Universal school choice best for student, parents and communities

The school choice is still expanding, and for good reason. Wyoming, Governor Mark Gordon is the latest to sign a bill giving parents school vouchers to cover every single school kid. New Hampshire’s legislature is advancing a similar bill. 15 states, including Florida, North Carolina and Ohio have passed universal school choice in the past four years, and it’s no wonder, when you look at what the public schools have been up to, nobody blames the public schools for closing in March 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic hit and everyone was afraid, but then the big school districts refused to reopen six months later, in places like Chicago and the suburbs of DC, the teachers unions protested against reopening in 2021 the unions made it clear that they didn’t value instruction and that the whole idea of a neighborhood school was a tall tale they didn’t really believe.

Also, public school systems all became ideologically extreme, they reorganized their instruction around critical race theory, and they adopted gender ideology, besides distracting from actual learning, these far left ideas had a common thread. They both pit school systems against parents. Critical Race Theory and dei are both based on the idea that America is fundamentally racist and that schools must uproot all tradition and existing institutions in order to uproot this deep seated white supremacy. Gender ideology in schools is about convincing a child that he or she is a different person, that who you are is determined solely by you.

Large school districts typically have policies that teachers may not tell parents if their child is beginning to identify as transgendered and the propaganda on sex is intense in Montgomery County, Maryland, the school system wanted to include in the curriculum books featuring transgenderism and sexual fetishes and show it to all the kids. But state law allowed parents to opt their kids out of sex ed, so the school system moved the sexual books into the reading curriculum when religious parents objected, school board members called them bigots. These school systems want to tear children away from their parents. The schools see themselves as the Enlightened liberators, freeing the next generation from their backwards, racist parents.

This ideology obviously endangers children in Arlington, Virginia County, officials allowed a registered sex offender who had recently been arrested for exposing himself to enter a girl’s locker room at a pool shared with a public high school because the man identified as a woman, and this was county policy. Look around the country and you will find 1000 stories like these. Soon you realize that the public schools have become, in effect, religious schools, preaching a harmful new religion, and these school systems try to insulate themselves from parents and the community.

Notably, the insanity happens the most in the big school districts, where the school boards are most immune from accountability and democracy. When parents speak up, they get branded as domestic terrorists. In this context, state governments have a duty to help parents opt out of these far left quasi religious schools. The best way to do this is to create universal school choice, and here’s hoping the trend continues.