Once upon a time, American schools were something to be proud of, with high expectations and students who – by some accounts – graduated high school with what is now the equivalent of two years of college under their belts. Most schools were under local control and were highly responsive to parents.

Today all that has changed. We rank 36th on the world stage. Despite spending on average $12,000 per student per year, public education has become a joke.

Why? There are endless reasons, but I'll give two.

One, public education does not permit competition among schools. Journalist and columnist John Stossel has demonstrated over and over that public education is not only a monolithic monopoly, but it actively discourages innovative teachers or schools. Whenever shining examples (charter schools or successful teachers in low-income areas) wrest success from failure, the educational establishment knocks them down. It's a classic "crabs in a bucket" metaphor, which Urban Dictionary defines as "a person (or subculture) that does everything in its power to destroy the ambitions of those among them who wish to improve themselves." Wikipedia additionally describes the metaphor as "Individually, the crabs in the story could easily escape from the bucket, but instead they are described as grabbing at each other in a useless 'king of the hill' competition which prevents any from escaping and ensures their collective demise."

"Why do they hate you?" Stossel asked New York City's Success Academy charter school founder Eva Moskowitz.

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"What we prove is that there's nothing wrong with the children," she replied. "There is something wrong with a system, a monopolistic system that is not allowing kids to succeed."

See? Crabs in a bucket.

OK, that's one of the problems with public education. Another is that schools have abandoned academics and have become nothing more than progressive factories designed to crank out social justice warriors. Social justice is all well and good, I guess, but it sure doesn't do much to improve math scores, encourage literacy, or teach science. And silly me, I always thought math, reading, science and other academic subjects were the whole purpose of schools. I guess I'm wrong.

Consider the example of Edina, Minnesota, an upscale suburb of Minneapolis. A few years ago, the schools were the gold standard in the state, but "virtually overnight, its reputation has changed."

Why? Social justice warriors took over. In a big way.

In 2013, "The Edina school district's All for All plan mandated that henceforth 'all teaching and learning experiences' would be viewed through the 'lens of racial equity,'" notes this article, "and that only 'racially conscious' teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina's racial achievement gap, which they attributed to 'barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.'"

This indoctrination now begins in kindergarten, where recommended reading for children includes an ABC board book called – I kid you not – "A is for Activist " and filled with such nuggets as "F is for Feminist," "C is for … Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures," and "T is for Trans."

The article continues:

At Edina High School, the equity agenda is the leading edge of a full-scale ideological re-education campaign. A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: "By the end of the year, you will have ... learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical ... lenses to literature." The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English course – required of all 10th-graders – that centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of "Colonization," "Immigration" and "Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender."

Mandatory indoctrination is even required of bus drivers, who must attend training sessions on how "'dismantling white privilege' is 'the core of our work as white folks,' and that working for the Edina schools requires 'a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.' Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district's 'equity' ideology."

Online criticism of either teachers or curricula is removed from any school-related websites. Conservative students (such as members of the unofficial Young Conservatives Club; yes, it exists) are persecuted – not just harassed, not just humiliated, but actively persecuted – "with groups 'as large as 30 students … daily surrounding club members and threatening to injure them if they did not change their political views," and school-sponsored antifa-style groups threatening bodily injury to YCC members. Edina faculty routinely support such actions.

Needless to say, test scores across the board – black, white, Latino – have dropped. But that's OK. All that matters is these students are being properly indoctrinated into the progressive mindset of the Social Justice Warrior, and Caucasian students learn to hate themselves.

This is great news, according to Dr. Annie Mogush Mason, program director of elementary teacher education at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (in other words, where new teachers are trained). She wrote an op-ed "that praised the Edina schools' racial equity crusade" and condemned "America's vicious history of violence and oppression – evidenced today by 'Eurocentric curricula,' 'hypersegregated schools,' and 'biased standardized tests.' Our nation's 'racist practices,' she wrote, are what 'allowed this country to expand geographically and to amass its great fortune.' White students, she asserted, must become 'racially conscious' to learn 'how their own worldviews are limited by whiteness.'"

So there you have it, folks. Your tax dollars at work.

In referencing the tragic school shootings in Florida this week, historian and columnist Bill Federer noted, "Instead of banning guns, maybe we should look into what these killer kids are being taught. Could it be that the confusion being programmed into these students' minds might have some bearing on their behavior? With computers, there is hardware and software. Instead of banning the hardware of guns, we should consider banning the corrupted software that the children are being indoctrinated with, the secular-atheistic-transgenderism which teaches that there is no right or wrong."

With what kind of "software" are schools like those in Edina, Minnesota, programming the kids?

Today's SJWs don't care that America's schools are failing academically. In their eyes, that's perfectly OK, so long as the graduates are properly indoctrinated into their worldview. They have our nation by the gonads, and they know it. Let China and other nations become the powerhouses of the world.

America is too busy shaming itself.