School Choice Week: A Reflection

While the impeachment trial continues in the Senate and the House plays partisan games with bills like the upcoming PRO Act, people outside of Washington in “real America” wonder what politicians are actually doing for them. For the answer, this week, they should turn to champions of school choice across the nation, in celebration of National School Choice Week.

Contrary to leftist rhetoric, “school choice” is not code for ending public schools. It is not code for cutting teacher pay. It is, plainly and simply, allowing families a choice of schooling for their children. Due to a lack of any school choice in many areas of the country, low- and middle-class families are often effectively all but required by law to send their children to whichever public school is associated with their address. Unfortunately, such public schools are not always the best choice.

For all of the ills of the District of Columbia., it has gotten a few things right on school choice. First is the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides scholarships for K-12 for students from low-income families in the city to pay tuition and other fees at qualified private schools. Second is the public school choice available to families who send their students to public schools in the city. Put succinctly, public school choice allows families to send their students to public schools outside of their neighborhood boundaries. This is the most basic type of school choice and is common sense when considering the implications of such a policy.

Whether it is public school choice or private school choice, a family may choose a different school than the neighborhood or in-district public school for any number of reasons, not simply school performance as many -- especially those opposed to school choice -- tend to believe. Any factor could contribute to another school being a better fit, from location to programs to size. The government should work to ensure that the maximum number of these reasons are able to be addressed, in order to better the lives and futures of our nation’s students.

Consider, for example, a single father or mother with two children ages 7 and 16 who may much prefer his or her children to go to the same K-12 school with on-campus extracurricular activities near his or her place of work, instead of juggling two bus schedules for schools miles apart from each other. Or, consider a family with a special needs student who would be far better served in the public high school across town than by the high school two blocks down the road.

Needless to say, there is nobody who knows the educational needs of a student better than that student and his or her family. On that basis, it is simple to understand why we need to empower those very actors to choose the best educational options for students, not leave them helpless at the hands of government bureaucrats who take their tax dollars and give only what is in too many instances an unsuitable education.

From private school vouchers and charter schools to public school choice and opportunity scholarships, the options abound for how to go about making expanded school choice a reality in our country. Constituents of every background should raise their voices to say that school choice matters, and legislators from every state and every level of government should listen.

National School Choice Week may be coming to an end, but the futures of students across America are continually beginning, and will forever be. This is a cause worth fighting for.

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Conservative Cities Better for Minority Students' Education

The educational gap between white and minority students is highest in progressive cities.

A recent study found that, contrary to popular perception, leftist-dominated cities across the country are actually faring much worse than conservative cities at closing the gap between white and minority students in educational achievement.

The study, entitled “The Secret Shame How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All,” observes, “Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities, respectively.” Moreover, “Three of the 12 most conservative cities — Virginia Beach, Anaheim and Fort Worth — have effectively closed or even erased the gap in at least one of the academic categories we examined.”

“Meanwhile,” says civil-rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “in our own ‘progressive’ city of Minneapolis, the report showed that the shameful gap in math achievement between black and white students in K-12 is 53 percentage points, while the gap in math between brown and white students is 45 points.” Armstrong continues, “Similarly, in reading, the gap between black and white Minneapolis students is 53, while the gap between brown and white students is 47. Compare that with ‘conservative’ Jacksonville, Fla., where the reading gap between black and white students is 30; and the math gap is 27.”

This educational gap cannot be blamed on a lack of resources, as leftist cities on average spend more per student than do conservative cities.

So, what conclusion do the study’s authors come to? Well, being committed leftists, they refuse to lay the blame for the gap on progressive ideology, though they also can’t deny the data. They write, “We did not consider any policy or practice as a cause for the larger achievement gaps between racial subgroups. But our results demonstrate that there is a negative difference between our most progressive and most conservative cities, and it can’t be explained away by factors such as city size, racial demographics, spending, poverty or income inequality. In cities where most of the residents identify as political progressives, educational outcomes for marginalized children lag at a greater rate than other cities.”

Try examining the worldview behind the competing ideologies and recognizing that the valuing and promotion of individual responsibility and personal development rather than group identity and social justice just might have something to do with closing the education gap. Just a thought.

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Why Elizabeth Warren's redistribution plan for forgive student loans is so very wrong

By now, millions of Americans have seen the exchange between Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and the angry father who confronted her at a campaign stop in Iowa, regarding her promise to cancel outstanding student-loan debt. Unfortunately, there are also millions of other Americans who either don’t understand or aren’t particularly concerned with why this exchange was taken to heart by so many of their fellow citizens. It’s because moral obligation has, for almost all intents and purposes, been tossed on the ash heap of history.

“I just wanted to ask one question,” the father began. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money. She doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”

“Of course not,” Warren answered.

