More and more parents want to rescue their children from poor academics and left-wing dogma in public school classrooms, and the time has come for churches to play a role in helping them do that, says a public education watchdog.
“You’re literally playing Russian roulette with your children,” Alex Newman, executive director of Public School Exit, warned the American Family Radio audience in a March 10 interview.
On the topic of classroom academics, Newman did not hold back about the state of public education in the U.S. After living in eight countries growing up, where he sat in classrooms in every one, Newman said American parents would be shocked to learn that even Third World students are learning to read and write, and do basic math, sooner and better than American students.
In the U.S. in particular, he told radio host Sandy Rios, less than a third of students score high enough to be graded as “proficient” in basic subjects.
The left-wing Huffington Post cited similar statistics in a 2019 story: 34% of fourth graders, and 35% of eight graders, scored proficient in reading.
Rios, responding to those statistics, said she has spoken to college professors who are alarmed incoming freshmen struggle in basic subjects.
“The worst part, and this is the part that people struggle to get over,” Newman said, “is this was deliberate.”
That is because left-wing activists have used public education not only to indoctrinate students but to create a dumbed-down population. One example of that success, he said, is that 90% of students who were raised in a church-going family will leave their faith after sitting through weeks and months and years of public school education.
“They’re literally turning our children against God, against their family, and against their country,” he warned, rattling off topics such as transgenderism, social justice, and critical race theory being taught.
On the issue of parents pulling their students from public schools, Newman suggested parents look closer at home schooling, which he described as the “gold standard” for challenging academics, and for preparing children for the world.
Newman also advised the radio audience that private schools remain another option, and he said more churches should be working together to form private schools. If that effort is not possible, he said, then churches should assist parents in their own congregations with tuition.
Public School Exit is currently working with churches and their pastors to not only create a “mass exodus” from public schools but to help parents finally realize today’s public schools are not the same as their own childhood.
Parents do have legitimate concerns about how to home school their children, or how to afford private school tuition, Newman concluded, but every Christian parent should decide, for good, to leave public education behind because doing so is saving their children.