A Fox News commentator and professional wrestler told a panel Thursday night that schools and teachers do not deserve all the blame for declines in performance during the pandemic.
“I’m going to be the bad guy here,” George “Tyrus” Murdoch told the panel on “Gutfeld!” “Whoever wants to go at the schools, at teachers, first world problems. But it’s parenting here, we aren’t parenting good enough. Our forefathers whether they were free or not free, had to deal with famine, disease, the occasional bear running through your house, wars. They were able to educate and become important people. My mother worked 90 hours a week raising two boys. We were stuck at the dinner table doing our school work.” (RELATED: CARDOZA-MOORE: Wokeism In K-12 Schools Takes Center Stage In 2022 Midterms)
The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that math and reading scores for 9-year-olds had a significant decline. Reading scores went down five levels, while math scored declined by seven points, according to the data.
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“If the average parent complaining about their kids’ reading level looks at the phone and how much time they spend on the internet and social media and how much time they spend with their kids reading, writing, arithmetic, I think they’d be shocked at the time,” Tyrus continued. “We can’t wait, especially with this administration. They aren’t going to fix it.”
Tyrus made his comments in response to Lara Trump saying that the positive of the remote learning resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic was that parents saw what was going on in schools.
“I think it has helped because they were home with their parents and parents actually saw what was truly going on in schools because of COVID, they were home,” the daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump said. “They saw critical race theory, they saw that instead of actually learning math and reading and science they were focused on pronouns and not hurting other people’s feelings and they were not preparing our kids for the future.”
Critical race theory holds that America is fundamentally racist and teaches students to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. It advocates for the pursuit of “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.
A spokesman for the Department of Education referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to a statement by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona that claimed the decline was due to former President Trump’s “mismanagement of the pandemic” and touted efforts by the Biden administration to reopen schools.
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