Education

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe infamously said at the second debate in September 2021. His comments opened an opportunity for Republican upstarts Glenn Youngkin and Winsome Earle-Sears, running for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively, to seize control of the educational debate. “In our poll, we were showing that we were hitting, like, a 45” percent polling average before McAuliffe’s debate comments," Sears admitted to me in an interview. But McAuliffe’s comments (and the campaign materials printed about them) opened the spigot, and the votes for Youngkin came pouring out.

In theory, the SCOTUS decision to strike down affirmative action in higher education should be considered as part of the post-George Floyd racial reckoning to “dismantle systematic racism.” But judging by the hysteria going on over at MSNBC and condemnations from President Biden, it’s clear that the activist class and American intelligentsia have a very different conception of what exactly constitutes racial justice. Two and a half years on, this racial reckoning has instead produced higher murder rates, generational declines in basic literacy among students — with the sharpest declines among black and Latino kids — and a massive transfer of wealth to an ever-growing DEI bureaucracy, BLM grifters and gurus like Ibram X.

A “Chinese puzzle” in its classic version is a game where you must fit a variety of ill-assorted boxes inside other boxes. The term came to mean any intricate problem, especially one in which what looks like the way forward leads only to new obstacles.   These days, in which we are warned not to use ethnonyms for fear of giving offense, it might be safer to say something like “brainteaser.” But the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate American society genuinely deserve the old term. The news this past week adds a few curious details to those efforts. Details first; explanations to follow.

Only occasionally in American history does an issue surface that challenges not only the values of an established political party but the party’s ability to function. If any such issue has emerged in our own time, it's clearly school choice. The evolution of such a diverse educational marketplace — private schooling, homeschooling and tutoring, among other options — will severely reduce the Democratic Party’s election workforce, squeeze its finances and even discredit its basic philosophy. Consider first the workforce. If nothing else, the widespread subsidy of K-12 grade schooling in venues not run by teachers' unions would deplete the enormous army of campaign workers that Democrats have come to depend upon during every election cycle.

A public school teacher for three decades, my mother kept me out of them for nearly a third of that time. Her refusal to allow me to partake of the public education system that paid her bills echoed a memorable quote of G.K. Chesterton’s: “Everyone goes to the elementary schools except the few people who tell them to go there.”  If the recent numbers are any indication, more people have followed her example. In 2019, about 2.8 percent of US students were homeschooled. By 2020, that number had jumped to 5.4 percent. And in 2021, it was up to 11.1 percent. Research from Stanford and the Associated Press places the overall increase in enrollment since the beginning of the pandemic at 30 percent.  Around the country, red-state politicians are taking notice.

In a surprise development, teachers' unions in eight states recently announced drives to pass legislation that would establish so-called “wealth taxes.” Working with progressive legislators in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, and Washington, the unions have devised what they believe are the best ways to tap, not just the incomes, but the assets of the most successful earners. Under the bill proposed in California, for example, residents with both financial and illiquid assets would be required to file yearly reports on their holdings, obligating those worth more than a certain amount to pay 1 to 1.5 percent of the total to Sacramento, even if they move out.

Another school year has begun. It's another year that I’m grateful to have left public education. From the outside, it doesn’t make much sense for me to have left. I had a good reputation in my district among staff, students, and administration. The pay at public schools is markedly better. And being a private school teacher makes you something of an outcast among teacher colleagues — never quite “one of us.” I did not leave because of the standard accusation — that I couldn’t “handle it.” In many ways, my private school jobs have been far more difficult than my public school one.

A new Arizona law which funds all the state’s K-12th grade children to attend a school of their family’s choosing, public or private, has been widely hailed as a landmark education reform, although evidence suggests the benefits will go far beyond academics. Studies by the Manhattan Institute, New Jersey’s E3, and Connecticut’s Yankee Institute all show that subsidizing students to use alternative placements would save any state millions each year. But perhaps the most unexpected promise of universal school choice is the impact it would have on area real estate markets, simultaneously lowering the cost of what families must pay for a desirable home, improving the value of distressed areas, and equalizing the quality of life between rich and poor communities.