No on the Prescott Unified School District Bond

It’s election season again, and with the election process comes the nearly inevitable request for more money from PUSD. For anyone paying attention, this request is absolutely ridiculous, because PUSD is experiencing declining enrollment and declining performance as evidenced by the test scores. The competition (private, religious, and charter schools) is doing a much better job and spending a lot less money per student. An unbiased observer would say that PUSD is failing, but is that really accurate?

Actually, it depends on what the goal really is, so let’s look at the state of public education in the United States in 2026. It’s mainly run by leftist wokesters, many of whom would like nothing better than to upend the existing order in our country. Co-opting control of education and doing everything possible to turn the students (with whom the educrats have been entrusted) into yet more leftist woke automatons is a really effective way to accomplish that. Reading, Mathematics, Science, History, and what we used to call “Civics” are considerably less important than re-orienting their students’ value systems.

How did this happen?

1n 1923 at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany a man named Felix Weil (using his wealthy father’s money) established an organization called the Institut fűr Sozialforschung (Eng.: Institute for Social Research). This institute was dedicated to implementing Marxist theory as applied to education and employed several prominent German Marxists and members of the German Communist Party.  This was not particularly noteworthy as the KPD (German Communist Party) was perfectly legal in Weimar Germany of the 1920’s and early 1930’s.

One of the basic pedagogical tools developed by the IfS was Critical Theory, defined in Wikipedia as “…social critique intended to effect sociological change and realize intellectual emancipation…”. This Marxist construct essentially critically challenges and seeks to reorder most of recorded history and most normative behavior in order to implement the rise and adoption of socialism.

During the decade from 1923, the Institute became popularly known as “The Frankfurt School” due to its location in Frankfurt am Main.

In 1930, the leftist members of the IfS became alarmed by the rising influence of the Nazis and made plans to leave Germany. They managed to move most of their organization to Geneva by 1933 just before Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg on January 30^th. Geneva, however, is in Switzerland, which is next door to Germany, and wasn’t far enough removed from the anticommunist purges that began in earnest later that year after the Reichstag passed the enabling act. The members of the IfS decided that the safest thing to do was to put an ocean between them and the National Socialists.

The United States Department of State under Roosevelt was full of New Deal leftists in the 1930’s, so the IfS members apparently had no problem obtaining the necessary documentation and permission to immigrate to the US. They set up shop at Columbia University in New York which was then as now a center for “Education” studies. The IfS had completely taken over Columbia University School of Education by the end of the war, and set out to do the same thing in other Schools of Education across the USA.

Thus began the “Long March” of the Frankfurt School into the American public education system.

Leftists find the easiest recruiting is done among the population with lower intellectual capabilities, simply because this group tends to be less well-off economically, and because of this disparity in their lives, has a built-in resentment against more successful members of society. The vast majority of leftists are seething with envy and possess a burning desire to revenge themselves on the people who have made something of themselves. Teachers in the US typically have “Education” degrees, and the overwhelming percentage of the college majors in the Department of Education have SAT scores in the bottom third. Given that fact and the fact that the Frankfurt School has essentially completely infiltrated all Departments of Education in academia, it is no mystery why many teachers in the public school systems are “woke” left-wing fifth columnists.

Back to “Critical Theory”

It has been co-opted by almost every grievance group and forged into their primary weapon: e.g., Critical Race Theory, Critical Feminism, Queer theory, ad nauseum, such that every disaffected minority has an opportunity to attack our society and indeed Western culture itself in their own very special lane.  “Teaching” is a dream job for these disaffected and envious people who want to poke the “Oppressors” (all the rest of us) in the nose!

So no, our public schools are not failing from the vantage point of the bureaucrats and teachers in the system; they are doing exactly what these Frankfurt School adherents planned a century ago.

They’re just not doing the job that most sane people think should be done in public schools- preparing kids to become productive members of society. They’re doing a great job of mass-producing leftist foot soldiers for what they see as the bright socialist future.

But I don’t think that I should pay for it.

I will vote NO on Propositions 405 and 406.