Education Debate in a Microcosm

The Administrators Don't Get It

I left Chicago for a lot of reasons, personal safety being the number one reason. I left a lot of friends there. There has been a tempest in a teapot brewing there for a long time and you can extrapolate it across the United States where it has been repeated.

The Teacher’s Unions, and the elite administrators along with their school boards have wrecked government-run education in the United States. The US had a great educational system until the 1960s.

Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race on an education issue. The media has focused on Virginia and other school systems. But, the first strike in the fight happened in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

First, some background.

Here is some data from Illinois that is also repeated across the country, I looked to two sources. Illinois Policy and Wirepoints. Illinois Policy tweeted out this video you should watch. Wirepoints compiled data on Illinois education. Here is an example. Decatur is mostly Black.

Ted Dabrowski @ilpoliski

"Social promotion" – pushing kids to the next grade when they can't read or do math at grade level – is one of the biggest inequities in #Illinois schools. Example: #Decatur Public School results. Via @Wirepoints wirepoints.org/poor-student-a… #SchoolChoice #twill @ISBEnews

I grew up in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. I went to public school and graduated in 1980. 50% of my almost 900-person graduating class didn’t go to college. They went into the trades. The areas around my high school were more white-collar. Glen Ellyn, Elmhurst, Wheaton and Hinsdale sent the majority of their students to college. A lot of the 50% at my high school went to junior college before they went to a four-year school.

There are some great public schools in the suburbs of Chicago, but the historical crown jewel of all of them is New Trier. Ann Margaret and a lot of other famous people have gone there over the years. I know people that won’t move until their kids graduate because it is super important to them that they go to New Trier. I also know people that move into the district any way they can to go to that school district’s public schools.

Predictably, New Trier’s district is a wealthy area north of the city of Chicago and lies right on Lake Michigan. The people that make up the area make mid to high six-figure incomes and are doctors, lawyers, and white-collar professionals. Many if not most have a grad degree from a “top school” that would be top ten in some US News and World Report ranking. You will find most people pay property taxes of $25k per year and up. It’s largely white. It has a large Jewish population. This makes a lot of sense since I don’t know one Jewish family that doesn’t value education highly.

New Trier’s administration is woke and so is the school board. The teachers they hire are woke too. Instead of teaching students how to think critically and objectively, they try to indoctrinate them.

Finally, many parents had enough. My friend Beth Feely led the charge and in a lot of cases, she has paid a personal price for it. Typical of intolerant left-wing people, they cut off their friendships with her and discriminated against her. But, she kept going. She keeps going.

Beth worked on The Policy Circle in its early days. It’s an organization targeted toward women. They organized local circles and women would get academic policy papers on societal problems. They avoided issues like abortion. They did talk about things like education. Their focus was to solve these problems from a free enterprise perspective. Beth started to find her voice here and her path shows how one person can make positive conservative change locally in their lives.

Yesterday, Mother Jones published a hit piece on Beth’s organization castigating them as racists for fighting back. Isn’t that predictable? Beth works with the Woodson Center. Hardly a racist organization! But, they think different than the mainstream race hustlers you see on television all the time.

The only thing the New Trier parents wanted was for the school bureaucracy to show both sides of the issue. They wanted them to have countervailing sources and speakers instead of the planned use of only radical left sources with radically left speakers. Let children learn and decide for themselves. Critical thinking and objectivity, not indoctrination.

But, leftists know that in the field of ideas they will always lose the debate if directly compared and contrasted to classical liberal ideas. Always. Like this.

So, the hierarchy empowered by elite leftist parents tried to bury the parents who wanted balance.

Racism is just the first salvo. Remember, the left-wingers are well-heeled people with money, and personal networks, and are fanatics. They are smug. At my blue-collar high school, we used to make fun of them. It was always fun to play them and kick their ass on the athletic field, even though we couldn’t do it in the debate room.

Some local knowledge for you. In Chicago, if you are a Republican/conservative and need the local network, you have to stay quiet about being a conservative. You have to toe the line. I used to tell people in Chicago I was an “out of the closet” Republican and get a chuckle but people knew what I meant. I was a solopreneur so I didn’t care. But, I lost some opportunities because of it and was actively discriminated against in some circles. A lot of people say, “I am socially liberal and fiscally conservative” and move along because it used to placate the leftists. But, they have raised the stakes.

The parents that fought the establishment hierarchy took career risks as well as social risks. They might lose business. Maybe lose a plum case at a law firm. Maybe have to leave a law firm. Maybe their business would get picketed or avoided.

Think I am crazy? Ask John Kass.

From the Mother Jones article:

The school’s doubling down on anti-racist practices spurred reactions from critics. Two days after Sally’s message, members of the New Trier Neighbors group—a new iteration of the original 2017 group that opposed seminar day—submitted a statement to be read at a scheduled school board meeting, communications obtained by Mother Jones via a public records request show. The email was signed by one of the members, Beth Feeley, and praised the school for focusing its response on “personal accountability” and not “cancel culture.” But it also expressed concern over the “equity agenda” based on the “highly controversial notion of critical race theory.” The school board, the group suggested, should concentrate less on “how we here in our leafy suburbs can focus on and apologize for our privilege” and more on practical ideas to uplift low-income neighborhoods. “When New Trier administrators decide that some thoughts are more equal than others they are doing a disservice to the families they supposedly serve,” the statement concluded.

For Feeley, the New Trier Seminar Day had marked the beginning of her activism. “I was a parent [of a freshman] and I noticed some things happening at my children’s school that I thought were highly questionable,” she said on the Take Back Our Schools podcast by the conservative Ricochet Audio Network in March 2022. Feeley is now a senior adviser to the Washington, DC-based nonprofit Woodson Center where she helped launch 1776 Unites, a conservative response to the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project. She is now the cohost of the podcast—which brands itself as putting the listener “on the front lines of the culture wars”—with Andrew Gutmann, a New York City parent who pulled his daughter out of the all-girls, prestigious Brearley School last year because of their “obsession with race.” Looking back at the events at New Trier, Feeley explains that at the time, hot-button terms like CRT and social-emotional learning were “not in the public eye. It was an eye-opening experience…It was definitely a trial by fire.” 

The fight against these radical leftists is only in the early innings. Since the 60s, they have been working to infiltrate every aspect of our civilized society. We have had some stops and starts, but most people that are conservative stick to their knitting. Conservatives don’t make a lot of waves because we are too busy making a living. Plus, in the past when we fought back we were generally genteel about it.

I don’t think that works anymore.

By the way, even when you win they keep coming. Sort of like the White Walkers in Game of Thrones. There is no dragon glass to dispose of them. The more they get met with engagement, the more shrill and radical they get. Social media has given freaks a platform that they never had before. That’s why cross-dressers are stripping in front of kids.

As more and more people become aware of what’s going on, more and more people are seeing things Beth’s way. It’s not just in her neighborhood, it’s nationwide. Virginia turned on education and so have a lot of other elections. The momentum is on their side and that’s a good thing.

Democrats have made their bed. They support racist CRT programs. They kill vouchers and school choice at every opportunity sapping hope and dooming underprivileged kids that can’t afford to live in a district like New Trier. Let them lie in their own bed and wear the pajamas. Government-run public education sucks in the US but it doesn’t affect the elite champagne socialists.

Democrats also support the “great reset”. They are fanatical about the Green New Deal which would cripple the United States, and do nothing to “save the earth”. They support open borders and because a lot of them live so far away, they don’t have to absorb the costs. Instead of agreeing to compromise on abortion, they are for unlimited abortion with public funds going to support the entire abortion industry. Then, they run ads that totally lie about it.

Virtually every core policy they advocate hurts poor and middle-class people.

I can’t think of one good idea with a corresponding implementation that today’s Democrats have. Not one. Even when they have a good idea, their implementation is to tax citizens and redistribute the money through some do-nothing government program. Hey, it’s a socialist agenda.

There is a midterm election in a couple of weeks. There are down-ballot races and they are important. A lot of people don’t do a lot of research on them because they seem unimportant. However, do your research. Talk to your neighbors.

For example, in a local judge race here in Las Vegas, Max Berkley is running. He is trying to position himself as a right-of-center moderate but I knew his mom. Shelly was a Democratic congressperson here for years and part of the Harry Reid machine. Let’s hope local voters don’t fall for the fallacy he is selling.

Follow the money that backs candidates if you can. Big money is spent down the ballot. George Soros has ruined many American cities by electing schmuck prosecutors. He also tried to elect Secretary of State candidates because they count the ballots. He knows the same thing Stalin said, “it doesn’t matter who votes but who counts the votes.”

Sure, Stalin was referring to an upper-party election but the gist is the same. Look at Pennsylvania’s Democratic politicians who actively will ignore a Supreme Court decision on mail-in ballots. Let’s hope they don’t get away with a steal.

Most of all, follow my friend Beth’s example. Speak up. Get involved. I know so many people that don’t want to “be political” and are tired of all the stuff that is going on. They just want to be left alone. But, the leftists won’t leave you alone until you get rid of them.

Thanks for the link Instapundit. If you don’t read his blog you should. I have been reading it for years now. If you like what you read here, feel free to sign up for the email distribution. you can follow me on Twitter @pointsnfigures1, and on other social media platforms @pointsnfigures. Take a look around at other posts and share it on your favorite social media platform or with email. Be well and have a good weekend.