Anything less than school choice is unfair
Even Occupy Democrats sees how unfair it is to deny school choice.
The unfairness of government monopolies is impossible to deny. The latest Occupy Democrats meme to hit my Facebook feed decries the unfairness of putting a mother in jail for the crime of… exercising school choice.
According to Occupy Democrats, Tanya McDowell went to jail for five years because she lied about her district in order to get her child into a better school.
Ignore for the moment that the real reason McDowell went to jail is for selling drugs. Under conservative proposals for school choice, their hypothetical McDowell wouldn’t have had to lie about where she lived to send her child to a better school. Lying about her address would never have had to be a part of that plea bargain. Even as a homeless person she could have sent her child to whatever district she wanted, and her child’s portion of school funds would have followed that choice.
The choice of district is one of the simplest forms of school choice that conservatives support.
The unfairness of our current government-run school system is so obvious that even the far left, pro-big-government, Occupy Democrats can’t resist using it to highlight the blatant racism of the system.
Because it is blatantly racist. Whenever Democrats criminalize school choice, they’re always criminalizing the choice of underserved communities, the choice of poorer parents, the choice of minority children. When Democrats shut down school choice options, they are almost always school choice options that save predominantly minority communities from failing schools.
It wasn’t Republicans who cancelled the DC Voucher program. It was Democrats, under President Obama—who sent his own children to a very expensive private school.
It’s Democrats who keep criminalizing school choice, who trap children in failing schools, who continually force parents to throw good money after bad instead of allowing parents to choose what school best fits their children. Instead of letting parents decide. The hardest thing for politicians to do is to let us make our own decisions. It is the nature of politics that politicians think they know better than us what we need; making our choices for us is why they got into politics.
And eventually, they always end up pointing a gun at us to force us to make the choice they think we should make. They always end up putting us in jail for disagreeing with their choices for us.
Support for school choice runs high not just among conservatives but across class and race lines. If Occupy Democrats really wanted to occupy the Democrats and change that party for the better, fixing the government school monopoly would be a great bipartisan choice.
In response to 2019 in Photos: For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2019.
- OccupyDemocrats breaks with teacher unions, demands school choice
- In a major break with a critical Democrat power base, OccupyDemocrats accuses Democrats, NEA, and former President Obama with “denying minority children the right to quality education in order to keep them in chains to a failed ideology.”
- No room for education reform in spending frenzy
- In a year of record spending, the one thing we apparently can’t afford is saving money on better education.
- This Felicity Huffman and Tanya McDowell Meme You’ve Been Sharing is Fake News
- “Tanya McDowell was not sentenced to prison for 5 years for lying about her address. She was sentenced to five years in prison as part of a package deal involving her lying about living in a school district and also being a drug dealer.”
More educational diversity
- COVID Lessons: How can we respond to a disease before it spreads?
- How can we make ourselves less vulnerable to sudden epidemics, before they become epidemics, and without causing epidemic levels of deaths?
- COVID Lessons: Government Monopolies are Still Monopolies
- Our response to COVID-19 was almost designed to make it worse. We shut down the nimble small businesses that could respond quickly, and relied almost solely on large corporations and the government monopolies that failed us, because they are monopolies.
- Why is it so difficult to hold schools accountable?
- Simulating accountability in education has the same problems as simulating accountability in health care or any other monopoly. Tests and grades and paperwork are never as effective as choice.
- OccupyDemocrats breaks with teacher unions, demands school choice
- In a major break with a critical Democrat power base, OccupyDemocrats accuses Democrats, NEA, and former President Obama with “denying minority children the right to quality education in order to keep them in chains to a failed ideology.”
- Is Trump calling the bluff of establishment Republicans?
- By appointing Republicans who have promised to reduce government into the very areas they’ve promised to depower, is Trump calling the establishment’s bluff?
- 11 more pages with the topic educational diversity, and other related pages
More government schools
- On education, the left is mired in the fifties
- Why don’t schools have locked doors? Because when it comes to education, especially K-12, the left, as in so many things, is mired in the distant industrialized assembly-line past.
- Why is it so difficult to hold schools accountable?
- Simulating accountability in education has the same problems as simulating accountability in health care or any other monopoly. Tests and grades and paperwork are never as effective as choice.
- Democrats endorse public school elections, teacher recalls?
- Should legislators and teachers be evaluated for job performance in the same way? A group called Winning Democrats suggests that public school teachers should be elected positions rather than tenured, and that teachers should be subject to recall by the communities they serve.
- What is a captive audience, anyway?
- G.K. Chesterton writes, in Eugenics and Other Evils, that whenever someone starts asking “what is x anyway?” you know they’re trying to pull some wool over your eyes and make it the default. So, really, what is a captive audience, anyway?
- Oregon schools call minorities “shiftless & mindless”
- Oregon white privilege conference says blacks, hispanics best-suited for taking orders from white masters, as they are unable to make decisions for themselves, think for themselves, and achieve success without direction.
- Eight more pages with the topic government schools, and other related pages
More Occupy Democrats
- OccupyDemocrats breaks with teacher unions, demands school choice
- In a major break with a critical Democrat power base, OccupyDemocrats accuses Democrats, NEA, and former President Obama with “denying minority children the right to quality education in order to keep them in chains to a failed ideology.”