(WND)—It’s not easy being a public school teacher these days. Not only must they contend with often-conflicting demands from school boards and parents, but they are frequently unable (or not permitted) to discipline unruly students, must contend with a huge variety of culture and language distinctions, and must often intervene in instances of physical or psychological abuse. Teachers are also facing a massive influx of migrant children, making classrooms even more complicated.
“Teaching has turned into behavior management day care,” said one teacher. “It sucks the joy out of you all day, and then the parents are calling to suck out some more joy. A select handful of kids are incredible and fantastic. So many kids won’t turn anything in as in earning a literal 0 for the semester. While all of this is going on you’ll have admin and the network telling you the kids are failing because you didn’t set them up for success, you didn’t invent a new wheel, you didn’t take enough data, you didn’t love them into behaving better.”
Another person observed, “I feel like most teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The school administrators fail to protect their teachers from those overbearing parents demanding good grades for their child, regardless of whether or not they earned it. They can’t teach anything anymore for fear of some parent getting mad or taking offense. It’s a mess.”
This isn’t to imply teachers are saints. Consider this hot mess of a headline: “Satan worshipping teacher who suffers from ‘mania and psychosis’ fired after Libs of TikTok exposé.” When you see stories like this, I wonder how anyone has the courage to send their kids to public schools in the first place.
And of course, academics are suffering, and not just because of the disastrous COVID lockdowns. Reading and math are steadily declining when compared to other nations. And yet progressive districts keep implementing more and more disastrous programs, such as the “equitable grading practices” that outlaw (outlaw!) “zeroes” for cheating or failing to turn in assignments.
As a result, many teachers are burned out and leaving the profession. Schools face massive staffing shortages. No one, it seems, wants to be a teacher anymore. Frankly, I can’t blame them.
I confess I have mixed feelings about teachers. I had some tremendous instructors in my youth, as I’m sure you had as well. I have numerous friends and relatives who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching, and have done a phenomenal job at it.
But there are, unfortunately, all too many teachers whose sole and exclusive goal is to indoctrinate their students into the extreme leftist lifestyle. Rather than equipping children with the tools for a productive adulthood, these change agents are turning students into helpless snowflakes and professional victims. In fact, many teachers are hired specifically for that purpose. Some states are even mandating extreme leftist ideological training for teachers.
Teachers are also tasked with the impossible job of walking the line between two deeply divided ideologies: the radical left and the conservative right. Nothing they do will please both these deeply polarized sides. Nothing.
And so teachers are leaving the profession. And it gets worse: Fewer and fewer people are entering the profession to begin with. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there is a massive drop in college students seeking degrees in education to pursue jobs in teaching. This decline has been going on for decades, but has accelerated in the last few chaotic years.
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This creates something of a doom loop. The teachers who remain get burdened with even more tasks and responsibilities, which leads to more burnout, which leads to more teachers leaving, etc.
The trouble, of course, is teachers are no longer required to teach. They’re tasked with indoctrinating, and that’s a whole different ball game. Tyrants throughout history have learned the most effective way to stay in power is to capture children while young, and America is no exception. As a result, public school kids can spew endless drivel about climate change (which contributes to a massive mental health crisis) but can’t add fractions or subtract. In fact, the public education system has now become a laughingstock on the world stage.
Bottom line: The good teachers are working against the tide with a broken system, and the bad teachers are part of the problem. The good teachers are being drummed out or scared away from teaching to begin with, and only the nutcases remain.
So what will public schools do with such a teacher shortage? Well, in the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, there are all kinds of ideas now being put forth, all of which are determined to raise a progressive phoenix from the ashes of education.
One of those ideas – put forth, unsurprisingly, by Bill Gates – is to have AI teachers. While he stopped short of saying these would replace human teachers, he certainly feels it could supplement instruction in the classroom. Three guesses who will be programming these AI instructors.
All of this seems to me like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. Public education has been subject to fads for decades, certainly since I was a child in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet somehow nothing ever improves. Only when competition exists (i.e. private schools, etc.) do academics flourish.
As long as the extreme leftists have an iron grip on public schools, things will continue to spiral downward in American education. More and more good teachers will throw up their hands in frustration and retire, leaving the radical teachers to continue the doom loop.
The future of public education is anyone’s guess.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.