Satire?

The public schools of the United States have become increasingly broken, failing to teach math and science, with the US placing 25th among 37 OECD countries for 15 year olds. Teacher unions have long prioritized teachers’ well being over students, and woke causes over basic skills, leading America to fall far behind other developed countries. Fewer and fewer Americans are opting to bother going to college or graduate schools, leading to a giant visa program for people of the Global South to enter the US, with a record 1.1 million international students in the US in 2023/4.

President Donald Trump applied the woke-standard of absolutism like “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” to begin the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education and move control of schools to the states. He orchestrated a photo op with signing an executive order in front of school children which bemoaned the DOE’s spending over $3 trillion since its creation in 1979, without improving student knowledge.

The photo session included a young Orthodox Jewish student in the background. It was perhaps not surprising, as Trump was the only president to invite an Orthodox rabbi to speak at his inaugurations – both times.

When Trump held the signed EO aloft and the other students similarly did so, the Orthodox boy in large blue kippah continued to write. People speculated whether he had OCD and was compulsively checking his spelling. Perhaps he was correcting grammar in the EO or adding footnotes like the biblical commentator Rashi (1040-1105).

Others wondered whether the boy was asking Trump to protect yeshivas in Brooklyn which are being closed right-and-left for failing to teach secular studies, or perhaps leave the DOE open a little longer to root out rampant antisemitism on campuses.

It is rumored that both Sotheby’s and Kestenbaum & Company are fighting to obtain the Jewish boy’s mock EO for auction.