OCPA praises DeVos, emphasizes federalism

Earlier this month, OCPA joined The Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and 10 other organizations in sending a letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos praising her commitment to educational choice and emphasizing the need to remain true to the tenets of federalism.

Public education system is indispensable to leftist cultural power

"I had to laugh at the Democratic memes on Twitter implying that DeVos bought her confirmation votes with campaign contributions," David French writes.

DeVos’s contributions are a drop in the ocean compared to the financial impact of the teacher’s unions in American politics. In 2016 alone, teachers’ unions gave $33.2 million in political contributions, 93 percent to Democrats. DeVos’s contributions—even if you include contributions from her entire family—are inconsequential by comparison. Who’s buying whom?  

But it’s about so much more than money. The public educational system is indispensable to leftist cultural power in the United States. As a practical matter, if your child goes to public schools from kindergarten through college, they are (with some exceptions) educated by the Left. Yes, there are conservative teachers here and there (especially in conservative towns), but they work in a system designed, built, and maintained by the other side of our great ideological divide. Moreover, given the public school monopoly in town after town, parents often have little choice but to expose their kids to public school morality, (often) public school incompetence, and public school ideology for seventeen consecutive years. It’s simply naive to believe this reality doesn’t carry with it profound cultural and political consequences.  

Finally, you can never forget the extent to which large numbers of secular progressives simply hate DeVos’s brand of Christianity. The idea that even a dime of taxpayer funds (through school choice) would go to a single Christian school is abhorrent to them, and they’d prefer that such schools vanish from the face of the earth. These ideologues want to control public education, they want to use public education to inculcate secular progressive values, and they want public education to be freed from any meaningful competition. 

Trump runs the risk of destroying school choice

"If DeVos and Trump love school choice and the children it benefits, they will keep the federal government far, far away from them," Joy Pullmann writes. "Trump should not destroy school choice in the name of expanding it."

A word of caution to the Trump administration on school choice

Good advice from Will Flanders and Jake Curtis.

DeVos will help the most vulnerable

Yesterday in the Tulsa World, OCPA president Jonathan Small made a case for Betsy DeVos.

'Oklahoma school voucher advocates see a political opening'

Informative front-page story today by Ben Felder in The Oklahoman. But it's worth pointing out again, as Jason L. Riley did in The Wall Street Journal, that federal vouchers are problematic.

Federal vouchers present hazards

"Mr. Trump has proposed a $20 billion federal voucher program that students could use to attend public or private schools," Jason L. Riley writes today in The Wall Street Journal ("Why Trump’s Education Pick Scares Unions").

But this idea presents similar hazards. Federal dollars will bring federal regulations, and reform-minded individuals like Betsy DeVos won’t forever be in charge of implementing them. Better to let the states lead on school choice. Now that Republicans control 33 governorships and both legislative chambers in 32 states, what’s stopping them?

Federal-voucher opponents are right (for the wrong reasons)

"A federal voucher program poses a danger to school choice efforts nationwide," Jason Bedrick writes.