Sacrificing Our Children at the Altar of Modern K-12 Public Education

Should publicly-funded K-12 education continue to exist? At first blush, it might seem a radical question to even ask. But when public schools are failing in their essential purposes, we need to explore whether to cease funding them. From their inception, public schools had at least two essential purposes: to train students in those values essential to participating in society and, as the saying goes, teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. This Article will highlight the ways in which public schools are failing to achieve these two basic goals. First, public schools are failing academically. Scores on standardized tests continue to decline as students increasingly graduate unable to read at grade level. The 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress results reveal the steepest declines in reading and math scores since the tests began fifty-five years ago. In Chicago, zero students at fifty-five public schools passed standard math or reading tests. In the face of these shocking statistics, many call simultaneously for increased funding for public schools and limits or bans on school choice even though the charter schools, private schools, and home schools generally are producing students who are academically more successful than their public school counterparts. Second, public schools fail to train students in the values essential to participating in society. The Bible is clear that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom and that the knowledge of God leads to understanding. Thus, schools that fail to educate based on those values pursue, as Proverbs 1:7 indicates, a foolish path. Unfortunately, the Establishment Clause jurisprudence over the past eighty years increasingly prompted schools to remove biblical values from classroom instruction. These curriculum choices, in turn, have directly undermined parental authority to direct the education of their children. In early American law, public educators were treated as agents of the parents, exercising only the authority delegated to the teachers. Parents, who have the God-given right and obligation to raise and educate their children, could delegate some responsibility over education to schools. But when a conflict arose between what the schools desired to teach and what the parents believed was proper, the parental right prevailed. Today, some courts operate on the exact opposite premise: parental authority ceases once parents decide to send their children to public schools. Once students are in the classroom, the schools decide what values to instill, even in the presence of parental objection. The Article concludes by asserting that there is no legitimate basis for continued public funding of K-12 education given the poor academic outcomes at public schools and the overt hostility of public schools to biblical values and the parents who seek to instill those values.