Academics Are The Less Visible Enemy of School Choice

American Thinker ^ | 2/28/15 | Ashton Blackwell

[BlatherNaut]

Conservative discourse mainly features teachers' unions as the enemy when it comes to school choice, leaving others, like sociologists and other tenured intellectuals, free from public accountability as they exert their substantial influence on education policy. One thing that you should know if you follow school choice issues is that for leftist academics who oppose school choice, their dogmas take primacy over empirical evidence, and their most fundamental dogma when it comes to school choice is that it promotes racial segregation, and thus thwarts their version of equality. Racial segregation, as a policy in the United States, saw its end as an achievement of the Civil Rights movement. The Left's cynical appropriation of “racial segregation” is a red herring intended to obscure their true aim of preventing freedom of association and unregulated innovation and to provide a check on the ambitions of the middle class.

Freely associating peoples, the bane of centralized administrators, spearheaded the school-choice movement with great success and public demand. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “Despite this growth, there is still an overwhelming unmet parental demand for quality school options, with more than 1 million student names on charter school waiting lists.”