Wednesday, February 03, 2021


Military Families Deserve More School Choice for Their Children

Rep. Jim Banks

I was disturbed to read a 2017 Military Times survey that found that 35% of service members pointed to dissatisfaction with their children’s education as a “significant factor” in deciding whether to continue their military service.

A big part of the military’s readiness is its retention rate. If more service members stay enlisted for longer, our military gets bigger and more experienced. In an era of great power competition, the U.S. must support and sustain the all-volunteer forces who dedicate their lives to service.

Improving military families’ access to education should be pursued with the same urgency given to other crucial parts of our national security strategy.

The answer lies in providing parents with choice.

The reason servicemen and servicewomen are often dissatisfied with their children’s educational options is because they can’t choose where they live, and so have fewer school options than almost anyone else in America.

Most American families can’t afford private schools, and despite the valiant efforts of school choice advocates, vouchers remain rare, and charter schools make up just 7% of publicly funded schools nationwide.

But at least most Americans can do their best to live in areas with decent public schools. Parents are willing to do and pay a lot to make that happen, which is why housing prices correlate so closely with the quality of public education.

Military parents are willing to pay a lot, too, but those payments just look different. In that same Military Times poll, 40% said they would decline a reassignment and pay increase to keep their kids in their current high-performing school.

It’s a travesty that military members are forced to choose between their children’s education and their own career.

Congress can alleviate this critical problem by supporting education savings accounts for military families.

That’s why I introduced the Education Savings Accounts for Military Families Act in my first term in Congress in 2018 and again in 2019 with the support of 93 of my colleagues. I’ll be introducing it for the third time on Thursday.

It instructs the secretary of education to establish education savings accounts on behalf of military families that choose to opt in. The accounts can be directed toward—among other things—private school tuition, textbooks and learning supplies, private tutoring, and contributions to college savings accounts.

We hold members of the armed service in such high esteem in part because we recognize the sacrifices they make to keep us safe. We should do everything we can to minimize the effects of that sacrifice on their children’s future.

Migrants Flee States with Highly Educated People: Why?

I think the best single indicators of the overall quality of life of a state are statistics on net migration. If lots of people move into an area, it is reasonable to assume that they think that place is overall a good place to live—better than the place that they left. Out-migration is a sign that for some reason(s) people perceive that the place in which they have been living is less desirable than their new destination.

There is something very striking looking at net migration statistics: areas of out-migration are mostly states with highly educated populations; areas of net in-migration have an existing population much less likely to have a bachelor’s degree or more. For example, I took the five states with the largest net-out migration between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019 as estimated by the Bureau of the Census: California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The proportion of adults with a bachelor’s degree or more in those states ranged from 32.6 to 42.1 percent, all well above the average for the entire nation. The net out-migration from these states was more than 560,000 persons—over one person every minute.

Then I looked at the five states with the most net in-migration in that period: Florida, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina. They had a net influx of more than 470,000 persons. Yet the proportion of adults with bachelor’s degrees was under 30%, below the national average, in every one of these states.

Moreover, the quality of higher education was clearly perceived to be especially high in the highly educated out-migration states. All of the 11 schools (there was a three-way tie at #9) at the top of the latest US News best national universities list came from one of the 10 states with the greatest amount of out-migration. Massachusetts (home of Harvard and M.I.T.) and Illinois (University of Chicago and Northwestern) are great places to go to school, but get away from there after graduation!

The move away from super highly educated areas to ones with less education was highlighted recently by the migration of the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, from California to Texas, as well as by other high-profile individuals like Donald Trump fleeing university-intensive states such as New York. Interestingly, both Musk and Trump attended a prestigious Ivy League school (Penn) in a state with net out-migration, both moving to states with lesser average levels of educational attainment.

As a young scholar I made a modest national reputation doing studies on interstate and international migration, and I am abundantly aware there are many factors motivating movement patterns, including the availability of jobs, taxes, climate, housing prices, pollution and traffic congestion, the perceived quality of schools, etc. A full analysis of this issue would require more sophisticated empirical analysis, and since most American academics arguably have a conflict of interest regarding the results, perhaps studies should be largely done by scholars at non-university research centers or perhaps from other countries. And I readily concede that such an analysis might conclude the university-migration relationship observed above is largely spurious. For example, the high out-migration states have relatively high taxes, higher than in the large in-migration states. That may be more important than educational background.

