“When equity is everything that we hear, it truly baffles me now that those who fight for it are the same ones who are so strongly opposed to Parental Choice!” Kim Reynolds, the Republican Governor of Iowa, made the egalitarian case for privatizing education on Twitter.
Adding, “What could be more fair than supporting every Iowa student equally?”
I first became aware of Kim Reynolds’s sober and sensible school choice program last week in the piece by the editorial board in The Wall Street Journal, “Iowa’s School Choice Comeback;” and I was warmly reminded of Milton Friedman’s dictum that there’s hardly a problem government can solve than the market can’t solve better. You could also add his saying that no one knows better how to spend one’s money than the individual oneself.
New York City
Indeed more government intervention into society to micromanage the affairs of millions of private citizens making billions of decisions a day has a pronounced tendency to make already existing problems worse. Take the case of Bill Deblasio’s equity-based admissions initiatives in New York City, wrecking public schools that were already struggling. In the article in Reason magazine (part of the libertarian publication’s “National School Choice Week” series), “How Brooklyn’s Much Copied Diversity Plan Helped Throw Its Best Middle School Into Chaos,” Matt Welch writes,
“The claim that all students would benefit from a ‘controlled choice’ system in which families rank their preferred middle-school destinations but the education bureaucracy ultimately controls the outcome via algorithmic lottery weighted to smooth out socioeconomic imbalances across the district was not just presented as an aspirational prediction by advocates, but as scientific fact by politicians and allegedly impartial news organizations.”
Academics, experts, leading opinions and such championed administrative “diversity” as a value in way of fostering better public schools—activists are even framing the new policy as a means to combat what they refer to as “segregation” in the nouveau racial justice lobby group sense of the word, implying that schools without administrative diversity policies resemble the Jim Crow south. A smattering of experts were cited to argue all the “research” supports rebalancing admissions for the sake of equity. Welch says,
“Suppose there is a gap between those confident, science-touting predictions and the real-world controlled-choice experiences of students, parents, and schools. In that case, the implications go far beyond the fate of a few thousand Brooklyn families.”
He observes, “The middle school class of 2019, the last to graduate under the old admissions policy, had 212 offers into the specialized high schools. The class of 2022 received just 168; this despite being only 22 students smaller than the class of 2019. Pre-Diversity Plan, around 45 percent of District 15 8th graders took the Specialized Highschool Aptitude Test (SHSAT), of which around 25 percent got in; post-changes, those ratios have been consistently down to 40 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
And, “Seventh-grade math proficiency scores at the school have collapsed from 81 percent in 2019 to 48 percent in 2022, with double digit declines among each of the four racial groups that the DOE {Department of Education} tracks. This cannot be explained away by pandemic learning loss; Manhattan's District 2, which is consistently the second-largest feeder into the specialized high school, saw very little decline over the same period.”
Also these schools’ new “restorative justice” programs have increased delinquency so much that the levels at which students reported feeling safe in school, Welch says, plummeted by “nineteen percentage points” as fights have broken out, kids cut class to smoke pot and vape in the bathrooms, as the schools eased discipline, and overwhelmed teachers couldn’t contain the chaos. At William Alexander, he says, “two-thirds of faculty giving a no-confidence vote to new principal Neal Singh; their union filing a grievance, teachers quitting in droves, accusations (on all sides) of racism, anguished quotes from people whose whole identity was wrapped up in what had been until 2019 a beloved local institution.”
One parent at a local town council meeting, Welch reports, said to the District 2 superintendent Kelly McGuire, “I am now looking for a private school for my son. But so many families in our district have reached out to me that they cannot afford it. It's deeply unfair that your plan does not meet the needs of these families."
So that’s the left’s grand idea to somehow improve education through abstract inclusivity at the cost of willfully denying practical reality. But the left fucking up inner city schools is probably a story you’re used to. The much more intriguing craziness, for our purposes, is happening further south.
Florida
In no clearer way than Ron Desantis’s noxious meddling with the result to exfoliate unseemly and unnecessary hotbutton disputes over culture and identity—prove that government does not deserve its monopoly on public education in the first place.
I hate Ron Desantis by the way. I mean I really really loathe him. He’s a populist, so I despise that (my antimajoritarianism quivers before anyone who purports to emancipate the untrammeled popular will of any unchecked majority). He is also a vote-getter and an opportunist, with no discernible conscience nor even the remotest sign of a sense of humor. Without even the pretense of a bedside manner, his skillful employment of a pronounced authoritarian acumen moreover make his rise almost more alarming than the rise and fall of Donald Trump. Trump gave birth to this cold blooded glacial psychopath anyway.
If Donald Trump were Victor Frankenstein then Desantis would have to be the monster. He abuses the governor’s office just to stage a sensational culture war, with no ostensible purpose besides to load slop into the trough of his Fox news audience for them to devour. He has no other goal, it appears to me, than to consolidate and concentrate unlimited unconstrained power into one central authority, himself; at the top of his agenda is the goal only to get votes by getting attention; just like Trump—get in the news every single day make CNN scared of you by making Fox love you, and make Fox love you by making The New York Times hate you. And just cultivate the appearance, in the crudest way possible, of a man who gets things done and makes the trains run on time, a snappy deliverer on ad hoc promises—it doesn’t matter how productive you actually are, because people hate Washington so much, you just need to act the part of a doer for the tv screen. A man of the people. He will dismantle the woke status quo, and I think he’s well on track to build a whole new bureaucracy in its place. We might call it Desantistan as they amusingly call it at The Bulwark. “Election integrity” police forces, buses deporting migrants, investigations into public health authorities over Covid. And then we have his numerous first amendment violations for the sake, if you take him at his word, of protecting academic freedom and promoting excellence. He says “Florida is where woke comes to die.” Congrats Ron. Presiding over tip lines instituted so conservatives can mainline their grievances right to the state, and the ban of countless books from public libraries, you’re a real trust buster.
In the wake of all this authoritarian collectivization with an expanded bureaucracy, it occurred to me there has never been a greater argument for school choice to put an end this head-splitting discord.
The Iowa Alternative
Since I have been so busy lamenting conservatives’ tacit jettisoning of school choice in Florida and Virginia, over the past several months, instead to pit opinion against opinion over culture for Fox news screen time—I was very pleased to see Kim Reynolds frame the argument better than I could have myself.
“When equity is everything we hear about, it truly baffles me that those who fight for it are so opposed to school choice!”
In making a light provocation—as if just to gently teasingly prod social justice hypocrisy, rather than go D-day on it unlike her Florida counterpart—the Iowa governor articulates a sober, sensible, reasonable, equitable—in a sense paradoxically a progressive alternative to the conflict between one and another version of epistemic truth, in principal driving the patent absurdity of the obscene culture war (are transgender people really what they identify as? Should they be allowed to play the sport corresponding with their gender identity?), whose pointless back and forth is beneath contempt for neoliberals and genuine conservatives.
In my experience, people, who when it comes to politics, care a great deal about “social issues,” are all idiots. Although now we can see an awful amount of conservatives have social cares too, I mean (if I’m speaking from experience) the progressives I met in college to be exact; as in people who flatter their vanity that they’re ‘empaths’ for instance, who would assume accommodating transgender people is a more urgent concern than our social security problem or the federal deficit, who have probably never even spent one second of their virtue-signalling narcissistic time thinking about fiscal policy. Affectionate earnestness regarding social issues really shows how uninformed people are, how limited their perspective is, and how naiive, shallow, self-absorbed, petty and generally stupid they are.
The Fundamental Reason Desantis is a Dictator
I don’t appreciate the radical left smuggling Marxist critical theory through our educational institutions, with the effect to shape public opinion by molding the minds of the naiive young—one can’t overstate how dangerous all forms of woke progressivism are to the free society—and I’m no less uncomfortable with it than social conservatives, though for very different reasons (because I am, by no means, a social conservative, no more than I am socially progressive; I am not socially anything as a matter of fact; because I love my independence, a rare thing nowadays, I actually pride myself on my sovereign aloof indifference regarding all concerns of a social nature which, it is even a source of smug bemusement to me, trigger so much high-strung emotion among herdlike groups of people with their stubborn attachments to social values, conservative or liberal).
I don’t think I want to have kids if I can avoid it; however I am positive that if I did or if I do (God forbid) have kids, I certainly wouldn’t want them to get gender reassignment surgery as a kid or at any age, nor would I want my kids to be taught that America is a racist country, or that white people exist to oppress black people and can hardly help being racist without even intending to or whatever— nor would I want my kid borrowing bizarre perverse children’s books laced ideologically with propaganda for homosexuality from my public library (if you didn’t think children’s books depicting sexual relationships were real by the way, I assure you, they are; it’s not a right wing paranoid fantasy; I read a horrifying article about these children’s books in the Washington Post a while ago)—nor could I imagine why I would ever take my kids to a drag show for God’s sake (as Desantis also went out of his way to criminalize). I would not abide my own kids’ involvement in, or to surround themselves with, any of these, in my personal opinion, speaking candidly obscene things. However as a classical liberal, my libertarian conviction is that what other parents do with their kids is none of my business.
In my classical liberal worldview, if you’re okay with your kids getting gender reassignment surgery, alright then I say, fucking go for it! Or if you want to take your kid to a drag show, or if you want to instruct your kid in homosexual relationships with the guidance of propagandistic children’s books, in which sexual liberation is packaged for little kids probably as a principle of justice, then fine. Go ahead. I wouldn’t let my kid anywhere near any of that stuff, but your kids are your own god damn problem. So you do that. If you’re ultra progressive, or whatever ridiculous impulse motivates a parent to take their kid to a drag show, then great, sexually liberate your kid then and teach them all about gay people—teach them that gender or sexuality is all a social construct like they do at liberal arts colleges, everything is “fluid,” and social conventions of all kinds, in a Foucaultian sense, you can reduce to a conservative conspiracy to oppress sexual minorities, give your kid complete license to identify as, and/or screw with, whatever gratifies their ephemeral fancy—if you think that would be such a productive use of your responsibility as a parent, essential to your child’s upbringing. I could care less. It’s your kid. It’s your fucking prerogative.
And so while I abhor that progressives are smuggling social justice lunacy into public school curriculums and libraries, it enrages me in equal measure, and I think it offends decency that Ron Desantis should willfully challenge this stuff head on, condescending to fight wokeness on its own terms, giving it much more attention than it deserves or warrants, or that it’s socially polite or even seemly for the more modest of us to have to witness. He’s like someone who’s emphatically opposed to nudists who spends all day looking at nude beaches with binoculars, perched in a tree. And if you consider that he deliberately does it for media attention, it’s as if he had a need to broadcast to the whole world only what primarily he is so obsessed with voyeuristically watching, as if a part of him liked it. His utter fixation on the most radical strain of progressivism makes me actually hope for his sake, he’s just a psychopath who cravenly wants political power for himself. Because on the other hand, if his obsession is genuine, then I must conclude, he has some really deep-seated inadequacies.
I submit, if this crass vulgar war on wokeness offends decency, it offends modesty. If it offends modesty, it offends good sense, taste and most importantly sound judgment.
Besides how crass for instance, a “Stop Woke Act” may be, it is also wholly impractical, and it would be understatement to say it’s inefficient. It is counterproductive to stemming the tide of institutional indoctrination. Desantis only sets a new standard by raising the bar for progressive earnestness. By opposing them on their terms, Desantis undermines his own case for freedom to the degree that he uses the power of the state to coercively enforce it. In his vain attempt to do so, he only lends more credibility to leftist claims that anyone who opposes antiracism ipso facto is a racist and all conservatives who care about liberty are hegemonic hypocrites. Most recently he blocked an AP course on black history on the grounds that it violated his stop woke law, because the course includes an objective review of the critical race theory movement. As Reason magazine’s Scott Shackford notes in the article, “Florida’s Rejection of an AP African American studies Course is a Rejection of School Choice,”
“Gov. Ron DeSantis' Press Secretary Bryan Griffin* said, ‘As submitted, the course is a vehicle for a political agenda and leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow.’
Well, it is a history class, after all. Once you get past the names and dates, history studies political agendas and ideology. Certainly, that would have to be the case for a black history class in America.”
This situation is a very unfortunate signal example lately of how Desantis’s “stop woke act” constitutes abysmal government overreach as well as an infringement on civil liberties. Not to mention it’s throwing another newspaper on the racial justice/ antiracism fire, making their argument that we’re all racist and life itself fundamentally is racist to the core—giving that self-victimizing black identity politics serious credibility; and at this point anything that gets in their way might empower them anyway, but still it’s the most unnecessary thing Desantis could do, attempt to regulate wokeness.
Moreover Desantis’s reactionary censorship only serves to cast suspicion on the motives of small government proponents like us who have more nuanced reasons for rejecting wokeness. Mainly the reason social justice is so dangerous in my opinion in principle, as I think Margaret Thatcher would probably agree, is that social justice is a threat to democratic self-government, because it’s a challenge to the rule of law; and it threatens to undermine the rule of law, because it’s a direct assault on individual liberty, as it attempts to subordinate people to privileged and oppressed group statuses. Social justice people with their overdetermined belief in systemic oppression slip into expressing a revolutionary desire to overhaul the system they scorn as broken. Accusations of “systemic injustice”—whether directed at the supreme court or the police, or the legal system as a whole undergird a deterministic worldview which is a radical denial of the possibility of incremental progress, which is a prescription for the violent overthrow of our institutions, if they can’t dismantle the rules from within, which they’re already doing in progressive states and cities like California and New York with bail reform, for example. Like I said in an earlier post, democracy will collapse if people are not regarded as equal before the law. That constitutional security is what is meant by the concept of the rule of law, which any functional democracy is supposed to enshrine first and foremost. One of the most extreme antidemocratic things you can say is that equality before the law is just a hoax. It doesn’t exist. And we should stop striving for it. Or as a Marxist would say, bourgeois legal equality is designed to oppress certain groups of people with impunity.
What the commonsense conclusion of an enlightened understanding of the danger of social justice necessitates: is that we need to strengthen the case for limited government and individual liberty. The polar opposite of the right way to deal with social justice is to expand administrative authority further, like Desantis. His view, to fight fire with fire, and expand state power, I’m forced to conclude, communicates a fundamental misunderstanding of why precisely social justice is so dangerous. Wokeness is dangerous because its proponents desire to seize all our institutions to control freedom of thought and speech; and therefore to take away our liberties and rights, all to impose totalitarian equity in a revolutionary fashion, and subject all of us to the ends of a collectivistic ideal—not to repeat myself. It is the threat that they desire to empower the state to attain their ends that is the root of the issue, not what their cultural values alone are. Who cares—what difference would it make?—that progressives are barking mad if only our institutions for securing our rights are fireproofed against capture?
Their totalitarian social movement demands a deep and passionate commitment to old fashioned Lockean liberalism and enlightenment western rationalism—the egalitarian values of liberty and reason, freedom and persuasion. Desantis pretends as if it were their ideas and culture in themselves that were the problem—not their potential exploitation of administrative government—and he thereby betrays how illiberal and authoritarian his instincts are. Quoted from The Economist, “Florida’s Woke Wars, Ron Desantis Wants to Limit Free Speech in the Name of Freedom,” —
“Usually when people want to prevent an idea they dislike, they limit who can speak on campus, says Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at FIRE {a libertarian group that filed lawsuits against Desantis for violating the first and fourteenth amendments}. (Liberals have been accused of using this practice against their conservative enemies recently.) But the Stop Woke Act is different. ‘Florida is skipping the pretext,’ Mr Steinbaugh says. ‘They’re skipping the middleman and just limiting ideas themselves.’”
It shows how Desantis is absolutely no different, in principle, from the social justice warriors he pretends to fight. Progressives want to trample on our constitutional rights for the sake of smothering us in bland, but nevertheless totalitarian, abstract cosmetic idealisms such as diversity, inclusion, empathy, equity and sensitivity. Desantis wants to counter their wholly impractical attempt at the complete cosmetic makeover of everything that superficially hurts them and triggers their inferiority, with antiprogressive or reactionary legislation, violating all of our first amendment rights that guarantee progressives, like it or not, the right to preach, teach and learn whatever in God’s name they feel like. Neither Desantis and his acolytes, nor progressives give the tiniest damn about actual liberty, equally. Each wants to weaponize the government to strong arm free private citizens by dictating to them what they can and cannot say and do.
What Actual Justice, that is Fair to Everyone, Really Looks Like
The Cato Institute’s Jeffrey Miron in his article, “In Libertarian Land, Private Colleges Can Go as Woke as they Want,” charts a course for public policy and an attitude I can admire. He says,
“Libertarian Land escapes this mess by avoiding any government involvement in higher education; it has no government‐owned colleges or universities, no government research funding, no federally guaranteed student loans or grants, and so on.”
Hearkening to Reagan’s principle that government is the problem, these unfortunate cultural clashes in Florida and across the country, I would argue, can be and should be circumvented and skipped over by removing the state from all government involvement in education whatsoever. Which brings us back, on a lighter note, to Kim Reynolds.
Towards Privatizing the Culture War!
Meanwhile, as Desantis monomaniacally hunts the Moby Dick of wokeness to eradicate every vestige and remotest trace of its existence—genuine conservatives like Kim Reynolds and also Doug Ducey quietly, modestly, serenely, are expanding school choice in Iowa and Arizona respectively.
In his landmark essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” Milton Friedman wrote,
“Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year, if spent on approved educational services. Parents would be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an approved institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by nonprofit institutions of various kinds. The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards.”
As if taking inspiration directly from Friedman, Mrs. Reynolds is provisioning students state vouchers for their deposit in Education Savings Accounts, ESAs. These parents can use to send their kids to the school of their own choosing, whether it’s catholic school or woke school, Critical Race Queer Intersectional Feminism University or whatfuckingever. She tried to pass a smaller school choice bill in the state legislature a year or so ago but now she propped up challengers in primaries to republicans who were opposed to school choice, and now her candidates won. Now, as the WSJ’s editorial board writes glowingly, “The bill that state lawmakers passed out of committee last week would provide education savings accounts of $7000 for students to use toward private school tuition, tutoring, and more.”
And in Arizona as in the National Affairs article, “The Arizona Miracle,” {Last} January, Ducey told the state legislature, ‘let’s think big and find more ways to get kids into the school of their parents’ choice. Send me the bills, and I’ll sign them.’ In July, he did just that. The Empowerment Scholarship Account Program—the most expansive school choice program in America—is a pure choice-based system that provides $6500 per student to any family that prefers an alternative to public schools. The funds can be used to send students not only to traditional private schools, but to the sorts of ‘pods’ or ‘micro schools’ that sprang up during the Covid-19 pandemic to fill the gap between homeschooling and traditional education. At the same time, the legislature increased the state’s k-12 budget by $1 billion.”
Exemplary classical liberals like Kim Reynolds and Doug Ducey spare themselves and the rest of us the indignity and disgrace of polarizingly engaging the left on the left’s own terms, just accelerating the erosion of democratic institutions and norms. They also combat the influence of totalitarian social justice by reforming our institutions against their monopolistic capture, in this case via liberalizing the marketplace of ideas—making education more competitive, making society more pluralistic, and while making social discourse more civil and agreeable in the process. As Friedman writes at the end of his essay,
“The result of these measures would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government yet a greater widening in the educational opportunities open to our children. They would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.”
Though without recourse to the healthful cultural consequences for society at large that would follow, there is also a moral argument for what would be a fairer allocation of resources. As Mrs Reynolds tweeted, “what could be more fair than supporting every Iowa student equally?”
By privatizing education, these statesmen and stateswomen not only expand choice and opportunity in a way that is efficient and mutually beneficial, but they secure our individual rights by doing so. This is proper statesmanship. This is how the intellectually honest, conscientious and principled among us can conserve, reform, and strengthen American democracy.
—Jay
Very well written, Jay. Lots of life in the prose.