Warren Tells Poor Parents to Fix Their Own Schools

It's a foregone conclusion that whatever Democrat wins the nomination will, in large part, have the teachers' unions to thank for it.

Teachers put the NRA to shame when it comes to exercising their influence. They are the most politically active pressure group in the country and no Democrat is likely to win the nomination without a sizable percentage of them backing their candidacy.

So it's not surprising that Democratic candidates shamelessly pander for their votes -- even if that means embracing an education agenda that does demonstrable harm to America's poor and disadvantaged kids.

The largest teacher's union is the National Education Association. They released a series of interviews with various candidates, among them, Elizabeth Warren. In her bid for support, she proudly mentioned her opposition to expanding charter schools in Boston.

In one sense, Warren is correct. The fact that she opposed the Massachusetts initiative does prove how far she is willing to go to maintain teachers’-union support. But what it says about her willingness to follow evidence, and to value the needs of low-income parents, is deeply worrisome.

Boston has probably the most effective public charter schools in America, producing enormous learning gains for the most disadvantaged children. “Charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes,” reported a Brookings study. “The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.”

Researchers have asked and answered every possible objection: Boston’s charters are not “skimming” the best students, they do scale up, and they do not harm students left behind in traditional public schools. (Indeed, “charter expansion has a small positive effect on non-charter students’ achievement.”)

Charter schools are a clear and present danger to teachers' unions because of their emphasis on excellence and the fact that they clearly outperform public schools. The excuses used by unions to oppose them simply don't hold up to scrutiny.

But Warren is proud of her opposition to expanding a good idea to give more poor parents a choice in educating their kids.

“The educators said, uh-uh, this is about draining money out of the schools, and I fought on the side of the educators. Public dollars must stay in public schools,” she continues — following the union convention of defining charter schools, which have open enrollment and no tuition as not being “public.”

Here's what she told the NEA interviewer about what the parents of disadvantaged kids should do if they don't want their kids in public school:

“I had a lot of folks visit my office and say, ‘I love my charter school,’” Warren said in the video about constituents who wanted her to support expanding the charter cap. My question always was, ‘If you don’t like your public school, what’s going to happen to the rest of the children who are there?’ Because we don’t have an obligation to just a handful of our children. We have an obligation to all of our children.”

“If you think your public school is not working, then go help your public school. Go help get more resources for it. Volunteer at your public schools. Help get the teachers and school bus drivers and cafeteria workers and the custodial staff and the support staff, help get them some support so they can do the work that needs to be done. You don’t like the building? You think it’s old and decaying? Then get out there and push to get a new one.”

If she had told a bunch of suburban parents that, they would have laughed her out of the room. As it is, what she said was cruel and shows just how much she will grovel before a powerful interest group to get their votes.

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2020 Democrats are school choice hypocrites

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander — unless you’re talking about the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and education policy. The majority of the front-runners either attended private schools themselves or sent their own children to private schools, yet they’re fighting hard against programs that would grant similar options to the less fortunate.

Here’s their latest school choice hypocrisy.

For starters, Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently released an education plan that is radically anti-choice. It would ban many high-quality charter schools, end federal funding of charter schools, and make it even more difficult to open new charters. She also calls to end private school choice programs — programs that overwhelmingly serve low-income families.

But about a month ago, one of us uncovered that Warren sent her son, Alex, to expensive private schools starting in fifth grade when she was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. Then, cellphone footage shows the senator lied about it to an African American woman, moments after giving a speech about the rights of black women, before her campaign finally admitted Warren's son attended private school.

Other Democratic candidates have also come out swinging against school choice. Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools, Mayor Pete Buttigieg denounced for-profit charter schools and is against vouchers because "they take away funding from public schools,” and Sen. Kamala Harris, who just dropped out of the race, said she’s “particularly concerned with expansions of for-profit charter schools” and said “our country needs an administration that supports public education, not privatization.”

But our new discoveries suggest these candidates are just as hypocritical as Warren.

It’s well-known that Mayor Pete Buttigieg exclusively attended private schools and that his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, taught at the private Montessori Academy in Indiana. What isn’t well-known is that Chasten’s Montessori school accepts students who use the state's tax credit scholarship program. Unfortunately, Buttigieg opposes private school choice programs that provide disadvantaged children with financial resources to attend his husband’s private Montessori school.

To top it all off, although Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign did not respond to requests about where his four children went to school, his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, attended a Catholic private school in Brooklyn.

