Winning School Board Elections With an Anti-Wokeness Platform

Liv Finne, a former adjunct scholar now serving as Director of the Center for Education at Washington Policy Center, has been analyzing education policy for the past 13 years. Her research suggests the unmistakable decline in the literacy of America's students from fourth to twelfth grade due to lower expectations and the shift in focus from academic excellence in mathematics, science, reading, and history toward the implementation of woke Progressivism and social justice constructs like critical race theory (CRT). Government data for 2019 shows the average fourth grader has a 41 percent proficiency level in mathematics. By the eighth grade, the proficiency level drops to 34 percent. By the twelfth grade, America's students have an average math proficiency level of only 24 percent. In reading, fourth graders have an average proficiency rate of 35 percent. By eighth grade, the proficiency level drops to 34 percent, and by the twelfth grade, America's average student shows only a slight proficiency improvement to 37 percent. In writing, the proficiency levels are 28 percent in fourth grade with eighth and twelfth graders sharing a score of 27 percent. America's students fare worse in science, with fourth-graders having only a 36 percent proficiency rate and eighth-graders dropping to 35 percent. Twelfth-graders have only a 22 rate of proficiency in science. The worst scores come in history, with fourth-graders starting out with only 20 percent proficiency and dropping to 15 percent by the eighth grade. By grade 12, America's students have a paltry 12 percent proficiency level in history. Rather than develop curriculum that provides students with the qualifications needed to graduate high school, Finne says the education system has opted to lower the bar of academic standards. This new push by the school system to abandon efforts of academic achievement and shift toward woke social constructs like CRT is an effort to hide the fact that they have failed in their jobs to educate our children. "The whole idea is that if the community knew that their schools are not educating their children to basic levels they would rise up," Finne said. And now they are notes Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups. The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, are incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society.