I continually refer to the education situation in the US for two reasons: 1) Education is about the future, and 2) as a result public citizen involvement in education politics is a good proxy for anxiety and anger of people who have most at stake in a raw emotional sense.
There’s good news. The Covid Regime backfired in a number of ways, and one of the most significant is that parents, forced to endure their kids’ Zoom classes at home, found out to their horror exactly what is going on in the schools. We’ve seen the result—a parent uprising across much of the country, leading to a stunning political upset in Virginia and to calls from the Left to designate involved parents as “domestic terrorists” and even to deploy National Guard troops at school board meetings.
Recently we’ve seen more evidence of the continued public reaction. One, of course, is the rise of home schooling—which appears to have acquired some permanence, not just an overnight reaction. So,
NSBA 'imploding,' 'getting everything it deserves,' following mass state exodus:
Education activists The National School Boards Association's letter to the DOJ compared protesting parents' actions to domestic terrorism
With the Wisconsin Association of School Boards' (WASB) decision to cut ties with the National School Boards Association (NSBA), more than half of the nation's state school board associations have withdrawn from the group since it sent a letter to the Justice Department to investigate parents for "domestic terrorism."
"Parents have seen the inside of the public school beast and understand better than ever who is feeding this beast, and are responding with a loud voice of not my child, not on my watch," Moms for America Senior Director Quisha King told Fox News Digital. "US State school boards associations are seeing the reactions of parents in many ways, from speaking up at school board meetings to getting their children out of these classrooms and state school boards know they do not want more problems with parents across America."
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Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, similarly applauded the mass exodus, but feared it won't solve the "underlying problem."
"While it's good that over half of the state affiliates have left NSBA, new organizations will spring up in its place, and the underlying problem will still remain: publicly-supported trade associations which claim to represent the views of their constituents are in fact ideologically-captured entities working at cross-purposes to what the majority of American people actually want," Neily said. "It's time to cut off the spigot to these institutions so our tax dollars aren't weaponize against us in the future ever again."
That, of course, is the key: Funding. “Publicly supported” unions of civil servants who enjoy virtual job tenure is an inherently corrupt situation that is inevitably at odds with the interests of the public. Teachers unions and their support network of government “education” agencies will not go away without a monumental fight, because they are a key to the entire Prog agenda:
Fight for Schools executive director Ian Prior also predicted another, just as problematic entity will rise in its place.
"The NSBA is getting everything it deserves for colluding with the Biden Administration to weaponize federal law enforcement to track down parents exercising their First Amendment rights by speaking up at school board meetings," Prior told Fox Digital. "But while the NSBA is imploding, the equally anti-parent state school board associations are continuing to work against parents and will ultimately regroup into an NSBA-like organization and it will be important for parents to continue to exercise citizen oversight over any replacement organization and its state members."
The NSBA did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
This next education story is quite amazing. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds pulled a page from Trump’s book:
School choice teaches Iowa Republicans a big lesson
Gov. Reynolds wins big with education agenda crushing primary opponents
School choice was on the ballot in the Iowa Republican primaries last week, and it won. It’s the latest in a series of state primaries where school choice has been emerging as a litmus-test issue for GOP primary voters.
Iowa stands out as a bellwether because of the high-profile battle over school choice between Gov. Kim Reynolds — a rising leader in the GOP who was recently tapped to respond to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address — and fellow Republican lawmakers in the statehouse.
Reynolds had a plan:
One of Reynolds’s top legislative priorities this year was a bill that would have created state-funded education savings accounts (ESAs) that families could use to customize their child’s education. Similar to policies in 10 other states, families could use ESAs to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, and a variety of other education-related expenses.
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"If education truly is the great equalizer," Reynolds declared, "we should create opportunities for more families to provide their children with the education choice that’s best for them. That’s exactly what this legislation does."
The plan easily passed the GOP controlled Senate, but then faced “fierce” opposition in the 60% GOP House. Reynolds didn’t just fold. She threatened to hold up the budget, and even delayed it, but the House GOP held firm against her, believing they had public support. Reynolds finally signed the budget, but she wasn’t done:
In the GOP primary, the governor backed nine pro-school choice candidates, including — in a rare move — several challengers to incumbent legislators who had blocked her proposal. Eight of them won.
The most prominent scalp belonged to Rep. Dustin Hite, an incumbent backed by the teachers’ union who blocked the governor’s school-choice bill as Chair of the House Education Committee. He was soundly defeated by school-choice proponent Helena Hayes, who secured 57% of the vote.
The article goes on to describe what a winning issue school choice is across the country. And the great thing about—wormwood for the Progs—is that it sucks money away from the government schools and gives it to the parents. In the hard times to come that could be another winning issue:
Opponents of school choice have long claimed that the issue was a political loser and, despite polling to the contrary, many in the establishment believed that narrative. These election results, particularly in Iowa, dispel that narrative.
Nationwide, 47 out of 59 candidates supported by the pro-school choice American Federation for Children Action Fund and its affiliates have won their primaries or advanced to run-offs so far this year.
These results shouldn’t be surprising. Earlier this year, a RealClearOpinion poll found that 72 percent of registered voters nationwide favored school choice, including 67 percent of independents, 68 percent of Democrats, and 82 percent of Republicans.
The additional good news may be that the GOP may have found another fighter. Trump, DeSantis, now Reynolds.
Very encouraging!
Will be interesting to see what the Supremes do on the Harvard and UNC cases in October. Was disappointed in Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett (Roberts, too, but no great surprise there) by their refusal to vacate a 4th Circuit stay of a District Court ruling that a new admissions policy at a local, specialized high school for science and tech (often rated best HS in the nation) affirmatively discriminated against Asian Americans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/25/supreme-court-high-school-admissions-race/
The policy change was most-obviously NOT about "undoing white supremacy." A school that was 71% white in 2000 had changed to 66% Asian American by 2020, simply as a result of which kids did best on the admissions test. Both as a local taxpayer and as an American, this is what I want--our best resources being made available to our brightest minds, regardless of what other descriptor appears before the hyphen in "_______-American." In a world where an increasing portion of seats at MIT, Caltech and the like are going to foreign nationals, it really comes down to promoting our own national interest...for once.
The public school system has to go. It serves no purpose. It doesn't educate our kids. Every homeschooled kid is another kid saved from evil leftwing propaganda.