Matt WalshAround 2 p.m. on January 6, 2023, at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, a black 6-year-old boy pulled a 9mm Taurus handgun from his jacket and shot his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner, in the middle of class. There was no provocation whatsoever. The bullet entered Zwerner’s hand and lodged in her chest, nearly killing her. When police arrived, another school employee (a “reading specialist”) was holding the child — almost as if she was trying to protect him from the police, even though he clearly posed a danger to her (and everyone else in the room). And then the boy started talking.
This is bodycam footage that took more than three years to release to the public, supposedly because of routine bureaucratic holdups. As you watch this, you can come to your own conclusions about the actual reason they withheld it. Watch:
“F*ck you, n-word. Shut the f*ck up, ho. I stole dat gun from my mama. I don’t care if I go to jail. If you want a piece of me, come get it.”
That’s a 6-year-old child talking to police officers and a “reading specialist.” And how does the specialist handle all this? She tells the police, “He’s on a modified schedule!” Then she tries to inform the child, “That’s not how we speak to each other.” She politely checks his hands to make sure he didn’t injure himself while he was trying to murder his teacher. If you didn’t know the context, and the police weren’t there, just based on how the woman is dealing with the boy, you’d assume he got in trouble for throwing a paper airplane in class, or maybe shoving a kid in the hallways or something. In fact, based on her demeanor and how she’s treating him, you might think that the boy isn’t in trouble at all. You might think that the teacher is comforting him because he got bullied on the playground and now he’s sad and has a tummy ache. It’s a microcosm of America, post-civil rights era. On the one hand, you have a barbaric, dangerous criminal and then you have the clueless, coddling white woman who’s acting as if she’s talking to a normal, functioning human being. There’s a 100% chance that this woman — and every other woman in the public school system — thinks she can “save” this child. She can make everything better. She can sit him down on the carpet and read him “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” And then he’ll be off to Harvard, and Fortune 500 companies will line up to give him jobs he’s not qualified for. And we can all pretend he’s actually successful. That’s the liberal fantasy, playing out in this footage.
Meanwhile, everyone with a pulse understands exactly what’s going on here. This child almost certainly cannot be reformed. Barring miraculous intervention of some kind, he will just become even more dangerous and volatile as he gets older. He’ll murder someone before long if he’s allowed to roam free. He’s already — at 6 years old — a menace to society. Is that his “fault”? No, not really. He’s 6 years old. He’s just a few years past toddler. You don’t become a cold-blooded killer at six except by being conditioned that way in an absolutely horrific, hellish environment. This child has been raised — to the extent that we can say he’s been raised at all — by barbarians. And now he is one himself. So if any bleeding hearts out there want to say that this poor little boy is a victim of his circumstances, and it’s not his fault he turned out that way, I will agree. If you were born to his mother, and raised in his home, and had his brain and his rock-bottom IQ, you would have ended up exactly like him, and you would have done exactly what he did, because you would be him. So we don’t even need to get into the nature vs nurture debate. The fact is that, obviously, both nature and nurture factor into the kind of person you become. And he didn’t choose either of them — his nature, or how he was nurtured. He is a victim in a very real sense. That’s extremely sad. It’s a tragedy. It’s a terrible thing.
But we live in reality. And we have to deal with reality. Questions of fault and blame and victimhood are all academic. In real, practical terms, the fact is that we’re left with a child who is wildly dysfunctional, dangerous, destructive, and unstable. He is not going to wake up tomorrow or the next day, or next year, or a decade from now, and have magically transformed into a civilized, well-behaved young gentleman. You can feel sorry for him all you want, but while you’re feeling sorry, you have to decide what to actually do with kids like this. And you have two choices. Either keep him in the system and allow him to continue disrupting the education of every other kid in the school, and stand by and wait until he decides to harm or kill someone else, offering innocent kids and adults up as sacrifices for the sake of giving this kid unlimited chances — or you can remove him. You can take this kid and every kid like him and remove them from the system, and from civilized society, and consign them to an institution somewhere. If they commit violent crimes, you can put them in jail or juvenile detention. The benefit of this second strategy is that it protects innocent, civilized, well-behaved people, and allows society to function, and our systems to operate as they’re supposed to. And that benefit vastly outweighs the downside, which is simply that the dysfunctional, dangerous kids suffer the emotional distress of being expelled from civilized society. That’s unfortunate, but either they suffer the emotional distress of being expelled from civilized society, or everyone else suffers the distress of watching civilized society be destroyed. And that’s really not a hard choice at all.
