“If we don’t do something about this problem, then it could be the demise of traditional public education in Duval County.”
—-Duval County school board member Charlotte Joyce during a recent board meeting, quoted by Politico in “School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close. The Republican governor’s school choice programs may serve as a model for other GOP-leaning states across the country.”
I saw that two-day-old story from Politico while web-surfing late last night, and had two immediate reactions: “What a perfect opportunity for Bruce to make an appearance from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive!” and “Good!”
I know nothing about Charlotte Joyce, her political affiliation or her attitude toward public schools, but I do know this: America’s public school system is broken, and was broken deliberately by ideologues who decided that the best way to achieve radical transformation of American rights, society and culture was to use mandatory public education to indoctrinate children from the youngest ages right through high school, after which college would pick up the assignment. Parents, lazy, apathetic, uninvolved and often badly educated and uninformed themselves, allowed this to happen under their metaphorical noses. The horrific result, among many others, is that chaos on college campuses as students whose minds have been poisoned by intersectionality cant now equate the terrorism of Hamas with the civil rights march on Washington.
Good job, everybody!
The Politico story states, “The enrollment declines for Broward, Duval and Miami coincide with the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent parents seeking new education choices for their children.” It never specifies what the pandemic had to do with sending parents looking for better educational options, which is either incompetent reporting or deliberately dishonest. Parents forced to host their children’s education at home while the kids participated remotely via Zoom suddenly realized what public education has become. The parents who were not already Marxists, anti-American radicals or too dim to notice or care realized—better late than never, but still really, really, disastrously late—just how bad public education has become. The responsible ones decided to take action.
For a long, long time, I have found it fascinating—a neutral word for something that cries out for a term far more damning—that the same political sect that sanctified “choice” as a core ethical principle when it involved the choice to kill an individual human being whose existence is inconvenient stridently opposed choice when it meant that parents are provided local options to educate their children in schools that are competent and trustworthy when public schools have proven not to be.
Why are only “GOP-leaning states” concerned about the massive failure and betrayal of public education, which has abandoned “traditional public education” for decades?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack,
I posted a comment to an old post of yours about Little Mermaid. It had an error and I’m not sure it made it through.
It did!
Thanks
A long sentence, and I had to read it three times to put it together, but it’s a brilliant synopsis highlighting the hypocrisy of “choice” on the Left.
I was talking with someone not so long ago who was lamenting the actions of our governor (Iowa’s Kim Reynolds). The phrase that was spoken was something like, “she’s too busy handing out school vouchers to get any real work done.” My response was something like, “If governor Reynolds did nothing but hand out vouchers that allowed parents the financial ability to remove their children from failing schools, I would consider her time as governor a success.”
I challenge the idea that parents are removing kids from the traditional public schools (charter schools are public schools) because of the poor quality of education. The education has been bad for a long time. I have observed that most of my son’s friends have been pulled from the traditional schools in the last 4 years. These are not wealthy people and have only bad homeschool and online school options. Not one pulled their kids because of the quality of the education. All of them pulled their kids because the children were being abused. They were either being bullied in a school where the bullies can’t be punished due to DEI policies, being harassed by teachers for personal beliefs or because they are heterosexual boys, or being molested by school personnel.
You don’t think being abused in school affects the quality of education?
My body -> My choice
My body – my brain
My brain – My mind
My mind – My eduction
My education – My choice
The woman should be more specific as to just what the “problem” is. Is it the existence of vouchers to enable school choice, or is it the poor quality of education in the public schools that makes choice/vouchers necessary.
Yes, if this continues the public schools will be populated by students who disrupt the classroom, bully others, and/or who have parents who look at school as a free child care program… Learning will occur elsewhere.
Another thing in life that happens slowly at first, then very fast at the end.
Michael R.,
I certainly hope that if your son’s friends are currently in a bad homeschool choice, that they might seek better homeschool options. I can only speak for the Catholic curricula that my wife and I investigated, but Seton and Kolbe Academy are very good programs, and they are not terribly expensive. We’re using Kolbe. For us, 3 kids this year is pushing $4000, but that includes additional books and supplies for science experiments. (Although, first kid is most expensive, and there’s some ability to reuse textbooks and lessons that doesn’t apply when you’re just starting.)
