It's Fort Worth on the Map

Fort Mostly-Worthless in the schools.

Imaginary schools have perfect students with perfect grades. Real schools, not so much.

The good news is that government-owned schools are slowly approaching a long-deserved euthanasia. The bad news is, you’re still paying for them.

This week the rulers of the Fort Worth Independent School District announced they would be closing some 18 schools over the next four or five years. The reasons: declining enrollment and budget deficits.

Well, those are the reasons they give. The real reason is that public schools are educating no one and parents don’t want their kids wasting their days there, always having to worry they will be victims of mass shootings, bullying or pedophile teachers.

The vote by the board to close the Fort Worth schools was eight to zero, about what you’d expect in a dictatorship where no one cares what the peasants think. The object is not to debate any issue publicly, but rather to seem like a group united in its purpose—even if that purpose is closing schools.

The Covid pandemic and its associated shutdowns of schools gave a big boost to the ending of “public” education. Parents looked over their kids’ shoulders during remote classes and saw what utter garbage was being dumped on their offspring, more indoctrination than education. Enrollment in Fort Worth schools has dropped 15% since just before the pandemic, and is scheduled to fall another 6% by 2030. Yes, the birth rate is dropping, but the I’m-sick-of-public-schools rate is climbing faster.

Here’s how it works: there are 15% fewer students in Fort Worth schools now than six years ago. Six years ago the school district’s budget was $920 million, according to the district’s website. This year the total revenue for the school district was $1.043 billion. Students DOWN 15%; budget UP 12%. Hmmm.

The school officials have an interesting view of all this cash. The Fort Worth Star Telegram explained it this way: “Deputy Superintendent Kellie Spencer said closing the campuses would save Fort Worth ISD about $10 million over the next five years. That’s money that the district can redirect toward literacy priorities, she said.”

How about “redirecting” some of that money to the taxpayers? That possibility never occurred to them. Of course, there are literacy problems in the district. Not only are the students getting poor educations, a big chunk of them don’t even speak English, having been dragged here by parents who crossed our borders illegally. Some of them are even citizens, thanks to our birthright citizenship policies. Not that it matters. The Supreme Court ruled long ago that children here illegally must be allowed into our schools and taught at taxpayers’ expense. The result? A lot of school time and money is now devoted to teaching children English, something they should already know when they show up.

How much time? All of it, for Spanish-speaking students. The district enrolls them in a “dual-language immersion” program that starts in Pre-K. Here’s how it works, according to the district’s website:

• PK-K receive 80% Spanish and 20% English.

• Grades1-2, receive 60% Spanish and 40% English.

• Grades 3-5 receive 50% Spanish and 50% English.

So by the time the kid is halfway through their public education, they’re halfway to learning Inglés. Magnifico. A report on the situation in the Fort Worth School District several years ago noted that 25 to 30% of all students in the district were English-deficient, meaning the district is blowing a couple of hundred million each year trying to make kids ready to learn something other than Spanish (96% of long-term English learners are Spanish speakers).

It’s expensive, but at least it doesn’t work. Here’s a quote from the report: “Students born in Mexico graduated at a slightly higher rate than students born in the United States.” (Italics added.) So kids born into a Spanish-speaking society are doing better than kids born into Spanish-speaking homes right here.

Thanks to Barack Obama’s campaign to import the entire Third World here, the report says “Immigrant students who arrived in the middle school grades spoke a wide variety of languages, including single students who spoke Kosovo, Amharic, Assyrian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Swahili, and Korean.” All of whom taxpayers had to provide teachers for, and very few teachers speak Russian, Swahili and Assyrian. Figure one extra teacher for each of those single students.

Even native English speakers don’t do well. The Texas Education Agency says 81% of kids who enter ninth grade in Fort Worth graduated in 2023. But twenty years earlier, in 2003, only 76% managed to do so. The implication is that schools got better and the kids got smarter, but the reality is much different. After lawmakers complained about dropout rates in the 80s, school districts responded by handing out high-school diplomas like they were Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum comics. Everybody who occasionally shows up at school gets a diploma, and voila, dropout rates are lower, though graduates’ knowledge levels suffer.

The State of Texas is finally changing rules to allow parents money for private schools, so now “public” education will collapse more rapidly. But in handing all that money to private schools, the State has attached almost as many rules as it has to public funding. The new system will be better than the old one, but it probably won’t be better enough.