Besides, this kind of kid is better off in an institution. It can’t possibly be any more nightmarish than his home life. The boy’s father is a career criminal who was not living with him at the time of the shooting, if you can imagine that. Actually, in 2023, his father was a fugitive with an active arrest warrant (having skipped multiple court hearings on an assault charge). He also had multiple convictions, including one for breaking and entering, and one for violating a protective order after he allegedly hit the boy’s mother in the jaw. The school was apparently unaware of all this, and allowed him to attend classes with his son on occasion.
That’s not to say the mother — a woman named Deja Taylor — was much better. Just a month before the shooting at the school, Taylor used the same Taurus handgun to shoot at the boy’s father. This is from The Washington Post:
Prosecutors cited a series of text messages between Taylor and the boy’s father, which appear to show that Taylor opened fire on him with the same weapon about a month before the shooting at Richneck Elementary. … The shooting followed a dispute over whether the father was cheating on Taylor with another woman. … The father was not hurt in the incident. … [Additionally,] Taylor’s son had twice taken her car keys from her purse and gotten into her car. On one occasion, he crashed the vehicle, and on the other he refused to leave. … Police had to break a window to get him out. Following the school shooting, investigators found copious amounts of marijuana in Taylor’s residences and vehicle during searches.
So she shoots a firearm at the father of her child, in a public setting of some kind, and nothing happens to her. And before that, her child stole her car and wrecked it. And evidently, despite this very alarming series of events, no one did anything — to her, or the kid.
This is nothing new. You might remember that, in 2008, there was a viral story about a black kid who stole his grandmother’s car. He damaged a bunch of property and nearly killed people. The local news, and the police, treated the whole episode like a joke. No one was prosecuted. Watch:
You’ll never believe this, but that kid — Latarian Milton — went on to commit more serious crimes, both as a child and an adult. In 2017, he was arrested with his friends for armed carjacking, after the group held a Lyft driver at gunpoint. Watch:
So Milton was the getaway driver. And he was a real criminal mastermind, ripping off a Lyft that he called with his cellphone. For this particular crime, he was released after a few years because no one actually serves a significant prison sentence anymore. I’ve seen reports that he’s committed more crimes after this, and we all know he’s going to continue committing crimes until the day he dies. That was evident for a long time — from back when he was a child.
All of this could’ve been avoided if Milton had been thrown in prison for life the moment he stole his grandmother’s car and publicly stated that “it’s fun to do bad things.” This is not the behavior of a normal child. He’s clearly a psychopath — and no amount of DEI hiring, or counseling services, or affirmative action was ever going to change that. But everyone pretended otherwise. The police pretended that they could “talk some sense” into this kid. They didn’t imprison his parents. And now, every time Latarian Milton is allowed to appear in public, he’s a danger to everyone around him.
The same inevitable pattern is playing out again in Newport News, with Deja Taylor and her 6-year-old kid who’s shooting up his elementary school. She was clearly unfit to be a parent, just like the father.
But nobody did anything about it, because this is par for the course in overwhelmingly black areas of the country. After this shooting, due to all of the attention, she was convicted of child neglect and firearms charges, but she’s already out of prison. But otherwise, she wouldn’t have been punished at all. This is how millions of black children are raised. The bar is absolutely in the ground. Deja Taylor is probably a top-10% mother in Newport News, if we’re being honest.
An enormous number of black kids in school behave just like this particular 6-year-old, even if most of them don’t shoot their teachers. That bodycam footage reminds me of scenes I witnessed countless times in public school. This behavior is animalistic, and it’s extremely common in public schools to this day — as even the most Left-wing people on the planet will admit. It was just a couple of weeks ago that we talked about Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times writer who deliberately sent her daughter to a mostly-black inner-city school, as a way to fight white supremacy or whatever. She eventually pulled her daughter out of that school because the black students were violently attacking each other in the cafeteria every day. She spent one day at the school, and she was horrified by what she saw. This is a woman who is so ideologically committed to Leftism that she actually sent her child to the worst school she could find. She bragged about it. And then, after having to be around the kids in that school for one day, it dawned on her that she had made a horrible mistake. The administrators didn’t even attempt to control the children — and even if they had tried, they probably wouldn’t have accomplished anything.
