftist indoctrination centers where children are inculcated with a worldview antithetical to their parents’ worldview and a biblical worldview.

The Illinois public school system is broken and beyond repair. Any business that consistently demonstrated results as poor as Illinois public schools do would see a purging of leadership, management, and employees. Expecting improved results from a broken system is a fool’s game, but in Illinois it’s the only game in town. The status quo is maintained by entrenched left-wing politicians and unions scratching each other’s backs; bloated education bureaucracies taking huge amounts of money away from actual education; and shocking educator compensation/benefits schemes no one in business can afford or would tolerate for such poor performance.

Businesses seek people with the ability to collaborate, think critically, communicate effectively, and demonstrate creative problem-solving. Exceptional performers in business not only have a well-trained mind, but they also possess strong moral character, an ability to self-govern, and compassion. People like this more often emerge from home education programs and authentic biblically based private schools.

The public school system also produces some highly capable people who are able to overcome some of the huge systemic problems endemic to public schools–people who are able to thrive in a highly competitive global economy. But American businesses no longer count on the public education system to do its job. Instead, we now see businesses in the U.S. hiring people from other countries with excellent education systems to do jobs requiring high skill.

The future of America and the businesses so vital to our country are not going to be able to depend on an army of woke, Marxist-leaning, poorly educated people to achieve great ends. We need godly, well-educated, wise people who love liberty and this country. This is not what Illinois public schools are producing. Tragically, government schools don’t even strive to produce these kinds of students. It is time to exit Illinois public schools and pursue a growing number of vastly better options.





Ten Reasons to Remove your Children from Public Schools

An assault has occurred on parental rights within the public school system. Parents have voiced their concerns across the nation about everything from perverted curriculum to forced masking. If any good came from the pandemic, it is that parents have seen what public schools are doing behind closed doors. This revelation should lead parents to remove their children from the grip of the government-run education system.

Here are my top ten reasons to leave public schools:

The Marxist Agenda:

Many parents and grandparents were in school during the Cold War, or just following it, and view Communism as the enemy. However, universities hid a dark secret: Marxist philosophers, economists, and educators were devoted to continuing to teach the theory to the next generation. As the Marxist agenda became more elevated on college campuses in the 1980s and 90s, we were unconcerned. After all, this action only involved a handful of academic elites, right? Wrong. Today the consequences of ignoring the indoctrination of university students are readily apparent in our public schools. Those university elites educated the current teachers, curriculum developers, and administrators that now teach in your child’s school. The ideas of hatred towards capitalism, American exceptionalism, and devotion to humanism have slowly infiltrated public schools, starting with high schools and are moving towards younger students. Now, even kindergarten classes are taught Marxist ideologies.

Critical Race Theory:

CRT is in direct relation to the Marxist theory. As a result, CRT, which started in universities, is now spreading like wildfire across public school systems. Schools across the nation are telling teachers to divide their students by race. Instead of finding common ground and cooperative ways of interaction, students are divided and labeled according to race and ethnicity.

LGBT Agenda:

The LGBT lobby and organizations have forced their agenda into every facet of life, including schools. Girls’ sports are being decimated by male athletes masquerading as females, and neither girls nor boys can assume privacy in their respective bathrooms or locker rooms. Teachers are asking students to “choose” their sexuality and pronoun identifiers. Children are allowed to change their name and gender on school records without parental permission. Schools across the country are forming clubs like the Gay-Straight Alliance, yet denying official status to Bible clubs. The agenda has taken over the public schools to such a degree that parents cannot question the schools’ policies. (Illinois lawmakers passed legislation in 2019 to mandate the teaching of LGBT history in classrooms K-12th grade.)

Explicit Sexual Education:

The LGBT agenda has given birth to explicit sex education programs. In previous generations, kindergarteners were taught about proper touch and “stranger danger.” Now, school programs are teaching about masturbation and sodomy, and even grooming children for pedophilia. The new, approved curriculum in Illinois is entirely lewd. This curriculum includes cartoon-drawn images of acts of hetero and homosexual acts. Children are encouraged to participate in masturbation. Although the Department of Education claims parents can opt-out of the classes, parents will not be able to stop their children’s classmates from sharing the curriculum’s text and pornographic images. (Illinois lawmakers passed legislation earlier this year to require all public schools—including charter schools—to align teaching in grades K-5 on “personal health and safety” with “National Sex Education Standards.)”

Declining Academics:

It should not come as a surprise that academics are declining. As educators push their agendas, there is little time to teach mathematics or reading. In the last year, Illinois raised funding per student to $14,492, one of the highest per-student budgets in the nation. Yet, Illinois students are not succeeding academically. In Illinois and across the country, students are falling behind. The US ranks 38th in the world in math and, according to a recent study by Gallup, deficiencies in reading cost trillions of dollars. Many business owners state that they cannot find entry-level employees with basic skills such as money counting, phone etiquette, or even basic reading abilities. Declining academic achievement is devastating our children and our economy. (Click HERE to view the proficiency scores of the largest school districts in Illinois.)

Lack of Transparency:

The local school board and the state have actively limited transparency. They often refuse to show how funding is being distributed and deny parental involvement in the decision-making process. In January of 2021, the Williamson County Circuit Court ordered the Illinois school board of Herrin District #4 to repay $2.7 million in misused tax funds. The school was taken to court by one taxpayer who noted the misappropriations. Parents could prevent fraud and misappropriations if school boards would issue regular reports on the distribution of funds. Schools also lack transparency regarding the curricula they choose. A group of Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin are circulating a bill requiring schools and teachers to publish a list of materials and all curricula utilized by the school. If approved, schools failing to publish these lists will incur a $15,000 penalty. Transparency of materials and texts is an excellent idea; however, the Department of Education and teacher unions are fighting this bill and any attempt to require transparency.

