Arkansas Poised To Move to Universal School Choice

Arkansas’s state legislature is expected to pass a universal education savings account plan this week, making it the fourth state to enact a universal school choice policy in the past year.

Governor Sanders, formerly President Trump’s press secretary, has made school choice a hallmark of her short time in office. She announced her plan — called Arkansas Learns — after her moment on the national stage delivering the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address.

Ms. Sanders’s plan takes the form of education savings accounts, disbursements of state funds for education-related costs directly to families. ESAs have won favor among school choice advocates over the past decade for their flexible approach to spending.

Unlike traditional vouchers, ESAs can be used for any number of approved items — including school tuition, textbooks, tutoring, and homeschooling curricula — and unspent funds can roll over from year to year, incentivizing families and retailers to economize.

“We want to make sure we’re empowering parents by giving them educational freedom accounts to allow them to make the best decision about where and how their kids should be educated,” Ms. Sanders said in a Fox News interview last month.

The annual disbursement per child is roughly equal to the per-pupil funding at a public school in the state. In Arkansas, ESAs — known as Education Freedom Accounts — would roll out at around $7,500 per student, with provisions for adjustments based on inflation.

The legislation would increase accessibility to ESAs over a three-year span. The 2025-26 academic year would be the first that any Arkansas student would be eligible for an ESA.

If Arkansas passes the Learns Act this week, it will be the fourth state to enact a universal school choice program — following similar measures in Arizona, Iowa, and Utah. West Virginia has a near universal program, with 93 percent of students statewide eligible for ESAs, according to EdChoice.

School choice is just one component of the sprawling education bill, which clocks in at more than 140 pages. The Learns Act also includes provisions for public schools, including raising the minimum teacher salary to $50,000 a year.

Democrats have pushed back hard against the bill. In a statement last week, the state’s Democratic Party called the legislation a “scam” to “dismantle and defund our public school system.”

“This bill does not address the state’s responsibility to provide a suitable, efficient school funding system,” a state legislator, Joy Springer, said.

Ms. Springer and her allies’ efforts matter little in the Arkansas legislature, though, as it is held by a Republican supermajority.

The bill is expected to pass the state legislature this week. An earlier version passed the state senate, but a technical amendment was added regarding public school teachers’ employment rights.

The amended bill was passed by the house and will likely have a quick turnaround in the senate by mid-week, making it ready for signing by the governor by the end of week.

https://www.nysun.com/article/arkansas-poised-to-jump-on-school-choice-bandwagon

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Your children belong to you, not a school. If you don't fight, you'll lose them

By Karol Markowicz

My co-author Bethany Mandel and I set out to write our new book, "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation," to answer this question and teach parents how to lay down the marker and say: mine.

It’s a question that, not so long ago, we didn’t feel we needed to ask.

In October of 2021, Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, said, "I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

Taken on its own, the comment might even be benign. Sure, parental involvement in education had always been a prediction of student success. A 2010 study called "Parent Involvement and Student Academic Performance: A Multiple Mediational Analysis" by researchers at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found "children whose parents are more involved in their education have higher levels of academic performance than children whose parents are involved to a lesser degree." But should parents be designing a curriculum? Maybe not."

The exchange, however, wasn’t about which math curriculum to use. It was about whether parents had a right to demand pornographic books be pulled from the library. Suddenly the question of parental involvement seems clearer to most people.

The left says it doesn’t happen, pornography in libraries is a right-wing bogeyman, and yet parents at school after school keep discovering these books at the school library.

What’s happening here?

We encapsulate the current moment into the word "wokeness" and it really took hold during COVID. Leftism has always existed but wokeness is something new. Wokeness demands that up is down and black is white and pressures you to believe it too. Wokeness pushes a separation between parent and child.

Wokeness pushes a separation between parent and child.

We open our book with a history chapter and the roots of this wokeness in totalitarian regimes of the past. We trace how places like the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge, and others, tried to sever the family connection as a way of pushing their indoctrination on to the kids and, by extension, the parents.

We are seeing it happen in America today. Kids are told to keep secrets from their parents. Sometimes the secrets are life-changing.

Just recently the story broke about a Long Island teacher who had transitioned a child from girl to boy behind the backs of the parents. The child is 9.

The teacher assigned the student a new boy name and referred to the child as a boy. The parents were only alerted to what was going on when the girl started having suicidal ideation.

The important point about this story is that it took place in a "red" area. It happened in a red hamlet of a red town in a red county. Parents who think they are safe from the reaches of wokeness because they live in a conservative area have to think again.

We heard so many stories like this one, about parents being cut out of their child’s life.

