Education in Peril
One of the biggest failures of the duopoly in our country is how Republicans and Democrats have mishandled education. Seldom do we hear of any good news anymore in American education. Consider: in May, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that almost half of public education employees who left the profession this year resigned, even as we continue to experience a major teacher shortage in the nation. Teacher shortages force class sizes to become larger, making it harder for students to get the one-on-one attention they need. In an effort to bring in more teachers, states have actually had to lower the standards for becoming a certified teacher. And what of the students? In June, federal testing revealed that math and reading scores among American 13-year-olds fell to the lowest level in decades, with economically disadvantaged students showing the steepest drops. Bringing in underqualified teachers to teach these students hardly sounds like a plan for improvement, but such is the lose-lose state of education in our nation, where, but we're forced to either deal with a shortage, or compel people to teach who aren't adequately prepared to teach in the first place, to address the shortage.
While it might be easy to blame the state of American education on the recent pandemic, a teacher shortage was already reported as early as 2018, and academic performance in the United States had been lagging well before the pandemic ever started, with math skills, in particular, remaining stagnant for decades. American students now perform below the global average, per the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
So, why are so many educators frustrated and leaving the profession? Frequent reasons given by the teachers include low pay, limited autonomy, and the stresses of dealing with our harsh political environment. And how does the duopoly respond to these concerns? According to surveys conducted by Education Next, when given information on teacher salaries, fewer than half of Republicans supported raising them. As for autonomy, Democrats have long sought to control education from the federal level, leaving states, teachers, and parents with limited options to determine what children are taught.
By contrast, The American Solidarity Party educational platform emphasizes making teaching a well-paying occupation, calls for the responsibility of education to reside primarily with the family, believes families should have the autonomy to decide whether their children should receive education at home, public, OR private schools, and seeks to give teachers freedom to design curriculum within parameters established by localized authorities.
As someone who has over a decade of experience in the educational field— I was a substitute teacher and paraprofessional in several Missouri school districts from 2012-2018, a tutor for the Ozarks Literacy Council in 2021, and currently have a child in Missouri's Parents as Teachers program — I understand the frustration experienced by many of today's teachers. Few occupations are as stressful as teaching, yet the duopoly shows no signs of meeting the primary concerns of teachers, who are now voting in record numbers with their feet (and, in the case of this author, a vote for The American Solidarity Party).