Universal School Choice is our Only Choice Now

Close your eyes, relax, the government is your friend …

Over time, the nation’s conservative movement has made—and in some cases continues to make—two fundamental ideological mistakes in its efforts to sustain the long-term integrity of the Republic, the first being a multiple generational failure to confront the growth of the administrative state and the second being the lack of an absolute commitment to universal school choice.

Not only is the fiscal reality of gargantuan government unsustainable—i.e., the nation’s profligate debt that chokes our standard of living—so is the totalitarian reality of big government itself—namely, self-proliferating regulations that suffocate individual liberty. Equally disastrous and perhaps more so has been the facilitation of government control of education, both on the federal and state levels. Not least, under government command of education, the teaching of critical thinking skills has been replaced by the hypnosis of compliance to government narratives and commands.

In the globalist world view, totalitarians are freedom fighters working hard to save democracy, (whatever that might be, but it sounds good in a slogan), while men are women, and women, well, they don’t really exist, not really. All this is so much nonsense, but it is also what is being taught to our children in many if not most government schools.

After all, as any bureaucrat knows, there’s little need for re-education camps when you control the education camps in the first place. Little wonder that a monopoly of government schools leads to a monopoly of thought, and a claim of monopoly on the children themselves.

And yet for decades conservatives have approached school choice with indifference and lip service at best to hostility at worst. From Texas (at least until very recently) to South Carolina, Republican legislatures beholden to special interests have fought the implementation of choice, while, in states like Wisconsin, conservatives have for some reason failed to pass universal school choice when they had the chance.

It’s not like school choice is a backwater issue—who will raise and educate our children would seem to be a top-shelf priority. And keeping government from controlling that priority is as fundamental to a free people as freedom of speech. Indeed, the latter is not possible without the former.

Certainly the Founders knew that when they excluded the federal government from any role in education as a way to preserve the sanctity of local and parental control, even though they recognized the need for education as essential to the Republic’s survival. And they also knew that, while education must be left to the states, it must ultimately be left not to government at all but to parents.

To that end, Thomas Jefferson tried and failed in 1778 to have the Virginia legislature pass his “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” an effort to establish a parent-controlled, decentralized and free (for three years) school system. Some have used this bill to proclaim Jefferson’s dedication to a government education cartel but nothing could be further from the truth. His proposed schools were not compulsory, and power was concentrated in the families whose youth would attend them.

Years later, Jefferson was still promoting education of the citizenry, and he was still opposing government control of that education. In 1816 he wrote to his protégé Joseph Cabell concerning the establishment of elementary schools throughout Virginia, and in it he made his view of government schools clear:

“If however it is intended that the State government shall take this business into its own hands, and provide schools for every county, ….if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the Governor & council, the Commissioners of the literary fund, or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.”

Throughout his life, Jefferson called for education under parental control, not government control, and he went so far as to predict—presciently so—that government schools “would be badly managed, depraved by abuses ….”

Depravity squared, multiplied exponentially

Speaking of depraved, this past week provided us with two immediate examples of why universal school choice is so necessary—actually, we have no choice but to guarantee school choice if the future is to be secured—and the first one comes from right here in Wisconsin, where newly re-elected and apparently depraved state superintendent Jill Underly turned down the Trump administration’s demand that the state certify its compliance with federal civil rights law.

The U.S. Department of Education sent letters to state education agencies requiring them to certify their compliance with what the administration called their anti-discrimination obligations, specifically, compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the responsibilities outlined in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which outlawed race-based affirmative action programs.

“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor said. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements. Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI.”

Trainor said the administration was also ensuring that states understand—and comply with—their existing obligations under Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

“As chief justice Roberts wrote, ‘Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,’” he said. “No student should be denied opportunities or treated differently because of his or her race. We hope all state and local education agencies agree and certify their compliance with this legal and constitutional principle.”

Underly refused.

In an April 18 letter, the DPI’s general counsel, Benjamin Jones, in a final response, enclosed signed, certified assurances from each of the 460 local educational agencies (LEAs) in the state that each would “comply with all applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, including, but not limited to, applicable provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).”

What the DPI did not do was provide any certification that they were complying with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—the administration’s second specific request—and it also did not enclose any certification that the DPI itself was complying with federal law and the court decision. That’s important because, arguably, the DPI is not complying with federal law with respect to removing DEI and its ideological foundations from its programs, including critical race theory’s assertions of systemic racism in society.

To cite just one example, on its website, the DPI has a page entitled, “Addressing Bias in Comprehensive Special Education Evaluation.” So far, so good, but just what is this bias?

Oops, turns out its systemic racism:

“Active steps” means providing a “culturally responsive” understanding of students’ academic and functional performance, according to the website. In other words, lower standards overall and performance metrics based on racial and other identity group characteristics: 

Educators are required to “be prepared to address students’ academic, behavioral, social and emotional, and mental health needs … in a manner that does not marginalize students, especially those who are members of historically marginalized groups (e.g., students of color, students who live in poverty, students with disabilities, multilingual learners, students who are LGBTQ+ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or other).”

