Good day, CharterFolk.
The NEA and AFT filed suit yesterday to stop the Trump Administration’s efforts regarding the Department of Education.
It’s played out pretty much as the New York Times editorial board predicted 46 years ago.
A federal department whose creation was announced by a President speaking before the NEA now sees the NEA to be one of its greatest defenders. The part the Times didn’t foresee was the AFT and the NEA being united in their defense. Nor did the Times say anything about local unions getting into the fray. The Massachusetts affiliate of AFT is also party to the suit.
AFT Massachusetts, for those of you keeping score, is the same party that is fresh off its successful effort to block the growth of high performing charter schools …
… and sunset the state’s high school exit exam.
… is running the most threatening legislation in the country attempting to defund charter schools.
Chilling.
Liberal standard bearers can argue all they want that Democratic policy makers need to stop blocking the creation of new things that the public wants.
Here and there, we find an encouraging sign that Dems want to stake out new ground, like the incoming Governor in Delaware recently speaking glowingly about charter schools at their annual gathering …
But more broadly, the party’s scarcity agenda remains firmly in place. This week, status quo interests won a case in California …
… whose implications could rival the imposition of scarcity in Massachusetts.
Call Massachusetts and California the “coastal elites” in terms of advancing an education scarcity agenda.
In the middle of the country, we near a historic funding equity win for charter schools in the Indiana state legislature, but the blowback is intense.
Brandon Brown picks apart the contradictions embedded in the positions taken by purveyors of scarcity.
None of this is meant to offer a blanket defense of everything coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Some of it is downright off its rocker, including legislation in Texas meant to ban furry behavior in school.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Last week, AEI followed up a story first published at the Financial Times about new evidence that human cognitive ability in the aggregate appears to be on the downslope.
I can’t speak to the scientific validity of the findings presented, but the amount of learning happening in our schools, and the quality of the discussion happening about those schools, would certainly suggest we’re in a period of pronounced cognitive decline.