It’s often said that you know you’re over the target when you start catching flak. Judging by a recent article from Vox and the flak it spewed, it seems like those encouraging school choice options such as Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are most certainly over the target, and woe to anyone who dares provide an alternative to the sacred public education system.
According to Vox‘s Andrew Prokop, supporters of school choice tried for years to get alternative education options to catch on. These efforts were all in vain … until the COVID pandemic hit. Suddenly, legislatures across America were piling on the bandwagon and passing legislation allowing education dollars to follow students, thus giving parents the ability to decide and choose where to send their children to school, rather than simply being assigned to one because of their zip code.
Prokop describes this change as though it’s some deep-seated conspiracy. But there’s nothing conspiratorial about it. All that’s at work is common sense.
The fact is, COVID enlightened parents to what was actually going on in school classrooms. And those parents didn’t like what they saw.
As Prokop explains, critics of school choice say that such choice is “the destruction of the common good” and that money will go to “low-quality private schools that don’t actually educate children well.” But parents, in their wisdom, looked at what their children were learning at government schools and said, “You call that the common good? How is it the common good if my child learns about changing his gender, but is part of the 67% of the nation’s public school fourth graders who can’t read proficiently?”
The fact is, the form of education that media like Vox and other public figures seem to prefer is now exposed and the exposure isn’t pretty. All they have left in their toolkit is to vilify parents and make them look like poor, ignorant conspiracy theorists.
Don’t let them do that. You are the parents. You are smart. And you know what is best for your children.
“The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds.” – John Taylor Gatto, former New York teacher of the year
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Image Credit: Wallpaper Flare
