In light of the National Assessment of Educational Progress' (NAEP) 2024 Report Card, which revealed one-third of eighth graders and 40% of fourth graders failed to meet reading benchmarks, the nation's leading women's organization dedicated to policies that enhance people's freedom, opportunities, and well-being wants to slash unnecessary oversight in education.
Neeraja Deshpande of the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) says her report, "Give Teachers a Break," gets into why conservatives should not necessarily look upon teachers as their enemies.
"Very often in conservative circles, we think of teachers as being the ones who are pushing down woke ideology, or they're bad at teaching because the test scores are going down," the policy analyst poses.
The reality, she says, is teachers are often victims of bureaucracy themselves.
"There's so much government overreach in schools," Deshpande asserts. "It comes federally, it comes from the state, it comes from localities, it comes from districts, it comes from individual schools themselves. Teachers are just left behind, sort of cycled by that bureaucracy and are unable to teach what they should be able to teach."
Amidst these bad policies, Deshpande says teachers have been unable to discipline kids in any meaningful way. That means disruptive kids are allowed to disrupt class; they drag down the behavior of other students, which demoralizes teachers and has driven many out of the profession.
The policy analyst credits the Obama administration for starting the production of this "red tape" that has tied teachers' hands. His Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleagues letter that outlined a new "disparate impact" standard that would see "any racial disparities in discipline numbers" and would automatically "assume those disparities arose from discrimination."
Deshpande says it began as a political push in the name of non-discrimination, but schools have "just descended into chaos" ever since.
President Trump has undone many of those policies. In 2018, he rescinded that Obama-era guidance after several reports found that it may have contributed to unsafe school environments by discouraging disciplinary actions.
Last month, he issued updated guidance against a Biden-era letter that "effectively reinstated the practice of weaponizing Title VI to promote an approach to school discipline based on discriminatory equity ideology."
Deshpande's report promotes other solutions to various problems.
One of them is simply minimizing state control, "just getting the state out of that business beyond a reasonable extent."
Deshpande says some of these policies can be dealt with on a state level, some of them on a federal level, and some on a district level. It just depends from school to school and from policy to policy.
But the red tape must be cut to "unleash the potential of America's great teachers."
