One of the great conservative successes of the modern era has been allowing parents to direct their children's education through school choice initiatives.
According to EdChoice, "There are 74 educational choice programs on the books in 33 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico."
But the Left—which includes Kamala Harris—hates school choice because every time a parent chooses to send their children to a non-public school, they lose the ability to indoctrinate that child forever. They can no longer secretly trans those kids or induct them into the sexual revolution at the tender age of six. They also can't teach them that 2+2=5.
The Left's primary weapons in the war against school choice and homeschooling (it's the same war) are lies and dissembling.
Twenty years ago, the Akron Beacon Journal published a disgraceful series "exposing" the dangers of homeschooling by trying to falsely tie every high-profile case of child murder, kidnapping, or abuse to the educational choices of the parents, never mentioning how dangerous public schools are.
A website called the Fallacy Detective did a brilliant takedown of the series, highlighting the very obvious logical fallacies contained within:
Fallacy 3: Proof by Lack of Evidence
. . . [T]he nation [collects] an unprecedented volume of statistics on public school students. . . . [But] it . . . knows almost nothing about children who are educated at home. (Nov. 15)
Lack of evidence is only evidence that there is a lack of evidence. There is no evidence of widespread cannibalism among Akron, Ohio residents; should the government fund a massive study to learn why there is no evidence? No, the government should channel its money to study problems for which we have evidence.
This line of reasoning tempts us to lose perspective. We imagine all the horrible possibilities of what homeschoolers could be doing behind closed doors, but we forget that we have absolutely no evidence for this – we only have a lack of evidence. Paranoia is an irrational fear of the unknown.
A reporter commits the fallacy of proof by lack of evidence when he suggests that something is true simply because there was no evidence to the contrary. A lack of evidence cannot be used to support or refute anything. The reporter has the burden of proof to supply positive evidence to support his claim.
School superintendents and other child professionals say an unknown number of children receive an inadequate education at home. . . . (Nov. 15)
An unknown number may be a million or zero. We don’t know. We could say an unknown number of newspaper reporters were smoking an unknown substance when they wrote this article.
It's gaslighting, pure and simple, and reporters do it—and get away with it—all the time when they discuss school choice. Here's a more recent example, courtesy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is upset because "Ohio has expanded school vouchers to cover nearly every student in the state with at least a partial scholarship, state spending on private school scholarships has ballooned to nearly $1 billion a year." The Democrat media organ hates the fact that poor black kids might have a way out of dangerous and failing public schools.
In an article Sunday, the paper set about pushing disinformation about school choice and trying to scare parents into keeping their kids in the system.
But public and private schools use different tests, and performance data are posted online at different times. Comparisons are especially tricky in high school because private school students can be tested on different subjects than public school students.
[...]
In short, the data doesn’t reveal enough information to prove that private schools are hands-down academically superior – even as the state is expected to spend nearly $1 billion on private school vouchers for last school year, once the final payments are calculated. [Emphasis added]
In other words, the Plain Deal has no idea whether private schools perform better than public schools, so it has to trot out the "OMG NO ONE KNOWS" fallacy to make it sound like something nefarious is happening at private schools. What are they hiding? It's the classic proof-by-lack-of-evidence fallacy, just like the Akron Beacon Journal used twenty years ago. The scare tactics have been marginally effective over the years, so they continue to use them.
But the Plain Dealer took it a step further by misrepresenting public school statistics:
But [Andrew] Brenner [Republican Chair of the Senate Education Committtee] says the point of school choice is “you have to have the money follow the student for competition, otherwise you’ll have mediocrity.”
“Look,” he continued, “if I’m spending $35,000 a student in East Cleveland city schools, which is what the state is roughly paying for those kids in that school district to fail miserably, and that school district can use those dollars to hire whomever they want, do whatever they want. They’ve got autonomy, essentially, on how they can spend those dollars. You give them an EdChoice scholarship for $8,500 to go to a high school, that is significantly cheaper than it would be to send them to the traditional public schools. And you’ve already determined the improvement in there.”
In East Cleveland, 54.2% of students were proficient in high school American government, compared to 48% of private school students on vouchers being proficient in social studies. [Emphasis added]
You might look at that statistic for American Government education in East Cleveland and think, "Wow! They're doing a great job! What is that lying liar Republican complaining about?"
But a quick glance at East Cleveland's state Report Card reveals abysmal proficiency rates for all the other subjects:
Algebra I 9.4%
American US Government 54.2%
American US History 40.6%
Biology 17.5%
English Language Arts II 19.9%
Geometry 1.4%
The Plain Dealer cherry-picked the outlier—U.S. Government, which had the highest proficiency rate—while ignoring the fact that only 20% of high school students tested as "Proficient" in English. At $35,000 per student, you'd think they could teach these children to read and write proficiently. Imagine what a private school could do with that kind of money. They could have a two-to-one student-teacher ratio and privately tutor each and every child.
But the education-industrial complex will not tolerate that kind of common sense, so they resort to lying and gaslighting.
The Democrat Party platform calls for a ban on federal funding for for-profit charter schools and opposes "private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system." Instead, they want to "reimagine" public education to include boys in girls' bathrooms, aggressive climate-change fear-mongering, and getting kids into the system as early as possible with free universal preschool babysitting.
The good news is that Americans are waking up to the fact that most public schools are cesspools of woke ideology and dismal academic ratings. Parents are smart and determined when it comes to their children's education. Unlike the education establishment, they're not obsessed with test scores—in fact, many think that schools focus too much on tests. They want their kids to be safe, cared for, and taught reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. It's a simple formula that worked well until the progressives took over education and began focusing on garbage like social-emotional learning and sex education.
The bad news is that the Left is not going to give up control of the schools without a fight. The Democrats are beholden to teachers' unions, which care more about advancing teachers' unions than teaching children, and together, they will sink every dollar they can into getting Kamala "bring back school busing" Harris into the White House.
If Harris wins—and somehow gets control of both the House and Senate—look for her to roll back all the school-choice rights parents have gained over the last two decades. Children will be forced to return to failing, dangerous schools, and there will be even less accountability than there is now. Homeschooling could even be outlawed.
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