Briefly Noted: Recommended Reads 8/29/21
Yesterday I recommended an article by Paul Gottfried, The Emerging One-Party State. Today Emerald Robinson has an article at her Substack (H/T Ray So-Cal) that offers a bit of a contrast:
How The GOP Committed Suicide Trying to Stop Trump
America Has Never Been Closer to Uni-Party Rule
As you can see, each perceives our traditional two party system--traditional, but never actually envisioned by the Founders--as in danger of giving way to One Party Rule under the form of two parties. Robinson focuses on the GOP leaders--McConnell and McCarthy--and understandably so. The picture she paints is dark, and that's also understandable. I accept that. Gottfried sees possibilities for moving past the situation we find ourselves in, and I accept that, too. I see hope, especially, in the House, where the Representatives are in closer contact with the People.
See what you think.
Matt Welch today hits on another topic that we covered yesterday in the same post referenced with regard to Paul Gottfried: Christian Schools Vastly Outperforming Public Schools During COVID-19, According to New Survey of Parents.
I won't repeat the data here, but I do recommend Welch's article, which is written specifically from a New York City perspective:
Families Are Fleeing Government-Run Schools
Brooklyn elementary loses one-third of its student population and eight teachers, as the first 2021–22 enrollment numbers straggle in.
Welch, like me, sees the turn from government schools as a good thing. Well, I see it as a very good thing. In his closing paragraphs Welch addresses some of the implications that go beyond simply getting children out of an indoctrination system:
We made our decision to leave the public elementary school right as de Blasio started speaking in near-absolutist terms about getting buildings open five days a week. As the check-clearing deadline for private school approached, the calculation went mostly like this: Do we actually trust the New York system to devise rules that will keep classrooms reliably open? The answer, even in those pre–delta variant days, was hell no. Yesterday's protocols confirmed that suspicion.
If the New York example plays out nationwide—and keep in mind, the 2020–21 K-12 decline happened absolutely everywhere—then the impact on public education, local and state governance, and politics itself could be profound. About one out of every five state-government dollars is spent on primary and secondary education. Spending formulas tied to enrollment will see major declines; those that aren't will face political pressure from taxpayers rightly wondering why the bill is so high for a service fewer people want. The trend toward tethering education spending to students rather than school buildings will continue shooting upward.
All of which would be another reason to view 2020–21 to be the apex of teachers union power, to be followed by inexorable descent. They got their work-at-home carveouts, their school closures, their preferred party running the federal government, their vaccine fast-tracking, their fingerprints all over the "science," and their hundreds of billions in federal largesse. And as a result of all that influence, they created a product that's literally repellant to millions of parents, even at the cost of free. Their ranks will almost certainly thin.
"[American Federation of Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten] seems blithely unaware that parents' patience is not inexhaustible, and bizarrely determined to alienate her members' most stalwart supporters: parents like those in Park Slope who pride themselves on being good progressives and public school parents," wrote American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Robert Pondiscio this week. "I'm still of the mind that 'new normal' talk is overwrought, but I'm far less confident of that assertion than I was at the outset of the pandemic. The long-standing practice of sending kids to zoned neighborhood schools is still a hard habit to break. What I didn't expect was how many public school supporters—from governors and teachers unions to local administrators and school boards—would be so determined to break it."
Hope for the future.
Lastly, here's a 20 minute podcast that offers hope in the treatment of the Dread Delta, which this doctor states appears less deadly than earlier variants:
Mayo Clinic-Trained Pathologist: Early Treatment Is Key to Fighting Delta Variant