Education, taxes, and medical debt: Selecting legislators at random starts to have merit 

Idaho Freedom Foundation ^ | February 21, 2020 | Wayne Hoffman

[Twotone]

H.L. Mencken once suggested that legislative seats be filled at random instead of by election. Admittedly, Mencken wrote that doing so might result in the selection of idiots. But, he said, “No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they’d be measurably more honest, taking one with another.” Here are some random musings from the last several days of Idaho lawmaking that makes Mencken’s proposal seem brilliant.

On education:

The Senate passed a bill to require elected school board trustees undergo mandatory training, conducted by the State Board of Education, whose members are not similarly mandated to undergo training and barely have a handle of their own on Idaho’s K-12 and higher education system.

Gov. Brad Little unveiled a proposal to spend another quarter of a billion dollars over the next five years for teacher pay. It’ll probably pass. But we all know it isn’t going to improve Idaho’s public schools unless making public schools more expensive counts as improvement.

The Senate passed a resolution asking Idaho’s education institutions to offer students courses on personal finance. Given that some school districts can’t balance their own budget without begging for tax increases, and the debt and money problems that Boise State University and the University of Idaho have amassed in recent years, students aren’t the only ones who might benefit from such classes.

The liberal news media went apoplectic when the House Education Committee pushed back against plans to spend $1 million on the latest education fad, “social-emotional learning.” But the committee is correct to be worried: The program is another part of a social justice agenda that feeds on self-loathing and victimhood, and steals resources from legitimate classroom lessons.