That said, however, the simple correlation between migration and college degree attainment is strong enough to warrant fuller investigation. I think there are plausible explanations for the observed results: while college graduates are more productive (measured by earnings) than non-graduates, college attendance is expensive, and there are potential “negative externalities” associated with universities. Living in Flyover Country, I sense many of my neighbors feel highly educated folks living in coastal states like New York tend to be arrogant with an off-putting sense of superiority.

I looked at the 10 states with the highest level of collegiate attainment—every one of them gave their electoral college votes to Joe Biden. By contrast, nine of the 10 states with the lowest level of collegiate attainment gave their electoral votes to Donald Trump. Although Biden won the election, people are on balance moving to more conservative areas less enamored of progressive politics financed by relatively high taxes.

Ethnic Studies Curriculum Promotes Divisiveness and Indoctrination

A third draft of California’s ethnic studies curriculum was released last month. Despite a third try, the latest version remains far from its legislated purpose of “highlighting the contributions of minorities in the development of California and the United States” and helping students become “global citizens with an appreciation for the contributions of multiple cultures.”

The first draft, issued in 2019, was identified by many as divisive political indoctrination of students and was rejected following enormous criticism, including harsh critiques from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

The second draft was also rejected. A letter signed by 80 groups, ranging from Black Americans for Inclusive Ethnic Studies to the California Association of Scholars, stated as follows:

“We are deeply concerned that classes taught using this curriculum will become vehicles for highly controversial, one-sided political advocacy and activism that will both subvert the educational mission of our schools and incite bigotry and harm against many students.”

How about the third draft? Better than the first two, but it is far from providing guidance on what students should learn about the wonderfully diverse world we share and how we can build a meritocratic society where everyone has an opportunity to succeed.

The reason it fails to do this is because this positive agenda is not the focus of the curriculum. And this is the reason why neither the first draft, nor the first do-over, nor the second do-over is acceptable. One is tempted to conclude that the strategy is to implement the minimum changes needed to get buy-in, while preserving the agenda of “critical ethnic studies.”

Critical ethnic studies, which is related to critical race theory, is a branch of ethnic studies that focuses on White supremacy, slavery, racism, colonialism, and victimization, with the belief that that these issues are the primary drivers of many of our social problems, and this theme permeates the current draft of the curriculum.

The focus of the curriculum on critical ethnic studies has prevented the creation of what could be a rich and rewarding curriculum celebrating the heritages and histories of all, and which could have facilitated the academic journeys of underrepresented minorities within the state’s school system.

Perhaps the most important justification for requiring ethnic studies is that minority students benefit enormously by learning about role models from their ethnic backgrounds. While the third iteration of the curriculum offers such lessons, there are glaring omissions of those who could inspire new generations of Californians, irrespective of their color.

Martin Luther King is a notable omission from the list of African Americans. A person displacing King from the list is Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former member of the Black Panthers who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder of a police officer who had stopped Abu-Jamal’s brother. His incarceration has become a cause célèbre in liberal political circles, despite testimony from three eyewitnesses and ballistics evidence supporting his guilty sentence.

What about Black women role models? Katherine Johnson is omitted. Johnson was a brilliant NASA mathematician who was included in an otherwise all-male research team that calculated the orbit of 1969’s Apollo 11 flight. The motion picture Hidden Figures was inspired by her. Just imagine how her story could motivate girls to embrace the fields of mathematics and science.

Assata Shakur, an African American activist from the 1960s who was convicted of murder during a shootout with police, and who escaped from prison and fled to Cuba where she was granted political asylum, is included.

A similar pattern of omissions and inclusions emerges for Native Americans. There is no mention of the “code talkers,” a group from the Navajo tribe who created an unbreakable code that helped the United States win World War II. Including the code talkers would celebrate the important contributions of Native Americans and highlight the uniqueness of the Navajo language.

Just think how many kids might be inspired to study the process of language and learning if they learned about the code talkers. Or consider former US senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the most recent of just four Native Americans who ever served in the US Senate. He is also missing from the list.