The administrators at the elementary school in Newport News, where the kid shot his teacher, were just as useless. In fact, Abby Zwerner — who required multiple surgeries just to regain the use of her hand — filed a lawsuit against the school, and she ultimately won $10 million because of how negligent the administrators were. This is from NBC News.
The Virginia teacher who was shot by her 6-year-old student texted a loved one before she was wounded that the boy was armed and that school officials were failing to act. … Abigail Zwerner sent the text about an hour before she was shot on Jan. 6, saying that the student said he had a gun in his backpack and that administrators at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News weren’t helping.
Around 11:15 in the morning, Zwerner told the administration that the student “had threatened to beat up a classmate.” Then at 12:30, a different teacher told a school administrator that he had searched the boy’s backpack because he thought he might have a weapon. Finally, just before 1 p.m., a third teacher told an administrator that the boy had shown another student a gun at recess, and threatened to shoot him if he told anyone. At that point, another school employee requested another search of the boy’s backpack, which was denied.
The administrator told the employee to “wait the situation out because the school day was almost over,” [the teacher’s attorney] said.
So this is the way public schools handle the news that a 6-year-old has a gun on campus and is threatening to kill other children with it. They just wait for the school day to end, so they don’t have to deal with it. The assistant principal of the school — whose name is Ebony Parker — apparently did not care about any of this. This is on top of the fact that, before the shooting, this 6-year-old had numerous other documented behavior problems, where he attacked students and teachers. The week of the shooting, he threw Zwerner’s phone and destroyed it. Yes, a 6-year-old destroyed his teacher’s phone before shooting her a week later. Whatever the opposite of a “bright future” is, this kid has it coming. But our system isn’t set up to protect innocent people from barbarians like this, so we’re not even allowed to know his name. When he finally murders someone, assuming he’s still a juvenile, they still won’t tell us. They’ll let him out again, in just a few years.
But despite the overwhelming evidence that these schools are full of hopeless, violent, and dangerous children who can never be rehabilitated under any circumstances, and despite the obvious fact that the administrators at these schools are completely incompetent, leftists like Nikole Hannah-Jones insist that inner-city schools are only bad because they’re “under-funded.” But as a basic factual matter, that’s not true. These schools receive some of the highest per-student funding not just in America, but in the world.
Let’s take a closer look at Newport News Public Schools and how much money they receive (and spend) every year. This is taken directly from the district’s website.
This is the fiscal year 2026 budget. As you can see, under the “Estimated Average Per Pupil Cost for Public Education,” they list total financial support, per pupil, at $18,659 per school year. That includes state and federal funding. Your tax dollars at work. Every single year, the government takes about $18,000 from your pocket so that this 6-year-old can get an “education.” And this isn’t unique to Newport News, by the way — $18,000 per student is roughly in line with national averages. So you have to ask — where is this money going, exactly? How much money are the teachers and administrators making to oversee violence and carnage and dysfunction like this? How much money is going to the unions?
Maybe here’s the best question: What was the per-pupil cost to educate a student in 1960 — back when students could actually read and write? If we adjust for inflation, what’s the number? It turns out that the Heritage Foundation has run the numbers on this. They found that, in real dollars (meaning inflation-adjusted), per-pupil spending in American public schools was just $2,763 in 1960. That was four years before LBJ launched his disastrous “Great Society” education programs, which would supposedly end poverty and lead to racial harmony. The spending continued to increase from there. In 1980, per-pupil spending was $7,359. Today, the number is more than twice as high.
So we’re spending more than twice as much to educate each student, compared with 1980, and more than six times what we were spending in 1960. And what are we getting for that money? What’s our return on this massive investment? Evidently, we’re paying for 6-year-old black kids to shoot their teachers, with no oversight whatsoever. All of this money is going into a bottomless pit, to enrich unions and administrators, while schools pretend to educate students who obviously cannot even control their own impulses, much less learn anything. There hasn’t been any improvement in test scores or student aptitude. Everything’s gone in the wrong direction (with one exception we’ll talk about in a moment).
The Stanford economist Eric Hanushek put it this way, “This productivity decline is remarkable, particularly when compared with dynamic improvements in productivity elsewhere in the U.S. economy. Schooling outcomes are the same in 2015 as they were four decades before, even though school funding is now several times as high.”
What a stark and frankly disturbing window into how much the civil rights era has transformed this country and drained our treasury at the same time. And that’s not all. Despite receiving this massive amount of money, the Newport News school district has the audacity to demand even more handouts — directly from local residents. This is a real video the school district produced and uploaded last year.
You’ll get to see exactly where all your donations are going, but as for your tax money? That’s apparently been vaporized. It’s totally gone, just like your Social Security contributions. You don’t get to see that money. But if you donate to the school, on top of your taxes? Sure, you can track that money, no problem.
It’s an incredible video. First, they demand that you hand over the cashback rewards you get from your grocery store. They claim that’s a “smart” thing to do — to just hand over money to them every time you go to the store. And then, they direct you to a donation page, where you can send them even larger amounts of money to fund various “projects” the teachers have set up. The projects, as you just saw on the screen, include a “rug for quiet time” (they need $227 for that). Another project was seeking $208 for some puppets to help ESL students (meaning foreign students who can’t speak English). And then there was the final project — “disinfecting wipes for Ms. Harris’ classroom,” which came in at a relatively modest $44.
So they’re getting $18,000 to educate every student — more than the average school district at any other point in the history of this country, adjusted for inflation — and it’s still not enough. Somehow $18,000 per student doesn’t cover a rug or disinfecting wipes. This is a scam, and they’re not even hiding it. Multiply this one school district by about 14,000, and you get a sense of how big the problem is. We’ve let teachers (and unions and administrators) run amok for far too long, and occupy a kind of privileged status where no one’s allowed to criticize them. But the fact is, they’re doing a horrible job. They’re getting more money than ever, and they’re producing worse results. In any other industry, that means they would all lose their jobs. And that’s exactly what needs to happen here.
The only state that’s moving substantially in a positive direction is Mississippi, which used to be one of the worst-performing states in the entire country, in terms of student achievement. Their 4th grade reading scores ranked 49th in the nation in 2013. By 2024, they were up to 9th place. Math proficiency increased by more than 12%. I don’t want to overstate this progress — students in Mississippi are still underperforming by 8th grade. But they made a drastic improvement for elementary school students in a relatively short period of time. And it’s very clear what they did. First, they refused to allow students to progress a grade if they couldn’t read. They recognized that, in a functioning school, some students simply do not deserve to take up space in the classroom. They also taught students how letters correspond to different sounds — which sounds pretty basic, but before that, they were basically telling students to guess how to pronounce words, based on context clues. These are pretty obvious, common-sense reforms. But in most states, school administrators don’t even bother with any kind of reforms. They’re happy to continue making more and more money every year, while their students shoot at them.
The public school system is irreparably broken and useless now primarily because, in general, it refuses to admit that many of its students — like the one who shot his teacher — simply cannot be reformed. And normal civilized children should not be forced to share a class with them. If they could simply admit this, then they wouldn’t need $18,000 per student. They could go back to spending just $2,000 per student. All they have to do is refuse to “educate” the students who cannot be educated.
This is the approach we need to adopt, because the prevailing educational model — the one we’ve tried over the past 60 to 70 years — is now dead. There might be scattered pockets in the country where the public school system is still relatively functional, but that will change. “Diversity” had already put it on its deathbed, thanks to kids like the one in that video. And new changes like AI have destroyed whatever hope there might have still been for the system. At the scale of mass government-run education, there’s really no way to stop students from using AI for every assignment. And that’s exactly what every kid in public school is doing. And at a certain level, you can’t even blame the kids. When your teachers are illiterate, ChatGPT may seem like a better option. And I’m not exaggerating here — the teachers are indeed illiterate. In 2017, New York eliminated the “Academic Literacy Skills test” as a requirement for teacher certification, because the non-white teachers were failing it at extremely high rates. White teachers were passing at a rate of 64% on the first try, while black candidates had a pass rate around 40%.
Here’s a sample question, to give you an idea how absurdly easy it was. This is from a practice test on Study.com.
So the answer, as you might have guessed, is “Take notes.” The answer is not to rush through the text and never look at it again. Who could’ve guessed? Apparently, this kind of question was truly vexing for the overwhelming number of non-white teachers who took the test.
Here’s another.
This could be a tough one, if you’ve never seen a TV show or a movie, or read a book, or talked to another human being at any point in your life. It’s obviously “C,” or “headings” — which is not an element of narrative. These are basic questions for a child. But New York teachers simply could not get these questions right, because most of them can barely speak English.
