Mask Droppings

     Villains must give themselves away by the end of the story, or there’s no climactic confrontation:

     Teacher union chief Randi Weingarten made a recent media appearance during which she admitted the real reason she doesn’t want the Trump administration to shut down the Department of Education.
     It’s all about school choice. She doesn’t want parents and kids to have it.
     Why would she oppose school choice? Simple. It threatens teacher unions. If your child’s teacher is awful, or their school is failing, Weingarten doesn’t want parents to have the option of pulling their child out of the school. What if everyone decides to do that and the school has to close?

     She wasn’t quite that bald about it, but the meaning comes through:

     Weingarten’s comments came during a podcast interview with Molly Jong-Fast, who spoke with her about the implications of Trump’s spending reforms, particularly his plan to terminate the Department of Education. Weingarten stated that cutting the department’s roughly $100 billion in funding will primarily benefit tax cuts for the wealthy or – “equally pernicious” – be redirected to states as “block grants.”
     “We know, for example, what Texas would do,” Weingarten told Jong-Fast. “They’ll use it for vouchers. So they won’t give [federal funding] to the kids who have it now, they’ll just give it for vouchers.”
     “And frankly, what we are seeing in all the programs now – in terms of vouchers – they don’t work for kids,” Weingarten continued. “They basically go right now – it becomes a tax credit for people who already are sending their kids to private schools. So it’s income redistribution.”

     Teachers-union bigwigs have always been opposed to school choice, no matter how it’s framed. But their objection isn’t about “income redistribution.” They’d be entirely in favor of that, as long as they were on the receiving end. No, it’s about the prospect of declining enrollment in the government-run a.k.a. “public” schools.

     If the money follows the pupil – which is inherent in a school-choice program – and the pupil leaves the “public” school, there’s less money available for Weingarten’s constituents. Less money means budgetary pressure on the school district. Under-attended schools might close. “Educators” might be let go. God only knows what would happen to such hangers-on as administrators, “diversity” counselors, and “teachers’ aides.”

     Would the closing of the federal Department of Education mean that less money would be available for the “public” schools? Probably, though the federal subsidies might be replaced by increases at the state and local levels. But behind the reduced-revenue fear lurks a still larger and darker fear: competition.

     At this time, the “public,” tax-supported schools have huge competitive advantages over all private alternatives. Their prima facie advantage stems from parents’ inability to pay for their kids’ educations twice. The tax burden that results from government-run schools makes private schooling unaffordable for the overwhelming majority of American children. But that confers a second, equally important advantage on the government-run schools: it masks their poor performance.

     Under current circumstances, the advocates for the “public” schools can deflect comparisons between their “product” and that of private schools on the grounds that it’s not “apples to apples.” The students at the private schools come from affluent families. Such families are likely to lay more emphasis on education than “public” school students’ parents; indeed, they’re likely to be heavily educated themselves, an indirect advantage for their children. “Public” school students shouldn’t be compared to “rich” kids who’ve benefited from a “tailwind!”

     Now consider the situation under a voucher regime, where the money goes wherever the student goes. A great many more families would be able to afford to remove their kids from the “public” schools. The differences in performance could no longer be dismissed as unfair. Perhaps even more telling, the degree of order within “public” schools would suffer in comparison with schools that possess the privilege of expelling unruly students. Competitive pressure on the “public” schools and their “educators” to “shape up” would rise in tandem.

     Nothing threatens a low performer more than competition.

     Weingarten knows all this. She would never admit any of it, but the import of it is plain. So she tries to keep public attention away from those considerations. Watch also for the ever popular “racism” gambit: a sotto voce admission that “public” schools are discouraged from disciplining unruly and disruptive black and Hispanic students.

     The Department of Education, Jimmy Carter’s sop to the teachers’ unions in payment for their electoral support, is the “educators’” prize bastion. They won’t let it go without a fight. Given the ocean of federal funds the DoE commands, that fight is likely to be a vicious one that features every imaginable allegation of corruption, favoritism, and unfairness.