Who displaces them? One is Dennis Banks, a Native American activist who was convicted of incitement of riot and assault, and who received a court martial from the Air Force.

The agenda is clear. Highlight the possibly wrongful incarcerations of political activists by a White-dominated justice system and omit heroes whose politics do not check off the boxes require by critical ethnic studies, even individuals as remarkable as Martin Luther King.

Another problematic issue in the curriculum is the failure to use facts and instead rely on stories that may or may not have a factual basis. Processing facts and data in an organized way is central to a child’s education, particularly today when understanding technical information and mathematics is so highly valued. This necessary training in logical thought and critical thinking is missing.

Take the issue of wrongful incarceration. There have been 375 DNA-based exonerations within the United States, and 60 percent of those have been of African Americans.

This single statistic establishes that African Americans have been disproportionately impacted by wrongful incarceration. But a statistic does not win over the hearts and minds of young people. So instead of using facts, critical ethnic studies seduces students with intriguing stories about potentially wrongful convictions that may have no factual basis.

Telling Mumia Abu-Jamal’s story (which has been made into a movie) is more compelling than a statistic, even though the statistic is infinitely more informative about wrongful convictions of African Americans. And because of its media coverage, Abu-Jamal’s story, despite no evidence of anyone else committing the crime, apparently is more compelling than that of Curtis Flowers, a Black man whose murder conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court but whose case did not attract nearly the same level of notoriety.

A hallmark of US immigration is that most immigrants achieve economic success at a much greater level than they could have achieved in their country of origin. But this fundamental aspect of ethnicity in the United States is largely missing from the curriculum. Consider the Hmong people of Southeast Asia who came to the United States as refugees in the 1970s and 1980s from a way of life that had changed little over hundreds of years, and who spoke an ancient language consisting primarily of one-syllable words.

The proposed curriculum discusses the Hmong with a focus on patriarchy and gender roles within Hmong society, and the de rigeur discussion of racial injustice:

“The criminalization of men and boys of color goes hand in hand with the decriminalization of white males. As a result, white criminality is less controlled, surveilled, and punished while black, Latino, and Southeast Asian criminality is treated as threatening and in need of punishment.”

What is curiously omitted is the miraculous improvement in the Hmong’s standard of living. In 1990, only 24 percent of the Hmong were employed, compared to 56 percent by 2010. Over this same period, the median household income of the Hmong grew from just 47 percent of the national average to 92 percent, and the percentage of the Hmong receiving public assistance fell from 67 percent to 12 percent. All of this in just 20 years and accomplished by an ethnic group that, prior to coming to America, had largely been living like they had two hundred years ago.

This transformation could only occur in the free and capitalistic United States. Yet students will read about the Hmong as represented in this curriculum and have no idea how they achieved the American dream, and so quickly. What a shame. But this is what can happen when facts don’t fit the desired narrative.

But not all is lost. Enter the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies, a group of thousands of Californians, including educators, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Armenians, and refugees from Communist countries who are working to help create an inclusive, positive ethnic studies curriculum, free from political agendas, that will help kids learn and think independently.

On their website, you will hear from Clarence Jones, one of Martin Luther King’s legal advisors, who describes how the third draft of the curriculum is a “perversion of history that will inflict great harm on the students in our state.” You will hear from Mark Yudof, University of California president emeritus, who worries that the curriculum does not invite diverse viewpoints, nor does it promote engagement through the democratic process.

Most important, you will see how the alliance has made enormous progress in advancing how the curriculum can be changed based on the ethnic studies curriculum of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which does not focus on critical ethnic studies or critical race theory. The alliance provides a blueprint for what to do in designing a positive and constructive ethnic studies curriculum.

The period for commentary on the state’s third draft remains open for two more days. I urge you to write and let your voice be heard. You can provide feedback on the proposed curriculum by writing to the California Department of Education at ethnicstudies@cde.ca.gov, or you can sign the Alliance’s statement here.

The primary goal of any society is to organize itself to promote liberty, peace, and equal treatment. The Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies is doing just that. And California students will be much better off if Governor Newsom, state legislators, and the Department of Education listen to the Alliance.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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