Additionally, this year, they got rid of the “ATAS,” which was a test for teaching assistants. They replaced it with a more “modern test,” which presumably means that too many people were failing the old one. So let’s try a couple of those questions from the old test. Here’s one, from Study.com.
It’s multiple choice. Is the answer 7 feet? 8 feet? 5 feet? Or 6 feet?
So they actually tell you that there are 12 inches in a foot, just in case you’re from Uganda and have no idea how anything works in this country. And then they ask you to do some very basic multiplication in your head. Seventy-two inches is what you get when you multiply 12 inches by six. When you multiply one foot by six, you get six feet. Therefore, the answer is six feet.
This is a question you’d expect teaching assistants in public schools to answer. But that’s no longer necessary. Here’s question two. And again, I’m not making this up.
You can tell, just reading these responses, that the people who wrote this test spent about five minutes writing the questions and answers. (A) and (C) are extremely similar responses, and neither of them makes sense. (D) is, very explicitly, a nonsense answer. It’s a joke, really. Obviously, if you’re going to grade students, you need criteria — meaning, a basis for giving them grades. Now, teaching assistants in New York apparently don’t need to figure this out.
So for now, if you have a 5-year-old child, and you’re deciding how to educate them in the modern world, you basically have only two viable options: spend a lot of money on one of the relatively few truly elite private schools, or (if you aren’t a millionaire, or even if you are) homeschool — which includes highly localized and small-scale homeschool co-ops and homeschool academies. You might be able to find scattered pockets here and there where the public school system is still moderately functional. But those places are extremely expensive — and they’re basically the same as paying for a private school when you factor in the costs of living in those districts.
Unfortunately, there’s very little hope that the school system will improve in any widespread, measurable, lasting way. Especially because now the institution exists to protect itself. Teachers’ unions remain some of the biggest funders of Democrats. In public school systems in Democrat-controlled states, they can’t be fired even if they’re drinking on the job or openly wishing death on their students. These are not exaggerations, by the way. These are real cases. In 2010, a tenured 5th-grade New York school teacher named Christine Rubino posted the following statement to her Facebook account after a student drowned while on a class field trip to the beach. She wrote, “After today, I am thinking the beach sounds like a wonderful idea for my 5th graders! I HATE THEIR GUTS! They are the devil’s spawn!” One of Rubino’s friends responded, “Oh you would let little Kwame float away!” And Rubino replied, “Yes, I would not throw a life jacket in for a million!” Rubino was fired, appealed her termination, and was reinstated because, according to the courts, “While her reference to a child’s death is repulsive, there is no evidence that her postings are part of a pattern of conduct.”
Then there was the case of Nicholas Cilento, “a special-education teacher at Colonia High School who was fired by the Woodbridge school district after he was found consuming alcohol on school grounds.” He was actually caught drinking on two separate days. But he had “tenure” — which is an absurd concept for anyone, much less a special-education teacher — so they had to hold a hearing. And at this hearing, Cilento claimed to be an alcoholic, so it really wasn’t his fault. A state arbitrator bought it, and overturned the firing. He eventually got his license suspended for just two years.
And on and on. These people are untouchable because they look out for one another. They unionize. They lobby. And it’s working. Even though birthrates are low and student enrollment is declining, their budgets — and the number of administrators — keep rising. It’s been a steady, massive increase from 1960, every single decade.
COVID was probably one of the final nails in the coffin. Teachers and unions fought to close the schools for as long as possible. They showed their cards, revealing that they don’t think the schools are all that important or necessary. Or else they do think the schools are important and necessary, but they were willing to deprive the kids of the important and necessary thing in order to protect themselves from the flu. Either way, there’s no coming back from it. No matter how much bodycam footage they hide, and no matter how many literacy tests they shut down, everyone is now well aware that the public school system is not only useless, but actively counterproductive. It endangers students while protecting its own, by design. Whatever alternative you’re thinking about for your own children — whether it’s home-schooling, private school, or something else — you should rest assured that it can’t possibly be any worse than what these vultures have been selling ever since LBJ promised to end poverty. It turns out, no matter how much money you throw at these people, they don’t change. They only demand more, to the point that they’re begging for your credit card rewards at the grocery store. If that 6-year-old school shooter accomplishes anything in his life, it will be helping millions of Americans realize that it’s time to stop giving it to them.
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