Editor’s note: During the next few months, Carrie McKean is writing for CT a series about education, exploring nationwide challenges and trends that affect all of us through the lens of what she sees happening in her own community in Midland, Texas. Coming up first, after this intro: a frank and honest look at how untested, unproven, and ubiquitous technology platforms in the classroom have rapidly transformed education. As the series gets underway, Carrie invites you to join the conversation: Write to her at education@christianitytoday.com and share what you see in your communities, both glimmers of hope and causes for concern. —Marvin Olasky
Last month, on opening weekend at a new Bass Pro Shops store about 15 minutes from my home, a group of men started fighting, reportedly because one of them had taken too long in the bathroom. Viral videos that spread in the aftermath show at least five or six men throwing punches and pushing each other down underneath the mounted heads of bison and bears and other wild beasts.
In the videos, some bystanders scurry to get out of the brawlers’ way. Others pause to watch, pulling out their phones to film. One woman caught on camera enters the fray, screaming at the—as she calls them—“grown-ass men acting like idiots.”
“And you wonder why our schools are falling apart,” she shouts as they roll on the ground in front of her. “Y’all are the example that [we’re] setting.”
The schools are falling apart.
She says it as a statement of fact, and I can’t find anyone disputing her—not in the video and not in the commentary afterward and not among a single person I’ve talked to about the state of education, especially in public schools, over the last few years. If anything, our collective sense of alarm is rapidly snowballing. More and more of us feel the same frantic energy she embodies: Something is deeply wrong. The house is burning, the ship is sinking, the walls are crumbling—and our children and their futures are trapped inside.
The vibes match with the data. American eighth-graders’ reading skills have now reached a 30-year low. Harvard has a remedial math class. Financial Times is asking, “Have humans passed peak brain power?” and publishing startingly precipitous charts to illustrate their bleak answer.
Indeed, the only thing remarkable about the shouting woman’s commentary is that this acute ache she names, this fervent concern for schools and the children within them, is what’s at the top of her mind as she watches grown men exchange blows. But I don’t find it surprising. I feel the same anxious energy lurking just under the surface of almost every social interaction I have these days. Education is one of the hubs of our civic wagon wheel, the center point from which our collective life follows and to which all our social problems return. Her visceral reaction, both furious and desperate for help, names the pain we all live with: Where are the grownups who will act like adults and make things right by the kids instead of giving up, watching, or—worst of all—contributing to the destruction?
Something is wrong with education in America today. Like a piece of glass pierced by a bullet, its fracturing sends ripples of anxiety and concern in every direction and into every space, even showing up in the midst of a brawl at the shiny new Bass Pro Shops in Odessa, Texas—where it demonstrates, once again, that no amount of economic development, consumer distraction, or shiny new stuff can plaster over our deepest problems. My 13-year-old puts it a little differently, in the vernacular of the day: “Our generation is cooked.”
We may all agree that something is wrong with education in America today, especially in our large and unwieldy public school systems which serve around 75 percent of American children, but diagnosing the origins isn’t as simple as laying things out on a linear graph. There’s not just one point when everything started to go wrong. It’s hard to find a root cause and even harder to find effective solutions. Like broken glass, the problems in our education system look like a complex fracture pattern, where each point of stress is both an effect of past pressure and a cause of future shattering.
Are the problems in our schools caused by inadequate school funding or lackluster teacher training or overcrowding or standardized testing? Are they caused by forgetting phonics or giving everyone a trophy? Are they caused by poor curriculum or wokeness or behavioral problems or fractured families or overused technology or ineffective instructional methods or too little homework or too much homework or artificial intelligence or not enough recess or lowered academic standards or culture wars or social-emotional learning or lack of discipline or cell phones? The answer is yes.
Can we solve our schools’ problems by posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom? By restoring prayer in schools? Is there any path back to the good ol’ days of reading, writing, and arithmetic that properly prepares our children for a future we cannot fathom? Some of us select homeschools, microschools, charter schools, or private schools. These can all be excellent choices, yet still, as followers of Jesus who are commanded to have concern for the most vulnerable, we must reckon with a question: If that is our choice, what do we owe the children whose families can’t (or just don’t) find viable alternatives to crumbling public schools? Do we give up on them?
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School has always been important to me. In my often-chaotic childhood, the tiny public school where I attended K–12 was my safe shelter and a sturdy tether to reality. My husband never loved books as much as I did, and his educational journey was more of a hybrid hodgepodge. He attended some church schools and spent several years homeschooling before graduating from the same public school where I had always attended. That’s where we met. Our daughters are in large public middle and high schools—my eldest daughter’s ninth grade class has more children than I had in my entire school district. Our children have seen things in their school hallways that I’ve never been exposed to in my sheltered life.
I’m not a teacher, but I am a concerned parent and an engaged citizen who wants all children to have access to the opportunities I want for my own. When it comes to my own kids, I know they’ll turn out all right. We’ll practice reading and find a math tutor when necessary, and I’ll email the principal or the superintendent or my school board members when I have concerns I can’t resolve at the campus level. And I am quick to celebrate the bright spots—like this year, when both my children are on campuses led by effective administrators and many passionate teachers. However, when things aren’t going well, I know how to navigate the system to try to meet my kids’ needs. But stopping with my own kids doesn’t sit well with my soul. My faith compels me to pursue the same for other children—the kids whose parents don’t speak English or the child whose single mom is a cashier at Walgreens till 10 p.m. each night.
So over the last several years, I’ve asked countless questions of educators, administrators, parents, and students in my attempt to understand why providing all children with access to high-quality educational opportunities seems utterly impossible these days. The more I learn, the more I picture a tangled snarl of yarn. When you pull on one end to untangle the knot, it tightens and twists somewhere else.
If I were dealing with a ball of yarn, I’d throw it away. But when it comes to our schools, giving up and feeling apathetic isn’t an option we Christians get to exercise. After all, we have a spiritual heritage that rightfully informed the radical idea that all children have value and potential worth cultivating, and we have a theology that teaches us to have persistent hope in the face of unlikely odds and apparent defeat.
Sadly, this heritage is not what Christians are known for in national educational conversations these days. We are known more for our abrasiveness than our love. In many cities, the loudest among us turned on the schools right down our own streets because of something we saw on the national news. This is wrong. We need more people who can set aside the endless cultural battles and take an honest look at what’s happening in their neighborhood schools, not in some other city’s schools across the country.
Whether or not we have kids in public schools, Christians should pay reasonable and thoughtful attention to all schools in the neighborhoods and communities where God has planted us. God commands his people to “seek the welfare” of our cities (Jer. 29:7, ESV). And the needs in our cities, whether Miami or Midland, are great: Our teachers are discouraged. Our administrators are weary. Our students are increasingly aware that everyone else thinks the whole system is broken (and if the adults don’t think it can be salvaged, why should they care?).
What’s needed where you live might be different from what’s needed in my community, but regardless, we have much to learn from one another. Together, let’s get honest about the mess we’ve made—and the mess we’ve inherited—and try to untangle some of the snarled knots that are hamstringing our children’s futures.
The schools may be falling apart, but let’s be the grownups who fix things.
