The Patriot Post® · In Brief: End Government's Monopoly on Education
Government schools, usually called public schools, too often have become places of indoctrination instead of learning. Good teachers too often can’t overcome a corrupt system. Former Vice President Mike Pence has an idea on what to do, because, he says, “The last thing America needs is a return to ‘normal’ in our public school classrooms.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was a stress test on public education that revealed fundamental flaws in the system that are deep, lasting, and likely to get worse.
Over the past year, Americans have seen teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats leverage the pandemic to score political victories and extort more money from taxpayers while lobbying to keep schools closed counter to CDC guidance. These efforts needlessly exacerbated and prolonged hardship for millions of students and families.
At the same time, online learning has allowed parents to peek into their child’s virtual classroom, where for the first time, they can see and hear everything their children are being taught. As a result, many parents are now rightly concerned that the primary mission of many public schools is no longer to educate America’s youth but to indoctrinate them with a radical left-wing political ideology.
The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the growing wokeness epidemic, created a perfect storm in America’s classrooms — forcing countless American families to flee in search of shelter elsewhere. The Census Bureau reports that homeschooling has tripled.
Likewise, many private schools have seen enrollment surge to record levels.
These are good changes and a silver lining to a very bad 18 months, Pence says. But there’s a lot more to be done. He proceeds to advocate for “child-centered funding models for education,” which send money with children to the school of their choice. He’s working for this at the advocacy group he founded, Advancing American Freedom.
Child-centered funding of education has never been more critical. During the pandemic shutdowns, wealthy families had the ability to bail out of public schools immediately and enroll in private schools that continued to hold in-person classes. But the vast majority of middle-class families and the working poor were left behind. True school choice can eliminate this gaping inequality in our society.
School choice also allows every family to escape the suffocating political indoctrination that has become all too common in our public schools, where science, history, and even math are increasingly taught through the lens of racial grievance, and children are taught to be ashamed of the color of their skin. School choice stops liberals from using our tax dollars to fill the minds of our nation’s youth with poisonous anti-American lies.
Pence concludes, “Decisions about a child’s education can have lifelong ramifications.” Those decisions should be made by parents.