Everyone in our family is college educated. I have 2 masters degrees (MBA, and Environmental Engineering) plus I got 2/3rds of the way through an Education Masters to teach HS science and math before determining that VA public schools are too broken for me to make a difference. My parents were poor and neither of them attended college. The only way I could afford college was to earn an NROTC scholarship and attended UW, Madison. I decided I'd teach HS science and math when I was planning on leaving the Navy. However, well into the 3rd masters, one of the very few VA Charter School principles teaching at ODU took me aside and told me that, while I'd make a good HS teacher, he didn't feel any of the principles in Hampton Roads high schools would be willing to support me teaching at any levels or standards that he thought I'd be satisfied with but he'd be happy to write recommendations to several schools in the state with much higher standards that would appreciate my abilities and background. That was a wake-up call. After 23 years as a Navy pilot, instructor, squadron commander, and nuclear aircraft carrier Air Boss, I was not willing to move my family again simply to find a school willing to accept reasonable standards and support student discipline. I believe all students, even the most impoverished, can learn to expect more of themselves than even some of their parents--and the vast majority of Hampton Roads public school administrators and teachers do. So I switched into the engineering department to complete my 2nd masters and went on to complete a 2nd 23 year career as a hydrogeologist, environmental engineer and project manager in both the private and Federal sector
Our elder son earned a full Navy scholarship to MIT and earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering, performing so well that the Navy sent him immediately to the Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey where he completed a Masters in Mech Eng before reporting to the Navy's Nuclear Engineering program. After 7 years in the nuclear submarine program he decided to return to the private sector and joined a Fortune 500 energy company and completed an MBA at UNC Chapel Hill. He and his wife now are entrepreneurs with their own business in OKC.
My youngest earned a full scholarship to UVA where he completed a dual undergrad in biology and chemistry and a masters in organic chem. He and his wife (an architect) both went to Tulane where she completed a masters in architecture and he completed a 2nd masters in Chemical Engineering. She works at a mid-major architectural firm in New Orleans and he manages a growing draft beer company in that city. Both of our sons left Virginia because of the lack of good jobs and Virginia's political war on energy which directly impacts those future job opportunities. And after over 50 years, my wife and I will likely be moving closer to them next year. We've already purchased land in NW Florida.
None of us would have been enriched with early school or middle school indoctrination in race hatred which is the basis of CRT in practice, early sexualization via LGBTQ agendas, or socialism --all of which seems to be central to just about every Ed School in the country --and getting worse--since I first attended a very liberal and politically explosive UW, Madison as an undergrad (1967-1971). All of this appears to be a deliberate choice, not an attribute or an improvement. US public schools have had declining standards and performance since the early 1970s and, frankly, I believe the ONLY possibility that public schools will survive into the future is through full school choice where the parents decide the best school programs for their children and education tax money moves with each child into those programs. Only total immersion into a free market system will force public schools to compete with the other alternatives--or close due to lack of students. We've tried throwing more money into a broken system for over 40 years with only failing student performance scores while the public school staff to student ratio has increased exponentially--with each new staffer robbing from the classroom and the teachers who deserve higher pay which also creating more programs and demands on the teachers to justify the new staffer's existence.
Get rid of CRT! I can't think of a more destructive thing you can do do to students than to tell the minority students they have no chance of success because they were born in an evil country that won't give them a chance. There was no country in the world that did not practice slavery at one time or another but the US only practiced slavery for less than 200 years and has done more than any other nation to eradicate it and lift the quality of live for all. Nor is it any less destructive than teaching White kindergarten and lower school students that they are inherently evil and immorally priviledged because they have White ancestors who only succeeded because they took what wasn't theirs from other cultures. This only generates hate and hurt between students that spills over as violence and criminal acts both in the schools and out into communities.