Impediment of Parental Involvement and Rights:

The governmental system does not respect parents or their rights. During the pandemic, parents discovered the nature of curricula and were outraged at the indoctrination occurring in schools. As a result, parents and grandparents are attending school board meetings in large numbers. Parents have expressed concerns ranging from requests to remove CRT and Marxist curricula to concerns about forced masking. These parents are vocal but have been peaceful, with a few rare exceptions. Even though parents have a right to voice concerns about their children’s education, the local boards and teachers have been defiant. Often school boards have refused to answer questions. Have these board members forgotten that they are elected officials? Regardless, parents have been vilified, doxxed, and faced cancel culture for simply wanting to protect their children. Recent Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe (D), stated, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This statement is a shared opinion held by teachers, unions, and board members across the nation.

Authorization of Greater Federal Control:

A memo from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) was sent to the Biden administration claiming that parents attending school board meetings were a threat to teachers and board members. As a result, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to investigate parents attending school board meetings as domestic terrorists. The federal government’s defamation of parents’ character is just the beginning of bringing the federal government into a more significant role in education. If the elimination of parental control in education occurs, then the states and the federal government can indoctrinate children without interference. Federalization can occur not only through the removal of parental influence, but also through financial control. Politicians such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) have long called for the federalization of funding. Complete federalization creates an oversight nightmare. This type of system would likely eliminate all local control within the schools.

Removal of God and Country:

The landmark decision of Engel v. Vitale (1962) removed school-mandated prayer from the classroom. It did not end there. Students have had a constant fight to keep student-led, voluntary prayer and Christian clubs in schools. However, we should be clear that the Left intends this ban to only include prayer to the God of the Bible. At the beginning of the school year, parents in California filed suit after the California State Board of Education unanimously approved a curriculum that included chanting to Aztec gods. These are the same false gods that the people of ancient Mesoamerica worshipped through the practice of human sacrifice. Schools have also removed anything that might resemble patriotism. One teacher, who has now been dismissed, removed the American flag and replaced it with the gay pride flag. Although this teacher was fired, many teachers across the nation are denouncing both God and our country in their classrooms.

Your Children Deserve Better:

The best reason to remove your children from the failing public school system is that they deserve better. The current system is rooted in hatred and indoctrination. Twenty years ago, Christian parents sent their children into the public system to be young evangelists. Today any possibility of that is squelched before the child even leaves the primary grades. Before they reach middle school, they will have already seen lewd images and been given ample opportunity to denounce all values their parents instill. Protecting our children means finding alternatives to public school that will support parental rights and values. We must develop our own systems that uphold Christian values. Whether it is home education, private schools, or church co-ops, now is the time to determine what option works best for your family and remove your children from the tyranny of government-run schools.





Rise of ‘Fed Ed’ Accelerated Demise of Real Education

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.




Special IFI Forum on Education Choice

A recent headline of a Chicago Sun-Times article alarmingly reports that a Chicago Public School watchdog is fielding 3 complaints of sexual misconduct per school day. This comes on the heels of a 2018 Chicago Tribune report that exposed Chicago public schools of having more than 520 sexual assault cases all across the city over the past decade.

According to the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), only 38 percent of Illinois public school students meet proficiency expectations in English Language Arts, only 32 percent of students meet proficiency expectations in math. This despite the fact that the NEA reports that taxpayers pay $16,925 per student per year in Illinois. For that kind of investment, the vast majority of students should not only be meeting proficiency expectations but exceeding them.

In addition, we now have the serious problem of gender-confused boys demanding unrestricted access to girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, and school boards and administrators affirming this nonsense. We also have a new state mandate that requires all students in K-12 public schools be taught, in a positive manner, about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and opposite-sex impersonators; as well as, textbooks purchased must include discussions of the those purported “roles and contributions.”

And let’s not forget that we have a state mandate in favor of highly objectionable sex ed material for the impressionable minds of government school children in 6th through 12th grade.

As if that isn’t enough, government schools are using instructional time to promote left-wing political views on climate change; open borders and global citizenship; Islamic studies and prayers to the god of Islam; Howard Zinn’s warped view of America’s Founding Fathers; and the pernicious ideology of “intersectionality” that is designed to divide and pit Americans against each other.

Christian parents and grandparents must seriously consider the great options they have for their students, and make the move away from government schools. The prevalence of perversion, subversion, and indoctrination are becoming more pronounced, and in order to protect the hearts and minds of our children, it is wise to consider other options.

We invite you to join us on Saturday, April 25th, to hear from a great line up of experts as we explore what we need to do to begin to rebuild the culture through education. The event is free and open to the public. Click HERE for a flyer for this event.

2020 IFI Education Forum

WHEN: Saturday, April 25th
WHERE: Church of Christian Liberty
  502 Euclid Avenue
Arlington Heights, IL  60004
TIME: 9:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Our tentative schedule includes:

9:30-10:15        Rescuing Our Children from Government Schools (Alex Newman, The Liberty Sentinel)

10:15-11:00       Homeschooling: What in the World is Going On? (Dr. Brian Ray, NHERI)

11:00-11:30       Home Education is Possible (Kirk Smith, Illinois Christian Home Educators)

11:30-Noon       The Benefits of Christian Schooling (Rev. Calvin Lindstrom, Christian Liberty Academy)

Noon-12:15        The State of Education Choice in Illinois (Lennie Jarret, Heartland Institute

12:15-1:00         Q&A Session


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