“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed? My buddy had fun, bought a car, and went on all the vacations. I saved my money. He makes more than I did. I worked a double shift. So, you’re laughing at me,” he continued, as Warren shook her head in denial. “Yeah, that’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”

“I appreciate your time,” Warren responded before the man briskly walked away.

Sen. Warren might appreciate many things, but the extra time and effort that millions of Americans put in to do the right thing — rather than taking the easy way out — isn’t one of them.

Yet based on the current ethos of the nation, why should she? If there’s one thing Warren and her fellow Democrats know, it’s that there’s a cohort of Americans who have been carefully nurtured to believe they are, above all else, “victims.” Victims of a nation characterized by Democrats — depending on which group of constituents they are addressing — as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, nativist, or just plain bigoted. One where irredeemably evil rich people made their fortunes solely by screwing over wholly virtuous lower- and middle-class Americans.

Lower- and middle-class Americans who deserve redress, because “fairness” demands it.

Thus, Warren’s plan, estimated to cost $640 billion, would be underwritten by a 2% “wealth tax” on individuals earning greater than $50 million, which Warren claims would raise enough money to fund the cancellation of student-loan debts and universal pre-K. It would forgive $50,000 of student-loan debt for individuals in households earning less than $100,000 per year, while individuals in households earning more than $100,000 would receive a reduced amount of loan forgiveness, based on a sliding scale.

Bernie Sanders also has a plan. He would eliminate all education-related debt underwritten, guaranteed, or insured by the federal government, regardless of the borrowers’ current income.

Fox News columnist Justin Haskins points out some inconvenient truths about the issue, noting that only about 10% of students default on their loans and that the federal government already has several programs for canceling student debt. There are also income-based repayment plans, tying monthly student-loan payments to household income, rather than their total debt amount, and a program that provides loan forgiveness after 10 years of on-time, income-based repayments to those who work for a nonprofit organization or for the government.

Haskins also explains that the status quo fuels the crisis because the federal government ultimately guarantees student loans, allowing colleges to raise their costs with impunity, while various programs of debt reduction or forgiveness incentivize unwise borrowing decisions by parents and students.

Thus, he suggests “reforms” that would mitigate both. “Until we fix the foundational problems at the root of the student debt crisis, this important issue will never be resolved,” he concludes.

In reality, there is only one “foundational” problem here, one that has plagued this nation for decades: the virtual elimination of moral obligation that begets personal responsibility.

Columnist Katherine Timpf gets to the heart of the issue. Even if Warren had offered to pay back the Iowa father, “this man’s own suggestion for how to make things fair would still leave him (in his words) getting ‘screwed,’” she writes. “When he references the sacrifices that he and his family had to make to pay for his daughter’s college, what he’s implicitly saying is that his choice to be financially responsible has cost him things that money cannot replace.”

In Timpf’s case, it meant a series of life decisions that included withdrawing from Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism after she had been accepted, because she realized “I’d never be able to repay the $80,000 loan I’d have to take out out to attend my dream school.”

Instead, she chose to pursue unpaid internships to advance her career. She also made other choices with which millions of her fellow Americans are intimately familiar. They included going “months without a single day off,” “waking up at 4 a.m. and not getting home until after 11 at night,” and living in an apartment building that was “so dilapidated that you could effortlessly break into the front door with a credit card, so poorly run that I’d have no water without warning, and so downright filthy that I once had scabies and fleas in the same week.”

Thus Ms. Timpf, who currently writes for National Review and appears on Fox News, has little patience for the Democrats’ siren song. “I don’t think that I should have to pay for someone else making an irresponsible decision when they could have made a responsible one,” she writes. “What’s more, talking about this issue only in terms of money truly minimizes the fact that, really, it’s about so much more.”

It most certainly is. If freely undertaken contractual commitments with regard to student loans can be tossed aside, what other commitments or promises can be dispensed with when one finds them “problematic?” Mortgages? Car loans?

In a nation where one-third of marriages end in divorce, the out-of-wedlock birthrate is now 40%, more “adults” ages 18 to 34 are living at home with their parents than with a spouse, and 15% of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 still aren’t working despite a good economy, it should surprise no one that shirking obligations and/or avoiding commitments altogether resonates, especially when politicians deliberately obscure the reality of cost transfers — or insist those transfers to Americans with greater wherewithal constitute “social justice.”

Once concepts like “fairness,” “social justice,” or “free” anything are conflated with genuine morality and personal responsibility, all vote-buying schemes become viable. Add the aforementioned embrace of victimhood to the mix, and such concepts are construed as noble.

Does the American electorate wish to continue expanding a safety net — one that’s precipitated the lion’s share of our $23 trillion national debt — already covering a large number of able-bodied people who can rationalize anything and whose entire journey through life is traveled on the path of least resistance? And, with regard to college-loan forgiveness, relatively well-off Americans who don’t wish to abide by their freely made obligations?

President Trump once said a nation without borders is no nation at all. Neither is one where free-riding is promoted as justice and compassion.

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