Even though she's not campaigning anymore, Harris could run for president again in the future, and she still has power over private school choice in her role as a senator. Thus, it's still worth pointing out her school-choice hypocrisy.

Harris’s stepchildren attended Wildwood School, an elite private school in Los Angeles that costs nearly $44,000 in tuition and fees a year and has a student-teacher ratio of only 4 to 1. While her stepson graduated in 2013, before Harris married Doug Emhoff in 2014, her stepdaughter didn't graduate until 2017. The children may just be on educational paths chosen by their birth parents, but it’s still hypocritical to denounce education “privatization” when her stepchildren attended elite private schools.

Harris’s campaign did not respond to our inquiries (sent before she dropped out) regarding where she went to school, where her stepchildren went to school, or why private schools were the best choices for them.

These politicians must deal with a huge dilemma: they claim to want to help disadvantaged populations but are fighting against giving those groups more educational options. This dilemma is only magnified by the hypocrisy of candidates who had the privilege to exercise school choice for their own families actively seeking to stop private school choice programs that give the less fortunate the ability to do the same.

It’s great politicians have the freedom and ability to attend private schools and send their kids to private schools. We are happy for each of them. But it’s far from progressive to exercise school choice for your own politically powerful families while fighting against extending those options to poor families who desperately need educational options.

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Australia: Gender-neutral toilets at Brisbane high school cause outrage

In a Queensland first, the all-new $80 million Fortitude Valley State Secondary College will not separate boys and girls’ bathrooms.

Instead, the Department of Education confirmed the school would be fitted with self-contained gender-neutral cubicles and shared basin areas. The only exception is the change room, which will have two male and female toilets.

Those toilets won’t open until later in 2020, but year 7 students starting next month will have access to 12 lockable, self-contained gender-neutral bathrooms.

The decision has not been taken lightly by parents and experts who have slammed the move as “ridiculous”.

“We already know some really bad things happen to kids in bathroom areas of schools – bullying, sexting, kids recording on mobiles, these things already go on when they’re just within their own sex, and then you’re adding in an extra element,” education expert and mum Michelle Mitchell told The Sunday Mail.

“Being a teenager is a really big time of change, for boys and for girls, and kids have a right to feel safe.”

The seven-storey St Paul’s Terrace precinct will provide more than 50 lockable “floor to ceiling” unisex toilet cubicles.

On Sunday, Opposition education spokesman Jarrod Bleijie branded the decision a “very bad” move and a “recipe for disaster”.

“I reckon boys and girls need and deserve their own privacy at school,” Mr Bleijie wrote on Facebook.

“How about instead of this PC rubbish the government spend more time helping our teachers with workload issues, aircon our schools, declutter the curriculum, fix the school maintenance backlogs and better support our teachers in regional and remote Queensland. Labor have its priorities all wrong.”

According to the Department, the move is in line with modern, state-of-the-art, vertical high schools in other states, including South Australia’s Adelaide Botanic High School.

“The toilet facilities at Fortitude Valley State Secondary College meets contemporary design standards in relation to accessibility, inclusivity, privacy and safety,” a department spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia. “Each unisex toilet cubicle is lockable in line with contemporary best practice and underpinned by safety considerations.”

The installation of gender-neutral toilets has sparked a massive divide, with some agreeing it was an “unsafe” move and others comparing them to disabled toilets, which are also shared.

“C’mon guys, nearly every accessible facility for disabled people is a unisex facility, and, last time I looked, nearly every household, you know where these kids live, has unisex toilet facilities. Get over it! There are bigger issues than this that deserve attention,” one person commented.

One woman said there was “no way” she would send her kids to a school with unisex toilets. “Especially being the mother of girls, not that it’s just girls sexually abused, then there is bullying and underage sex. Our schools really aren’t safe environments anymore,” the woman said.

Another person said it would be fine if the cubicles were all separate, but having shared hand basins would be a “real issue”.

“I can think back to when I was a teen and all my insecurities and embarrassment around boys, I would have been horrified to take a bowel movement while anyone of the opposite gender was in the room; not to mention that time of the month,” the Facebook user explained.

Clinical psychologist Dr Judith Locke told The Sunday Mail sharing facilities could lead to potential problems, such as girls feeling uncomfortable using the toilets while menstruating.

“If they are trying to change things to suit what we are experiencing in a modern society, we should allow opportunities to test them,” Dr Locke said, saying it was important the school takes on student feedback once it is in operation.

Fortitude Valley State Secondary College is the first inner-city state school to be built in Brisbane in over half a century.

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