France’s Education Collapse Is A Warning For America

France spent the past three weeks watching its high schools burn. What originally began in late September at a suburban school outside Paris as a protest over missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and decaying buildings spread to hundreds of schools and quickly metastasized into riots that included Marxists, Antifa, and Islamists.

On the biggest day, the interior ministry counted more than 250,000 people in the streets. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called the casualties the heaviest toll on the school system in decades: at least 215 teenagers and 85 staff injured, plus more than 760 police officers. Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked.