The Public School Uniparty
Wagons have been circled
The debate over school choice is not going away. Parents are increasingly unsatisfied with public schools that fail to educate children in basic academics while pushing far left propaganda and are looking for solutions or even alternatives. In many cases, parents have found their existing school boards and school administrations to be hostile to their concerns — recall Attorney General Merrick Garland calling concerned parents domestic terrorists just a few years ago. In other cases, even when concerned citizens manage to win election to school boards, they find that bureaucratic red tape at both the state and federal level prevent any meaningful reform.
Governor Brad Little and State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield would both say that Idaho already has school choice. Private schools or homeschooling are great options for families with the necessary money and flexibility, but many parents are unable to make those options work. That is where a nationwide movement is trying to help. Figures like Corey DeAngelis are promoting an education model where tax dollars follow the student rather than going to public schools by default. In response, defenders of the current public school system have circled the wagons.
I recently highlighted one 501c4 organization called Save Our Schools Idaho which opposes any bill to expand school choice, no matter how mild. I noticed recently that the website for Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a freshman Democrat on the House Education Committee, links to Save Our Schools as a resource to “see how ESA vouchers would impact schools in your area”.
This got me thinking about how the public school establishment really is nonpartisan. Even though Galaviz is a Democrat and House Education Committee Chairwoman Julie Yamamoto is a Republican, they both worked as public school teachers, which I think is a bond that is thicker than that of ideology. Though they certainly disagree on some issues, they wholeheartedly agree that public education is sacrosanct.
Recall that Yamamoto spoke candidly at the Idaho Policy Forum last October about her opposition to anything that would affect the public school system. “Who’s money is following the child?” she asked rhetorically, implying that your tax dollars belong to public school administrators. She also accused school choice proponents of being interested only in money and power, and not the best interests of children. She agreed with her fellow panelists that only public schools offer any form of accountability for the way in which tax dollars are spent.
Except we all know that’s not really true. Every session, the Legislature allocates more cash for the public school system as the governor boasts about another historic and unprecedented investment in public education. Yet taxpayers are clearly not getting value for their money. Last October, Idaho Education News published a damning article about yet another drop in standardized test scores throughout the state. Author Carly Flandro took the State Department of Education to task for trying to spin the latest report as positive:
In the news release, state superintendent Debbie Critchfield characterized the early literacy results as “generally positive.”
But Idaho K-3 students dropped in reading proficiency to 66.6% on the spring test from the previous year’s 69.1%.
Just last week, Flandro wrote a follow-up article pointing out that 42% of K-3 students in Idaho’s public schools are not reading at their grade level. If a student turns in a test with a 58% grade, he fails, but the public school system as a whole can get away with only 58% of students being proficient in reading and not only are they not held accountable, they have the audacity to demand even more money.
How much of the defense of the public school system is about the students, and how much is about the jobs it provides? Recall the Tennessee public school administrator who lamented the jobs that would be lost of a school choice bill passed in his state. That is the part that is usually left unsaid: that the top priority of proponents of the current system is keeping tax dollars flowing to public school employees.
Rep. Galaviz currently teaches at a Boise elementary school and Rep. Yamamoto worked as both a teacher and an administrator before she retired. Despite belonging to different parties, they are united in ensuring that their own industry continues without any interference.
The current system is hamstrung by bureaucracy, controlled by federal agencies, resistant to reform, and championed by lawmakers with vested interests in its continuation. It is, in short, broken, and severely in need of transformation. One of the biggest advantages to money following the child, besides providing alternatives to thousands of Idaho families who are trapped in schools that are failing their children, is that it would provide competition to the current system in the same way that a second gas station or hardware store in a neighborhood keeps prices low and quality high.
There is little chance that any kind of reform will get past the House Education Committee with Julie Yamamoto as chair. However, there are ways around that roadblock.
Last session, after Chairwoman Yamamoto and Vice-Chair Lori McCann joined with Democrats to kill the original library porn bill in committee, Rep. Jaron Crane reintroduced it as H314 and House Speaker Mike Moyle sent it to the State Affairs Committee rather than Education. It received a fair hearing there and eventually passed both the House and Senate before Governor Little vetoed it near the end of the session.
Also near the end of the session, Sen. Ben Adams introduced a bill creating a modest tax credit for families who homeschool or choose to send their children to private schools. Since this bill was primarily about taxation, rather than the school system itself, it was referred to the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee instead of Education. It was too late in the session to get a hearing, but perhaps a stronger version of that bill could gain traction next year.
It’s clear that something needs to be done. Idaho public schools are failing in their basic mission of educating children, but public education apparatchiks like Reps. Galaviz and Yamamoto will brook no opposition to the current system. Rather than simply accepting the frame that says ideas for reform or money following the student are novel and extreme, we need to put the public school uniparty on the defensive. Make them explain why they are so unwilling to hear criticism of a school system that is failing nearly half its students. Force them to admit that there are deep structural problems that cannot be solved by simply throwing more tax dollars at them. Let’s make 2024 the year in which real universal school choice becomes a reality in Idaho.
Your readers might find this article of interest:
Rotten From the Roots: The History of Public Education (12/10/23). By Suzanne Kearney. “Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach, and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid,” said John Taylor Gatto in an exposé on compulsory schooling. The public school system is doing precisely what its founders intended. The author discusses these founders and how they created today’s regimented, dumbed down public schools: https://kootenaijournal.com/2023/12/10/rotten-from-the-roots-the-history-of-public-education/
This is a real civil rights battle. Decades from now people will find it hard to believe that we forced parents to send their children to a designated school no matter how bad, ineffective or full of woke indoctrination without an opportunity to choose a school that better educated children, or that espoused values consistent with the parents. We taxpayers send that money to the state to pay for children's education, not to make them slaves to the teachers' unions and the local district schools. There is no excuse for a third or more of children not to be able to read at grade level in third grade, except that the school insists on using ineffective educational methods and materials. But if they do, it is unconscionable to force parents to send their children there instead of giving them a choice.