My wife and I decided to homeschool because of a large number of reasons (the count currently stands at 652,187), but quality of education was a very large factor, though that needs qualified. Wyoming’s Carbon County School District #1 consistently ranked at the bottom of all Wyoming school districts, and we wanted something better for our children. (In Rawlins, the only alternative to public school was homeschool; the Catholic School had closed decades ago, sadly.) But we have also been very concerned about the heavy progressive tilt in education, ramifying not only into topics we’re skeptical about (such as so-called climate science, much of which is bad computer modeling and egregious extrapolations from very limited data sets), but also ethical matters, such as the meaning, purpose, and proper expression of human sexuality.
The continual stories of sexual abuse in the schools has made us leery, as well…
We chose the Kolbe Academy out of other Catholic homeschooling choices because it offered a more rigorous curricula, and they had advisors and bookkeeping services that both ensures we’d have records saved in an offsite location for when our girls might need portfolios to display, and requires us to be prompt and dedicated in our handling of our girls’ assignments, grades, scheduling, etc. Technically you don’t need all this administrative assistance if you already are self-motivated, well-organized, and are dedicated to grading, record-keeping, scheduling, and so on. Other programs allow for more flexibility and less accountability, and those typically will be less expensive. In addition, one can often find some grant or scholarship to help defray some of these costs.
I am the product of a family that pulled all their kids out of a poorly performing public school in a solid GOP district. Linking a district or proposed educational solutions to a political party isn’t conductive to describing or addressing the problems with the education system.
Homeschooling during my childhood made up a tiny minority and charter schools didn’t exist as options until the youngest members of my family nearly completed primary education.
I’m not sure what differences this made in the foundations of our lives, but I’m sure they are net positive for me and all my siblings. I’m also sure that my parents being forced to pay for our educations twice; once for a program they didn’t want and also for the desired was profoundly unfair.
Preparing children for a modern world is a complex problem with many inputs. When the only way to afford parents choice in their school is the neighborhood they can afford to live within, there’s little surprise that parents who have no choice also show little participation.
Back to Charlotte Joyce’s quote “If we don’t do *something* about this *problem*…”
Well, yeah. If she’s capable of seeing the status quo education system as currently broken, then school choice is *something* being done, and it seems to be working to light a fire under her ass about identifying a *problem*.
Unfortunately, the statist bureaucracy is heavily invested in defining the problem as things other than status quo. If she buys into the propaganda, then she becomes the problem and the *something* she does will be counterproductive.
Here are a few related Charlotte Iserbyt quotes:
It’s really interesting how accurate some of the things Iserbyt said and wrote back in the late 20th century are now quite obvious in hindsight to people who are willing to think critically.
Yup, there has been a “deliberate dumbing down of America”.
https://x.com/GeneforTexas/status/1794844079400030498
Democrats genuinely default to asserting people are too stupid to take care of themselves when their own pet policies face popular competition.
My brother and I were sent to Parochial school (our parish) and Catholic high school. He graduated from the Coast Guard Academy, and I graduated from the private college which used to be the real deal (but it’s not anymore) and produced Bill Jacobson. (Of course, much to its shame, it also produced, along with Harvard Law School, Marc Elias.) Mrs. OB and I sent our kids to private school because it had after hours programs and Mrs. OB and I both worked. So, for generations, the family has paid real property taxes and tuition. It’s just always been a part of the deal. My mother and her siblings also went to Catholic schools. I guess we’ve just been in a milieu where it’s understood you have to pay for your kids’ education. There’s no free lunch when it comes to education. Interestingly, our children have sent the grand children to public schools. And the grand kids seem to be doing okay. Our grandson is to the right of me! Hah! He drives his lefty father NUTS! I guess the Lord or whoever works in mysterious ways.
“This problem” is clearly:
People don’t want what we’re offering. If they are given the option to get something other than what we’re offering, our schools will no longer have any students and we and all our employees, administrators and union member teachers will be put out of business and lose our livelihoods.
So the obvious solution to Ms Joyce’s problem would be the public schools she oversees adopting what the privates and charters are doing to attract the students. Maybe it is too obvious.
They’d rather retain control of a sinking ship than change what they’re doing.