(WND News Center)—Last November, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten annoyed the vast American homeschooling community by expressing bafflement behind the trend to remove children from school.
“What’s behind the increase in homeschooling?” Weingarten posted on X (formerly Twitter), referencing an article on Axios with the same title. This apparent cluelessness drew snorts of derision from parents all over the nation, who didn’t hold back on their responses by the thousands – so much so that Weingarten turned off replies to her post.
After stating, “The answer is in your mirror,” Townhall columnist Phil Hollaway questioned why Weingarten turned off comments.”Are you afraid of the answers you’ll get? You and the teacher unions with help from [former CDC director Rochelle Walensky] sent public schools into a death spiral from which they may never recover.”
Another poster responded: “A person touted as the country’s top teacher asks a question then turns off replies to keep people from answering it. That sums up pedagogy in public schools right now.”
It wasn’t so much the refusal to acknowledge the problems endemic in public education that homeschooling parents found objectionable in Weingarten’s remark; it was the deliberate playing dumb: “Golly gee willikers, little ol’ me has NO IDEA why anyone would want to homeschool their kids!”
In the past, various prominent politicians have been dubbed “Gun Salesman of the Year” after involving themselves in gun-control legislation. The same sentiment can be applied to the upper echelons of public education officials, who cannot seem to grasp the concept that parents want their children educated, not indoctrinated. When public schools were closed during COVID, millions of parents learned they could educate better at home, and never looked back. New meme: “Randi Weingarten: Homeschooling Sponsor of the Year!”
The numbers are impressive; and the bluer the state, the higher the interest in homeschooling. In California alone, over 1,400 public K-12 schools lost more than 20% of their students since 2020, with homeschooling up 78% between 2017 and 2022. Upending the narratives that homeschooling is done only by religious or wealthy families, a 2023 analysis by the liberal Washington Post admitted homeschooling’s surging popularity “crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics.”
As often happens when faced with such drastic declines in enrollment, the public school systems make fretful attempts to lure parents back into complacency, usually in the form of hiring more teachers to lower teacher-to-student ratios. Ironically, this itself has proven difficult, as teachers are (understandably) leaving the profession in droves (here and here and here), concerned about violence, disrespect and other classroom quarterbacking that interferes with teaching academics.
Additionally, 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.
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. Faced with these challenges, it’s no wonder there’s a teacher shortage in America. Who would want the job?
But what academic experts fail to see (or, more likely, refuse to admit) is what parents find most objectionable about public education: The content of the curricula. As long as public schools ignore academics in favor of grooming and indoctrination, parents will continue to withdraw their kids for academic alternatives.
So, faced with such drastic declines in enrollment in failing public schools, officials are falling back on what they often do when faced with homeschooling’s indisputable academic superiority: Ramping up regulations for homeschoolers. Usually this increased regulation begins by conveniently citing the rare case of abuse, then spinning it into the wild extrapolation that any parent who homeschools is doing so to hide the bruises.
Citing a Washington Post smear piece against the booming homeschooling movement, Casey Chalk wrote in The Federalist, “To support the claim of exploiting ‘lax home education laws’ to hide abuse, the Post cites a 2014 study that found that of more than two dozen tortured children treated at medical centers in five states, eight of 17 victims old enough to attend school were homeschooled. You read that right – the most damning evidence The Washington Post can cite to support the claim that homeschooling is facilitating widespread abuse or neglect of minors across the United States is a study with a sample size of 17 children.
(Keep in mind, there were about 3.1 million homeschool students in 2021-2022 in grades K-12 in the United States, or roughly 6% of school-age children, and yet the Post could only drum up 17 examples of abuse from nine years ago.)
Meanwhile, the extreme-left Southern Poverty Law Center has classified parental rights organizations as “hate groups.” And of course, the U.S. Justice Department famously documents and investigates concerned parents attending school board meetings.
Ironically, as one commenter pointed out, “Homeschoolers are held to a much higher standard than are public schools. Case in point: Oregon has suspended standards for graduation from a public school but still requires testing for homeschool students in grades 3, 5, 8 and 10 to make sure they are getting a ‘good’ education.”
Meanwhile public education continues to decline in quality. In Illinois, just 32% of high school juniors could read, and 27% do math at grade level – and yet the state opted to kill school choice.
Schools are now being dubbed “knowledge-free zones.”
Educators can play dumb all they want, but of course we all know the real reason behind the hostility toward the homeschooling movement: The manic desire to keep children within their clutches. For this reason, I pray every parent in the nation finds some way to educate their children outside of public schools. Only by starving the beast can their agenda be disrupted.
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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.