Part of the reason we wrote this book is we saw the concern that so many people have, correctly, about the indoctrination that happens at college campuses. What alarmed us is that it starts far earlier than college now and parents seem unprepared to grapple with the onslaught.

This wokeness doesn’t just target children at school. We trace the way this forced conformity has taken hold at medical schools, teachers’ colleges, publishing companies and so on.

Everyone is afraid to speak up and step out of line. We chart parents who have shown bravery in fighting for their children and show other parents how to take a stand.

It’s going to take a fight but it will be worth it. Because whose child is this? Yours. Fight for them.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/your-children-belong-you-school-fight-lose

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The ‘anti-discrimination’ bandwagon – coming to Australian schools

You have to hand it to the ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors – they are effective. Watch them go from city to city preaching ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’, the only catch being you must submit totally to their worldview.

This cottage industry has seen great success in Western Australia, Queensland, and the Northern Territory: jurisdictions that have all sought to curtail religious freedoms. Since taking the reins of power in Canberra, the Albanese government has similarly been only too happy to oblige – accepting calls for a review on religious exemptions for schools in federal law.

But the feel-good, anti-discrimination messaging of the review’s supporters disguises a radical agenda, one which strips schools of protections that allow them to operate according to a self-determined set of values.

The new provisions, released by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), fly in the face of religious freedom and parental rights. As it stands, political parties would be allowed to hire staff who share their ethos, while schools would not.

Most fair-minded individuals would be appalled by such blatant double standards.

The Institute of Public Affairs’ submission to the Commission’s inquiry found the proposed reforms would; curtail the right of parents to give their children an education consistent with their values; facilitate sectarianism by pushing religious disagreements into the courts; and give government bodies, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission, the power to control what faith-based schools can do, say, and teach.

The ALRC wants government agencies to enforce compliance with new restrictive standards. And yes, you read that right, the ALRC essentially wants to take parents out of the equation and disregard the values and beliefs they want instilled in their children.

It is something straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, except it’s likely to become reality in Australia.

Make no mistake, religious freedom is under direct attack in Australia, and the first formal steps towards new religious discrimination laws have been taken by the Albanese government.

Out with the old and in with the new. Freedom, choice, and Judaeo-Christian values are to be replaced with a rigid creed, which entrench radical ideologies on gender and sexuality.

Worse still, the ALRC wants its reforms extended to all religious bodies in due course, which is perhaps the most concerning part of the whole Consultation Paper. If the narrative that religious protections are harmful to certain marginalised groups takes hold, then the cottage industry of activists has won.

Left-wing activists have been working hard for years to normalise this very idea with little courage shown by religious groups, who have typically been desperate to accommodate the howls of activists at every turn.

The bottom line is that when harm is equated with hurt feelings and is used to put a stop to the dissemination of genuinely held beliefs, religious freedom is dead. The proposed changes will foster greater intolerance and, as such, impacts all people of faith: Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians alike.

By pushing for legislative change, the ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors have ensured their cottage industry will continue to thrive long after this debate fades from public discussion.

Advocates have praised the reforms as progressive, but ultimately the recommendations are in direct conflict with Australia’s long-standing tradition that upholds religious toleration and pluralism.

In the name of progress, ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors are determined to throw out the Western intellectual tradition and replace it with identity politics and Critical Race Theory. Here, the subjective feelings of the individual are elevated above basic freedoms of religion, association, and expression.

Fortunately, there has been some pushback from the Christian community on this issue. Two major Christian schooling associations that represent 150,000 students across the country, have pulled out of the consultation process with the ALRC. The groups claim to have ‘lost faith’ in the inquiry remaining ‘balanced’ in addressing the issue.

As one Catholic Bishop warned late last year, preventing religious schools from requiring staff to teach in line with the school’s faith would strip these schools of their religious essence, while ushering in a Woke quota system for hiring, rather than a system based on shared worldview.

The provisions, if enacted, will also do parents a disservice by taking away their choice to send their child to a school with a genuine religious ethos.

This move against religious freedom also highlights a deeper and more troubling phenomenon occurring across Australia, the detachment of the political class and inner-city elites from mainstream Australians who want their freedoms preserved and to get on with their life.

As you go about your busy day, you may ask yourself, why all the fuss? As former High Court Chief Justices Mason and Brennan once wrote in a joint judgment, freedom of religion is the ‘paradigm freedom of conscience’ and ‘the essence of a free society’.

Ultimately the proposed changes will foster greater intolerance and impact all people of faith – Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians alike. This is not only a serious problem for religious freedom, but also seriously problematic for free speech.

Never forget, many had to fight for the freedoms we enjoy today, we must ensure they are not surrendered in silence.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-anti-discrimination-bandwagon-coming-to-a-school-near-you/ ?

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My other blogs: Main ones below

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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