Controlling schools through federal housing grants
Here in Missouri the original and continued push against Common Core was based on the governance structure being put into place to enforce compliance with the standards. NGO’s owned the copyright for which they could demand licensing fees at any time. They disallowed any accountability for the standards in their license agreement which left the states on the hook for any poor outcomes. They could change the standards at any time and had no process for state input during that change. States essentially gave up all control of their education standards to the NGOs. States were forced to join a testing consortium by a federal agency with no authority to make such demands. The feds then predictably tried to gain control of the teacher selection process by tying teacher evaluations to test scores.
The structure of governance is very important and the progressives will try any means possible to go around or recreate the structure of our representative government because it so often gets in the way of their plans for control. The following post by Jane Robbins in The Federalist demonstrates how the progressives to continue to push for structural changes through backdoor mechanisms that don’t require the approval of the people.
The broader point is this: The Obama/Gates scheme is the Left’s latest step to undermine the constitutional structure by making government responsive to the views of “experts” rather than to citizens. It’s a plan to negate local control of government, and to destroy the laboratories of democracy brought about by sovereign states and local decision-making. When their voices don’t count and their choices narrow, citizens become disengaged and society crumbles.
Obama Administration Wants To Kiss Your Local Schools Goodbye
If the Obama administration and its supporters have their way, the suburban neighborhood school could be headed for extinction. In a veritable symphony of bureaucratic coordination, the administration has figured out how to recruit three cabinet departments, liberal non-profits, and deep-pocketed foundations to this effort. It can be tough even to follow the sophisticated strategy for accomplishing this (and the president prefers it that way), but if we value our liberty, it’s worth a bit of effort to understand this scheme.
The administration is maneuvering to replace local control in education (and in other areas) with school systems that extend across entire metropolitan regions. This effort is bolstered by advocacy groups promoting “economic integration” to force suburban jurisdictions to either admit low-income students from outside their districts or redistribute the tax money that supports their schools to less affluent nearby districts. Lurking behind this plan—as with practically every nationwide education policy—is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The pincer created by Obama’s coercion from coordinated federal agencies on the one hand and Gates’s advocacy of supposedly social-justice taxing and redistribution on the other could squeeze the life out of the suburbs and suburban schools.
We Don’t Like Your Neighborhood
First, let’s have a look at the Obama coercion scheme. This ambitious plan is bound up with a new rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. Stanley Kurtz has provided the definitive analysis of AFFH (see here, here, here, and here), showing how the rule advances Obama’s longtime dream of essentially abolishing suburbs. Cities swallowing suburbs is known as “regionalism,” and how the Left plans to achieve it is explained in Kurtz’s Controlling schools through federal housing grants – Missouri Education Watchdog:
