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Accountability education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Weak Link in Chain of Corruption

How do you replace anti-​child school board members with persons of common sense? That is, with those who favor educating children rather than indoctrinating them with socialism and racism?

This is not a battle that all parents need to fight directly on behalf of their own children. Those who can enroll them in a sane private or charter school, or homeschool them, may do that instead.

But parents who are taking on corrupt school boards have found a couple of very effective approaches.

One, recall campaigns. 

Some board members are so horrible that parents will catapult themselves to polling stations for the chance to oust them. Unfortunately, not all voters everywhere have the right to recall crummy officials.

Two, regular board elections.

But to succeed in replacing the zanies entrenched in many school boards with better persons, one must field appropriate candidates.

Among those who have been doing the necessary preparatory work in Minnesota, where “the teachers’ union, Education Minnesota, has largely run our state for decades,” are John Hinderaker of Powerline fame and the members of his organization Minnesota Parents Alliance.

The Alliance reports that in the recent election, its candidates won 49 seats statewide, “with victories in 15 of 19 targeted districts.”

It’s just a beginning. But, wow, a substantial beginning. And fast. The Alliance was created only a year ago. This achievement is also a ray of hope and proof of concept that we parents (and grandparents; and uncles and aunts) in the other 49 states really need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
education and schooling free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

The Pushers

When I was a teenager, my mom attended nursing school and became very interested in nutrition. This had consequences.

She stopped buying sugary cereals, for instance. Well! We could not supinely accept this. My younger brother hid Cap’n Crunch and other stuff like that under his bed; and when we wanted a bedtime snack, we’d find him and barter on the black market.

I cite those halcyon days of determined resistance as a relatively benign example of adults regulating kids. Parents have that job. Mom was certainly within her rights. Yet children, although they should gladly obey all reasonable parental injunctions, can only be expected to resist when parental prerogatives stray into sugary-​cereal-​banning territory.

How much more enthusiastically, then, must we cheer kids who valiantly evade not the proper authority of parents but the improper, pushy, Puritanical programs of joy-​stomping institutional busybodies?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Are you by any chance referring to the efforts of Michelle Obama and snivelingly acquiescent educrats to expel anything tasty from school lunchrooms across the land, as if innocuous condiments were the equivalent of strychnine?” Correct!

I’m also talking about kids “caught bringing — and even selling[!!] — salt, pepper, and sugar” to rescue their taste buds from the arbitrarily bland fare.

Good going, guys! And if moms and dads want to take this Declaration of Independence even further, let them yank their kids out of these places and find another way to teach them the ABCs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Lunchroom Black Market

 

Categories
education and schooling

Legislation for Graduation

The most obvious problem with government-​run schools is that, well, politicians are in charge.

Two Arizona solons have written bills to require high schoolers to pledge their loyalty and allegiance to the Constitution in order to graduate. You’ve probably heard about at least one of these bills, since it affixes a “so help me God” phrase at the end, and that would pose a problem for atheists … and for those pious folks who don’t believe in swearing by the God they believe in.

While most of the media coverage has focused on that tacked-​on “so help me God” aspect, both measures seem “tacked on” to me: Tacked on to the end of a high school career. Pretend you are a student. You’ve worked hard, or at least hard enough to graduate. Much of your future employment depends on your diploma. And now some politician is going to require that you recite a loyalty oath to the federal (not state) government?

Sounds like something more appropriate to a Communist dictatorship.

Stranger yet is the bill, proposed but not moved forward, further north:

Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

Before one hyperventilates, it’s worth noting that the good Sen. Goedde did this to “send a message,” so to speak, to the State Board of Education because of his unhappiness with their recent moves lowering graduation requirements and canceling evaluations of principals.

Well, I guess there’s method to his madness. And besides, there are worse books.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.