Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, February 17, 2024

Here’s a true story from a public school near you: My elementary age son brought home a wooden box from school a few years ago. It was covered in his pencil drawings of fish — his favorite. I opened the box and on a scrap of paper inside saw the curse word. Scraps of paper underneath it were filled with other bad words. I shut the box and called the school.

That’s when I learned about the school assignment of the “tacky box.” A guidance counselor came to the class, told the kids to write down the worst words they could think of (they could crowdsource with friends from upper grades) and then to put them in a box instead of saying them out loud. It was part of anti-bullying week. I think the class bullies learned some new words.

This week, parents on my kindergarten group message chat were upset to find inappropriate images come up on the school-sponsored iPads and Chromebooks. Someone’s daughter had stumbled on them while Googling something for her kindergarten class. How much time are kids spending on those devices at school anyway? And why is this still a mystery? Research is piling up about the negative impact of devices on learning and attention span for kids.

Then there’s the new math curriculum, which I’ve written about in these pages before. Memorizing addition and subtraction facts, multiplication tables are out. Intuitive learning and educated guesses are in. It seems backward, like driving a car before building the road. Can we get the basics right? We haven’t even gotten to the tests, the testing to test, the silent recesses to not mess up the tests — how the means to accountability became the ends, and unaccountable ones at that.

What does this have to do with the Department of Education? Absolutely nothing. But it helps explain why many parents, even with kids in great schools, are emotionally fed up with the system. That’s the energy behind President Donald Trump’s pending executive order to eliminate the department altogether. . .