You know I love a good analogy. I spent four decades trying to help people understand one thing by connecting it to some other thing. So I love a good analogy.
This is not a good analogy.
Nick Freitas is an army vet and Virginia politician, who served in the house of delegates before making a couple of unsuccessful runs for the US Congress (both House and Senate). In his bid for national office, he was backed by folks Rand Paul and Mike Lee, the Club for Growth, and Freedomworks. He has been writing for the ultra-right Daily Wire, where he usually sticks to war and the evils of communism. But this week, he decided to stick his oar into education waters with "We Wouldn't Let Government Control Our Grocery Stores. Why Do We Let Them Control Our Schools?" Transparency requires that I link to the article so you can check my work if you're so inclined, but I'm going to ask you to resist giving this thing any more clicks than you can help. So here's the link.
There are so many things wrong here. But it's worth poking through this pile because it's representative of how the anti-gummint school crowd views the issues.
Freitas opens by reducing the many debates about school to two sides--one side all for "choice and freedom" and the other side "insists that improved education can only be achieved through strict government control of schools." Well, no, not really. It's not clear what exactly he means by "government control" or "strict," but a lot of straw is going to fly before he's done. We have locally elected school boards, which is government, but their control is not particularly strict in most case. We have oversight on the state and federal level, which is where most of the rules and regulations that he might be upset about come from, but if we were going to have strict control from that level, we'd have lefties CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: A Really Bad Anti-Public School Analogy