There’s more, lots more. Last fall, at the Educational Equity Fall Institute, the DPI invited educators to participate absolutely free with funds provided by the Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), you know, by taxpayers. Among other things, they heard from Dr. McKinney de Royston, whose research and teaching, so her bio states, examine “how educators’ political clarity can be reflected in their pedagogical practices in ways that support the intellectual thriving and holistic well-being of racially and economically minoritized learners.”

In other words, translating the progressive academic gobbledygook, she looks for ways for teachers to embed left-wing ideology (political clarity) in their teaching practices in DEI classrooms.

Then, DPI staff provided an overview of “racial disproportionality in education, offering key insights into how it impacts students and systems in our state.” Finally, participants explored the “concept of systemic change in education, gaining clarity on their own roles in initiating and sustaining meaningful transformation. They will also be introduced to the Theory of Change, a powerful framework for mapping out the short- and long-term actions necessary to achieve sustainable equity practices.”

Theory of Change, by the way, is described as “a radical learning agenda in development.” It seeks not incremental change but transformative change, delivered in challenges to existing power structures.

So no wonder the DPI doesn’t want to comply. Its intersectional irrationality is drip, drip, dripping from the top through the veins of educators across the state, and it’s making its way into our children’s curricula, their classroom discussions and presentations, and ultimately into their impressionable minds. And, no, children are not being merely exposed to different ways of thinking, they are being indoctrinated. The question is, what choice do parents have?

The answer is, without universal school choice, not much. Whatever becomes of the Trump administration’s threat to cut off federal aid, until fundamental change happens at the state level, the status quo will endure.

Underly said as much in announcing her resistance. Her refusal risks the loss of federal funding, about $842 million, but she said she would sue. And if that doesn’t work, she said, well then, state taxpayers would just have to “step up” and pick up the tab. Here’s how she put it to WisPolitics.com:

"They have to fund special education, they need to invest in our teachers, they need to provide meals for all kids at no cost and address the mental health crisis. I mean, those are the programs that, you know, we rely on federal dollars for,” Underly said.

In government schools, at least for the foreseeable future, Underly’s embedded radicalism will continue—it is too entrenched to be rooted out in one presidential term, if ever, given the nature of state government control.

Not that there isn’t an answer. It’s that ultimately there is but one answer: Universal school choice. Parents must be able to opt out completely from the education camps. Let them teach their radical anti-American ideology if they choose, but force the government schools to compete for public money. Let the money follow the children, and families make the decision where to spend it. Let parents control, and DEI and Theory of Change and Critical Race Theory and all the rest will disappear in a hurry. People will vote with their feet.

And, by the way, it might be a good time to point out that long ago school choice advocates made a huge mistake by ceding the term “public education” and “public schools” to progressives. Attaching public money to families rather than to a monopoly set of schools does not erase the public nature of the education the so-called choice school provides: Simply because a school is funded by the parents’ choice to send their children there rather than receiving it gratis from the government doesn’t make it any less a public school—in the Jeffersonian sense.

We should call today’s “public schools” by what they are: government schools. With universal school choice, there would be government schools, parochial schools, special needs schools, secular schools, neighborhood-founded and run schools, but all those who participate in the universal choice program would be public schools.

To assign that description only to government schools is to mask their true identity—schools run by bureaucrats and unions and academic gobbledygook progressives. Not that many government schools don’t still manage to be good schools with loads of parental involvement; it’s just that, at day’s end, the government is in control in a monopolistic system.

A peek into those government schools

If one doesn’t believe that the radical ideology and training promoted by woke state departments of education don’t have actual impact in the classroom, we need only take a look at an ongoing lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case called Mahmoud v. Taylor.

In this case, parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, have challenged the mandated participation of their children in classes using a multitude of LGBTQ+ storybooks. The plaintiffs are diverse, including parents who are Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox.

In mandating participation in the reading curriculum, according to the parents’ petition to the Supreme Court, the board told employees responsible for selecting the books to review options through an “LGBTQ+ Lens” and to ask whether “stereotypes,” “cisnormativity,” and “power hierarchies” were “reinforced or disrupted.”

One book “Pride Puppy,” was a picture book directed to three- and four-year-olds describing a Pride parade and what a child might find there.

“The book invites students to search for various images, including ‘underwear,’ ‘leather,’ ‘lip ring,’ ‘[drag] king’ and ‘[drag] queen,’ and ‘Marsha P. Johnson,’ a controversial LGBTQ activist and sex worker,” the petition states.

Another book was “Intersection Allies,” a picture book intended for kindergarten through grade 5 that invited children to ponder what it means to be “transgender” or “non-binary” and asked “[w]hat pronouns fit you?”

