I remember how it was -- JR
Thursday, August 31, 2023
The Economic Benefits of School Choice
It’s back to school this week for Florida students and many others across the country.
The first days and weeks of a new school year are always filled with anticipation, adjustments, transitions, and growth for parents and students. Yet, this school year’s “firsts” for an expanding pool of families also includes the first time that their children will have the resources and freedom to enroll in the school of their choice.
The short- and long-term consequences of these new opportunities for school choice aren’t just experienced within the four walls of a home or school building, or by the families now empowered to pursue them. The impact of education choice stretches across communities and economies, helping to unleash prosperity and growth that benefits everyone.
Since 2021, eight states have passed universal or near-universal school choice programs, affecting over 13 million students nationwide—a growth of over 4 million in just two years.
Florida’s universal choice program was passed by the Florida Legislature on March 23 and took effect July 1, making this back-to-school week the first experience for many parents newly eligible to draw down approximately $8,000 per year to spend toward their children’s educations.
To provide families an opportunity to pay for education costs ranging from tuition to school supplies, the legislation creates education savings accounts that may be used toward private school tuition, tutoring, or anything else under the approved legislative umbrella.
With no restriction on families that may participate, certain areas become more populated than others, shepherding an influx of economic vitality. With school choice comes increased competition, encouraging businesses—especially small business entrepreneurs and real estate investors—to transform their development and growth strategies to cater to emerging markets, as families relocate to take advantage of expanded educational options.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Homes.com introduced “School Scores” to its website, which allows potential buyers to access a school-ranking system based on letter grades ranging from A+ to D, calculated by state testing performance data available from public schools.
Indeed, businesses likewise consider tax rates, inflation, and supply and demand in deciding where to set up shop. They also consider access to high-performing schools for their employees, who place a high value on working close to quality schools for their children to attend.
Florida’s universal choice program has certainly set the national standard for how to respect families’ individual decisions about the schooling best for their children. But it’s also a model for other states looking to experience the economic boom that comes with incentivizing more people to “follow the money.”
Why does the economy benefit from school choice? Bartley Danielsen, associate professor of finance and real estate at North Carolina State University, emphasizes that school choice fosters communitywide economic prosperity.
This allows families to remain in their dwellings, rather than feeling led to switch neighborhoods based on school districts. In turn, real estate becomes equally coveted across regions where school choice is implemented.
Virginia is an apt case study. As a state that offers little parent choice in education outside the public system, the Old Dominion has experienced rapid outward migration since the onset of COVID-19, which saw some schools there getting national attention for infamous mask mandates and increasingly progressive curriculum.
From fall 2019 to fall 2021, public schools in Virginia saw a collective loss of over 46,000 students. On the list of states with greatest population decline, Virginia is now tenth—joining the likes of California, New York, and much of the Northeast, all of which offer little to no educational options outside their public systems.
Meanwhile, Virginia’s neighbors of West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina are all net positive for migration, as are the other proximal Southern states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida—with Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida being significantly so.
A feather in the cap of these rapidly growing states is the existence of steadily expanding school choice programs.
Beyond benefiting states’ economic livelihood, taxpayers across the states are also seeing savings as a result of these expanding programs. Out of 52 analyses on the fiscal impact of private school choice programs, 47 were found to generate overall savings for taxpayers. Another study in 2018 found that school choice programs generated $12.4 to $28.3 billion in tax savings.
Expanding education choice options as widely as possible isn’t just good for the students who enroll in the programs. These programs encourage economic growth and competition between states looking to attract and retain small businesses, job growth, stable families, and thriving communities.
This year is just the beginning of realizing the potential—not just in our kids, but in our policy solutions.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/25/the-economic-benefits-of-school-choice/ ?
***************************************************
Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools
Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The line actually comes from Karl Marx.) Four years ago, during Black History Month, a poster of Davis beamed down from the wall of his public elementary school in Brooklyn.
I eagerly praise my son’s charter school to other parents. It’s full of dedicated teachers who urge their students to debate politics and history with an open mind. So I wrote to the administration, proposing that they should balance the school’s homage to Davis with a quotation from Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky, who fought to free the millions of Soviet bloc citizens that Davis wanted to keep locked up. After all, I reasoned, some of the school’s families are themselves refugees from communist tyrannies. My suggestion was met with silence.
Davis, who is now euphemistically celebrated as an “activist,” was in fact a loyal apparatchik who served working-class betrayers, some of whom were murderous bureaucrats, and others outright maniacs who defy any normative political description. Among the objects of her adoration were dullards like the East German leader Erich Honecker and the stupefied (and stupefying) Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, as well as the Reverend Jim Jones. Before the grotesque mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, Davis broadcast a worshipful speech about Jones to the imprisoned Black women who were murdered by his cult.
There’s hardly a more famous American communist than Davis, who twice ran for vice president on the CP ticket and stayed true to the party until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For decades, she tirelessly defended the brutalities of the elderly white men who ran the Eastern bloc. Now entering old age herself, Davis has escaped her rightful place doing penance at a memorial to victims of Stalinist tyranny to become a beacon for American millennials who make Soviet-style Black History Month posters. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has named Davis her “idol.” Omar, like rest of her Squad, is cut from Davis’ pattern: Spurning the legions of African American women who stood up for freedom, she instead celebrates a dedicated lifelong bootlicker of communist-bloc tyrants. What redeems Davis, in the eyes of Omar and her fellow progressives, is apparently the fact that she was put on trial for supplying guns to the Black Panthers who murdered hostages during a 1970 shootout.
My son’s school is not the only one with an enthusiasm for Davis. In 2021, City Journal reported on an elementary school in Philadelphia that led fifth graders in a simulated Black Power rally in which they shouted “Free Angela!,” a reference to Davis’ incarceration on murder and conspiracy charges, and adorned the walls of the school with murals of Davis and Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. Last year, a high school in Rockland County, New York, invited Davis to speak on campus (the speech was canceled due to parental outrage). And the website of the National Women’s History Museum offers a lesson plan—Common Core compliant!—on Davis’ thought, which promises to help students “better make sense of the struggles of women and historically marginalized communities.”
Praise for communists like Davis is a sign of the times. After all, the argument goes, they fought for the oppressed and against the evils of capitalism. A colleague who teaches Russian history tells me that in each class a handful of his students announce that they are communists. The students come equipped with handy rationalizations to explain away monstrous Soviet crimes. They argue, for instance, that Stalin was needed to defeat Hitler; if there had been no Stalin, many more Jews would have died in the Holocaust, so the numbers of Stalin’s dead are outweighed by the people Hitler would have killed.
It’s not just the left that makes excuses for the Soviet regime’s crimes. President Trump claimed that Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 “because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB man, models himself after the Soviet rulers in his paranoid wish to silence dissent, his reliance on political assassination, and his use of military force to establish regional dominance, so it’s no surprise that he sees the communist era as a pinnacle of Russian glory. The official Chinese line on Mao is that he was a great leader who made some errors. No Chinese citizen will dare to discuss Mao’s more striking errors, like the 20 million-plus killed by famine during the Great Leap Forward.
The state of Virginia also officially discourages teaching about the criminal behavior of communist regimes. In February the Virginia Senate’s Democrats killed a Republican-sponsored bill that would have required public schools to teach students about the victims of communism. Public school teachers in Virginia are already required to cover slavery and the Holocaust. So why not communism? Because, a representative of the Virginia teachers union explained, “There is a strong association between communism and Asians,” and so studying communism could lead to anti-Asian hate.
Idiots will attack anyone for any reason—a fact to live with. But the Virginia teachers union explanation is plainly bunk. It seems exceedingly unlikely that high school students, after learning about the many millions of Chinese peasants sacrificed at Mao’s whim, would pin the blame for the dictator’s atrocities on the Chinese American kid sitting next to them in class—perhaps a descendent of one of Mao’s victims.
The reality of course is that the Virginia teachers union is loath to desecrate the memories of their own communist poster boy and poster girl heroes. The real reason for failing to include communism in a history curriculum, one suspects, is that it reflects so poorly on the American left, which has so often made common cause with tyrants so long as they were anti-American, while blaming the right for all forms of “oppression.” If “right-wingers” are all racists and fascists, then it follows that communists were the good guys—even when they were committing mass murder.
*****************************************************
Colorado School Board Hands Victory to Child Sporting a Gadsden Flag on Backpack
A Colorado Springs school board walked back a decision from a school administrator that a student could not display a Gadsden flag on his backpack.
The update came after video of the administrator telling the boy’s mother that her son could not return to class with the Gadsden flag patch on the bag went viral. Even Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, weighed in.
"The reason we do not want the flag displayed is due to its origins with slavery and the slave trade," Beth Danjuma, assistant principal of the junior high building at The Vanguard School, is recorded saying.
The boy’s mother informs her that the flag was a symbol used during the Revolutionary War and did not promote slavery, but to no avail.
“I am here to enforce the policy that was provided, by the district, and definitely, you have every right to not agree to it,” Danjuma responds.
With the incident thrust into the national spotlight, however, the school’s board of directors called an emergency meeting and reversed course.
“From Vanguard’s founding we have proudly supported our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the ordered liberty that all Americans have enjoyed for almost 250 years. The Vanguard School recognizes the historical significance of the Gadsden flag and its place in history. This incident is an occasion for us to reaffirm our deep commitment to a classical education in support of these American principles,” the board told Vanguard families in an email.
******************************************************
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
******************************************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment