Stand back! Exploding heads!

For public education, there are two certainties:

Seismic changes are underway … and Betsy DeVos

will be blamed for all of it.

The anti-DeVos psychotics are relentless.

Their opposition is now more reflexive than anything else. They’ve been pavloved into rage … howling at any mention of DeVos.

It’s become a suburban hobby to excoriate DeVos. Whole websites burst into tirade at her mere mention because … because DeVos, it seems, is their anti-public education satan. The archfiend. The destroyer.

And so we witness these almost-compulsory juvenile hurumphs from those least dented by lousy public education. Mostly suburbanites are well removed from the situations DeVos speaks about most often. Their children … despite the smog of the new reforms … are educated in favored circumstances.

Apparently … that gives them the right to speak on behalf of every parent … everywhere.

No, it doesn’t.

There are parents who want out.

Parents who loathe public education because of what it has NOT done for their children. For a long, long time.

DeVos thinks the time is now for those parents to have choices.  Because the public schools have failed their children. For a long, long time.

And this gets Betsy DeVos beaten up a few times a day … because she advocates for disenchanted parents over corrupt unions and their dreadful schools.

It’s pathetic.

Like the mindless Trump bashing … the DeVos hyper-abuse now borders on pathological.  And irrational.

That wins sympathy for her … not for her opposition.

And it brings more attention to the failings of some public schools … mostly inner city schools … and that supplies more support for DeVos’ position  that kids are entitled to options to the public school dread that has haunted some communities.  For a long, long time.

Yet comfortable suburbanites … the DeVos bashers … feel compelled to speak on behalf of inner city families …  to decide their educational fate.

Imagine that in reverse.

Support for school choice is growing … and not just from inner-city school parents.

It’s coming from parents who’ve had their fill of crap-nonsense from politicized teachers who pollute their classrooms with bias. And from teacher unions that would rather be political players than guardians of public education.

Lots of parents want politically-free classrooms that are free of insane political correctness. They want fundamentals.

At those Trump rallies, suburban parents reacted in roars to the mention of Common Core. But others reacted because they finally saw an escape from public education.

As for Betsy DeVos … there are lots of reasons she’s been tattooed as an outsider, but I don’t think she’s much bothered by that label at all because …

It’s insiders who’ve allowed inner-city schools to rot away … for decades.

It’s insiders who’ve decided that kids matter least … and unions and politicians matter most.

It’s insiders … like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan and Gary Booker and Hillary Clinton … who actually championed charter schools and spoke of the inner-city mayhem.

It’s insiders who’ve allowed schools to become social justice -sites … indoctrinating captive audiences, pissing away essential funds on feel-good projects that do nothing but line the pockets of opportunistic educrats.

It’s insiders who’ve allowed unions to politicize education … and to lose complete touch with the classroom experience … and the teachers who create that classroom experience.

It’s insiders who’ve turned a deaf ear to the concerns of mostly minority parents … and their desire for any alternative to the hell-hole schools of the inner cities.

It’s insiders who’ve been extra-reckless with taxpayer monies … allowing schools to become academic ghettos that send an unmistakeable message of indifference to every single child.

It’s insiders who’ve allowed state politicians to own undue influence as they sold out children for their own gain … inviting greedy, privileged entrepreneurs to pillage tax treasuries in return for political lift-off.

It’s insiders who brought us Common Core … and who still defend it openly or with their disturbing silence.

It’s insiders … like union leaders and teachers themselves … who left parents out-to-dry as they resisted these idiotic reforms.

It’s insiders who’ve allowed the federal government to manipulate and interfere in public education … to the complete upset of nearly everyone.

It’s insiders who’ve turned schools into social engineering centers … and children into ideological recruits.

It’s insiders who’ve caused home-schooling to rocket in the recent years … as folks flee these absurd reforms and try to save their children from this public system nightmare.

It’s insiders … those educational absolutists … who mock any mother or father for acting as though they have any regency at all over their own child’s education.

And here’s the Great Whisper insiders are loathe to hear …

It’s insiders who created Donald Trump. He is here because they are there.

This system will change. Dramatically.

Professional educators and unionists can play a role.

Or they can bitch non-stop … until their influence vanishes entirely.

 

Denis Ian

with Michelle Moore