Jillian Schneider | December 26, 2024
(The Lion) — After four years full of presidential blunders, America’s public education system is in worse shape than ever before.
Under Joe Biden, test scores reached record lows, spending record highs and students and families have faced a slew of policy blunders from PreK to college.
Undermining Title IX
Arguably Biden’s worst decision regarding education – if not the worst of his entire presidency – was attempting to redefine Title IX to include transgender students.
Title IX, passed in 1972, forbade sex-based discrimination to help give women equal opportunities in higher education. But in April 2024, Biden’s education department tried to reinterpret Title IX to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
In other words, schools must take opportunities away from young girls and give them to gender-confused boys.
Naturally, this complete undermining of civil rights didn’t go over well.
Courts already have ruled against Biden’s version of Title IX in 26 states. Likewise, over half of states’ leadership – and numerous female athletes – have spoken out against the change, and many filed legal complaints as well.
“We are asking for the bare minimum we deserve as women. We deserve safety, we deserve privacy, we deserve equal opportunity, and we deserve respect, and they are trying to take that away,” women’s advocate and former college athlete Riley Gaines told Fox and Friends. “I can’t even put into words the damage this will do.”
Parents as domestic terrorists
Another of the Biden administration’s notable affronts was calling parents “domestic terrorists” in a memo coordinated with the Department of Justice and the National School Boards Association.
Their crime? Protesting at school boards over a variety of issues ranging from mask mandates to pornographic books.
Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit group of concerned mothers, even wound up on a “hate map” compiled by the radical left Southern Poverty Law Center alongside groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
It was later revealed that members of the Biden administration had met with the SPLC.
“It is shocking to see in writing the evidence that innocent parents were harassed and targeted by their own federal government for exercising their right to free speech and for speaking out during the COVID school shutdowns,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Liberty Justice told The Daily Signal in January.
“We have known for some time the Biden administration has made it their mission to attack parents who publicly advocate for their children’s education,” she added. “Attending public school board meetings and voicing concerns about our children’s education should not put a target on our backs to be silenced by the federal government.”
School violence skyrockets
Though such stories don’t usually make national headlines, incidents of student violence have risen dramatically during Biden’s tenure.
The problem traces back to the Obama years, when the then-president threatened school districts with federal investigations if their data showed a “disparate impact” – higher rates of discipline for students of certain races.
The Trump administration repealed the policy in 2018, only to have the Biden administration reinstate it. Until then, however, the Department of Education says 2013 to 2018 saw numerous negative outcomes for students, including a 42% increase in sexual violence.
Overall, 2009-20 exhibited an increase in student racial/ethnic tensions and “widespread disorder in classrooms.” The same data found rates of cyberbullying had doubled, as had students verbally and nonverbally abusing teachers.
Anecdotally, schools are riddled with violence, putting teachers and other students in harm’s way.
For example, one 74-year-old teacher from Indiana suffered a gruesome black eye and other head injuries when a large male student attacked him. Another educator from Tennessee was pepper-sprayed for taking away a student’s phone, and a third teacher in Ohio was assaulted so violently she required “major brain surgery.”
Other districts have seen violence so pernicious that parents tried to oust the superintendent, students organized walkouts, and school administrators even tried to call in the National Guard.
North Carolina reported an 18% increase in crime and violence during the 2022-23 school year. And in September, Milwaukee police revealed they visited public schools over 3,100 times last year – an average of nearly 20 calls per school day.
The commonsense nonprofit Parents Defending Education blames Democrats’ enabling violent behavior through “restorative justice,” an experimental practice that prioritizes rehabilitation and reconciliation over disciplinary action.
“We need to move away from prioritizing the perpetrator of the bad behavior over the classrooms full of kids who are ready to learn,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at PDE, previously told The Lion. “Teachers feel unsupported, and too many students are trapped in chronically disruptive classrooms.”
All this happened as funding for education continued to climb across the board. When Biden took office, the national average for per-public school student expenditures was about $15,633. As of July 2024, the estimate rose 10.5% to $17,280 per pupil.
Meanwhile, the average cost of an American private school is just $12,600, meaning parents and taxpayers spend more funding the public school system than if taxes paid for children to attend private schools.
Higher education
But Biden’s blunders haven’t only been in K-12 education.
His administration has committed numerous errors, including an unconstitutional attempt to erase student loans and an epic meltdown of the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) system.
More insidious was the administration’s apathy toward violent antisemitism on college campuses following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel.
Biden also persecuted Grand Canyon University, a hugely popular Christian institution in Arizona, despite no justification.
This article was made available to EdNews Virginia via The Lion, a publication of the Herzog Foundation.