“By ‘standing together,’ the book claims, we will ‘rewrite the norms,’” the petition quotes from the book. “In yet another book, ‘What Are Your Words?,’ an uncle visits to comfort a niece/nephew, whose pronouns are ‘like the weather. They change depending on how I feel.’”

Finally, the petition continues, “Jacob’s Room to Choose” is about two young children who identify as transgender.

“Their teacher uses a game to persuade their classmates to support gender-free bathrooms,” the petition states. “After relabeling the bathroom doors to welcome multiple genders, the children parade with placards that proclaim ‘Bathrooms Are For Every Bunny’ and ‘[choose] the bathroom that is comfy 4 u.’”

And with the storybooks came guidance, the petition stated—ostensibly from the board, but I’ll give you three guesses where the guidance really came from and the first two don’t count—that directed teachers to emphasize that “not everyone is a boy or girl” and that “[s]ome people identify with both, sometimes one more than the other and sometimes neither,” so students “shouldn’t” “guess” but instead solicit others’ “pronouns.”

The guidance directed teachers to frame disagreement with those ideas as “hurtful,” and to “[d]isrupt the either/or thinking” of students, the petition stated.

Even district elementary school principals objected to the inclusion of the books in the curricula, saying they were not age appropriate and supported the “explicit teaching of gender and sexuality identi[t]y,” according to correspondence the parents obtained through an open records request.

The school district would not allow the parents to opt out of the instruction based “on religious and/or other, objections,” even though the same district allowed other opt-outs for “noncurricular activities” or “free-time events” that “conflict with a family’s religious, and/or other, practices,” the petition asserted.

The petitioners also pointed out that, under Maryland law, parents are required by penalty of law to keep their children in public school unless they have the ability to send them to private school or to homeschool.

Now it’s important to note that, in oral arguments this week, a majority of justices seemed inclined to side with the parents. If that happens, that’s a win, but it simply isn’t sufficient to guarantee parental rights in education, or even to reverse the tide toward total government control of education.

First, a divided panel had affirmed the district court’s ruling, and that makes five appellant courts on board with not allowing parental opt-outs in such situations. As the petitioners pointed out, the Fourth Circuit’s decision essentially ruled—based on Wisconsin v Yoder in 1972—that forced instruction never burdens parental rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the constitution.

“Five circuits now hold that—absent some ‘coercive effect’—Yoder essentially provides parents no protection once they place their children in the public system,” the petition states. “As one circuit judge put it, outside the Establishment Clause, there is ‘no limitation on [a school’s] power to require any curriculum, no matter how offensive.’”

And that is the sum and substance of government power under an education monopoly. The Fourth Circuit’s decision might not stand, but even if it falls and the court determines that forced instruction can burden parental rights under the Free Exercise Clause, that still does not offer parental rights advocates all they need.

For one thing, the parents’ claims are based on a narrow religious exemption, and they rely on the precedent in Yoder, in which the court said Amish families couldn’t be made to send their children to school past eighth grade. As such, the parents are asking the court to narrowly re-establish parental rights over religious instruction, and they emphasize the religious claim:

The petitioners do leave the door open to a broader interpretation beyond an opt-out based solely on religious grounds, arguing that the First Amendment “lies at the heart of our pluralistic society. It cannot do its work if free-exercise rights must be sacrificed by all who attend the nation’s public schools. New government-imposed orthodoxy about what children are ‘supposed’ to think about gender and sexuality is not a constitutional basis to sideline a child’s own parents. The Court should grant review.”

Still, there’s no guarantee that the court will do anything more than uphold their claims—assuming they uphold the parents’ claims at all—on the free exercise of religion.

What’s more and equally disturbing was this past week’s reasoning expressed by progressives in oral arguments. The liberals on the court wondered if exposure to such literature amounted to coercion, and they also worried that a broad interpretation beyond religious opt outs, as well as religious challenges to the books themselves, could undermine the school’s right to teach its chosen curricula.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor even wondered if a broad ruling might allow challenges “to biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievement outside their home.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson resurrected the old argument that the parents weren’t forced to enroll their children in the school, never mind the affordability of private schools.

It’s a good bet the parents will prevail in this case, but it’s also a good bet that the ruling will be narrow enough to allow for continued litigation on these matters. It’s also a good bet that government school systems, with an ingrained ideology they insist on teaching, will scheme to devise ways around any ruling, just as universities have done with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Here’s how John Yoo, a Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration put it prior to the decision in that case:

As of last September, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, admissions statistics since that decision suggest that has been the case. Expect the same in this decision no matter what—we all know just how much authority government schools believe they have when it comes to teaching children, we know their true colors, and their push for uniform coerced curriculum—and a radical uniform coerced curriculum at that—will continue well beyond this decision.

It might be good to close by returning to Jefferson’s letter to Cabell. If surrendering control of schools to state government is such a good idea, Jefferson pondered, then why not take that thought to its logical conclusion:

Or of the massive education bureaucracy in Madison.

Let us place our schools under what our own parents’ eyes can superintend. Our children will thank us for it.