How Greg Abbott Took On RINOs And Teachers Unions To Pass The Country’s Best School Choice Bill
The passage of SB 2 is a victory for parental empowerment and a testament to persistence in pursuit of good public policy.The passage of SB 2 is a victory for parental empowerment and a testament to persistence in pursuit of good public policy.The ‘education establishment’ always resorts to fearmongering
If the U.S. Department of Education suddenly went away, what would change for local families and communities? Not much.
For starters, the Department of Education doesn’t “educate” anyone. It’s a middleman. Americans send their taxes to Washington, D.C., the bureaucracy takes a big chunk of it to pay staff and overhead, and the rest is sent to states and local communities with a bunch of red tape. Reducing that bureaucracy should save money, which means schools could actually receive more funding.
Parents are better at making decisions for their children than federal bureaucrats.
Furthermore, there’s no evidence that the federal involvement has improved education. Since the department was created in 1980, federal per-pupil spending has skyrocketed, but results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — have been largely stagnant.
Yet a recent Fast Company article declared that ending the Department of Education “would be disastrous for Title I schools,” with a special emphasis on Greater Johnstown Public Schools in Pennsylvania. And who is making that claim? Not surprisingly, it’s largely people who benefit from the current system, including the head of the local and state teachers’ unions, the director of the law firm that’s led efforts to increase school taxes, and the director of a policy center that has historically received substantial funding from unions.
When your only arguments are nothing more than fearmongering, you’ve ceded the debate.
Title I will remain
For better or worse, ending the Department of Education would not end Title I funding, which is supposed to help low-income students. Title I existed before the Department of Education and would likely be administered through a different department if the agency were shuttered.
As with other federal involvement, we have no evidence that Title I has been effective overall. For example, the Nation’s Report Card has for decades shown a consistent achievement gap between economically disadvantaged and non-economically-disadvantaged students.
There has been talk of changing how Title I is distributed to improve its effectiveness. One option is converting the funding to block grants that states could administer with fewer strings. This would put decision-making power closer to the students who are impacted by these decisions and enable state leaders to direct funds where they see the most need. It would be an improvement over the current Washington-based system.
Better still would be to bypass the states and convert the funding to scholarships, enabling parents to choose the educational support that their children need. Ultimately, there’s no constitutional role for the federal government when it comes to education, which makes sense given the impossibility of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., knowing what’s best for children in, say, Pennsylvania.
One of us was formerly a teacher and principal in Johnstown public schools and is now the principal of Bishop McCort Catholic School, also in Johnstown. He has dealt with Title I firsthand in both environments and seen the problems caused by the red tape and lack of flexibility with the funding. He’s confident that dismantling the Department of Education — and making any federal funds portable so parents could choose the best environment for their children — is the best way to support the students served by Title I.
Parents over bureaucracy
And that’s the bottom line when it comes to education. Parents are better at making decisions for their children than federal bureaucrats. Pennsylvania public schools spent nearly $22,000 per student in 2022-23 (the latest data available). In the Greater Johnstown School District, per-pupil spending was more than $23,000. Yet 82% of students scored below proficient in math, and 77% scored below proficient in English. Imagine what parents could do if they could direct even half of that funding to the educational option that worked better for their kids.
Dismantling the U.S. Department of Education will not destroy education, but it may put a dent in the public schooling bureaucracy. Despite the fearmongering of people who work in the system, less bureaucracy and more freedom for parents and students are good things.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPennsylvania and made available via RealClearWire.
Erase the Bible, lose the West — and that’s the point
The cultural revolution of the 1960s undermined every pillar of American identity, and public religion was no exception. Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963 struck down state-led prayer and mandatory scripture reading in public schools. While these decisions didn’t explicitly ban biblical education as literature or cultural instruction, they effectively removed it from the classroom. Over time, institutional pressure and administrative caution eliminated nearly all engagement with the Bible in the public square.
As large-scale immigration introduced greater religious diversity, demands for a more “neutral” education further pushed cultural Christianity into the realm of the taboo. Christmas and Easter became “winter” and “spring” break. Schools reduced biblical references to passing mentions — if they acknowledged them at all. The result: a rootless, amnesiac society cut off from the spiritual and cultural traditions that once inspired greatness.
By removing the religion that shaped our national character, we’ve lost the ability to understand or transmit our own culture. This is no accident.
Humans remain narrative creatures. Even in an age obsessed with data and reason, we understand ourselves through stories. Every civilization has a set of core narratives that define its identity. These stories echo through its literature, art, science, and daily language. People imitate the archetypes they inherit — knowingly or not—so the stories a culture preserves shape its citizens’ behavior, values, and imagination.
For ancient Greece and Rome, Homer’s “Iliad” served as a civilizational anchor. For Western Christendom, that role belonged to the Bible.
As with all enduring societies, the Western canon both reflected and created its civilization. The canon includes the foundational works every educated citizen was once expected to know, at least in outline: “The Divine Comedy,” “Paradise Lost,” the plays of Shakespeare. But none of these are truly intelligible without biblical knowledge. These literary masterpieces do more than quote scripture — they shape theology itself, popularizing specific interpretations of Christian doctrine.
Art doesn’t just reflect a culture; it defines it.
The stories are everywhere: David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Judas the betrayer, the unwelcome prophet, the good Samaritan, the sacrificial Christ. These archetypes saturate Western literature. Even works not explicitly Christian — like Shakespeare’s plays — reference scripture on nearly every page. And for directly inspired texts like Dante’s “Inferno,” biblical illiteracy makes the work incomprehensible.
Yet American legal doctrine now treats biblical ignorance as a virtue. Misreadings of the First Amendment have transformed cultural illiteracy into a legal mandate. Forget the Bible’s spiritual value — removing it from schools broke the chain of cultural transmission.
As a former public school history teacher, I saw this biblical and cultural illiteracy firsthand. I routinely had to explain the story of David and Goliath or the birth of Christ to 16-year-olds — just so they could understand the references in a historical speech or literary text. Students weren’t rejecting scripture. They had simply never heard it before.
Shakespeare and Dante still haunt English literature curricula, but only as lifeless relics. These works already challenge students. Strip out the biblical framework, and they become unreadable. That’s one reason woke activists now demand their removal altogether. Too white. Too Christian. Too patriarchal. But the push to obliterate the canon also masks a deeper failure: Today’s teachers often find these works unteachable — because students lack the cultural foundation to make sense of them.
Mass immigration has intensified the demand for multiculturalism and secularization. As the public square fills with Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists, American institutions have stripped out the Christianity that once defined them. But by removing the religion that shaped our national character, we’ve lost the ability to understand or transmit our own culture.
This is no accident. It’s the only outcome multiculturalism has ever produced.
America now suffers from a full-blown identity crisis. If we hope to recover a coherent national identity, we must start with the Bible. Conservatives and Christians who want to revive the American tradition must demand — unapologetically — the return of scripture and prayer to public life.
These practices weren’t controversial for most of our history. The Constitution didn’t suddenly change because the left launched a cultural revolution. Students — even those who are secular or from foreign faiths — still need biblical literacy to understand the civilization they live in and the culture they’re supposedly assimilating into.
A general knowledge of the Bible is indispensable. Without it, American education remains incomplete — and a unified national culture remains impossible.
Reading Scores Plummet In Rich Blue States And Rise In Poor Red Ones
The reading and math scores of students in Mississippi and Louisiana have surpassed those in deeply Democratic states such as California.Red-state rot: How GOP governors are handing power to the left
At first glance, outsiders might expect North Dakota to have already passed both school choice and a ban on pornography in public libraries. Republicans hold overwhelming majorities — 42-5 in the Senate and 83-11 in the House — and every statewide elected official is a Republican. Yet, Republican Gov. Kelly Armstrong’s twin vetoes of both bills have forced conservatives to wait another two years to achieve these basic red-state goals. Warnings about Armstrong’s weakness came early and often.
SB 2307 could not be simpler. “A public library or a school district may not maintain in an area easily accessible to minors explicit sexual material,” the final amended text reads. Any sane person should support this standard. The definition of “explicit sexual material” mirrors language already used in other areas of law. The bill does not even ban the books outright — it merely restricts children’s access to sexually explicit material in publicly funded libraries.
Electing more governors like Kelly Armstrong will leave conservatives with nowhere to run.
Without enforcement, any law becomes meaningless. SB 2307 addresses this by requiring local prosecutors to investigate violations. Schools and libraries found out of compliance risk losing state funding.
Despite the bill’s straightforward intent, it barely passed — just 27-20 in the Senate and 49-45 in the House — with more than a third of Republicans joining Democrats to oppose it. Last week, to the shock of party officials, Armstrong vetoed the bill.
“I don’t pretend to know what the next literary masterpiece is going to be,” Armstrong wrote in his veto message. “But I know that I want it available in a library.” In parroting tired liberal straw-man talking points, Armstrong claimed he agreed with the concerns but dismissed the bill as a “misguided attempt to legislate morality through overreach and censorship.”
According to Armstrong, limiting children’s access to sexually explicit material in taxpayer-funded libraries now qualifies as “censorship.”
The rest of Armstrong’s veto message trots out the usual excuses — warnings about frivolous lawsuits, handwringing over enforcement logistics, and complaints about oversight costs. But his main point could not be clearer: Armstrong opposes any effort to shield children from sexual content in public institutions.
Bought out by teachers’ unions
What can parents do when public schools flood classrooms with pornography? Send their kids to private school, of course. Unfortunately, Armstrong worked to block that option, too.
House Bill 1540 would have established Education Savings Accounts for private school students, giving them a chance to compete with just a fraction of the money state and federal governments pour into the public system. The bill passed the House 49-43 and the Senate 27-20 — the same narrow margins as the library porn bill.
In his veto message last week, Armstrong whined that public school students pay taxes, too, and griped that HB 1540 offered them nothing. Instead, he threw his support behind Senate Bill 2400, which turns school choice into another welfare program for the public education establishment. Most of the money under SB 2400 would flow straight to parents whose children already attend public schools.
But why would public school students need education savings accounts when their tuition already costs nothing? The entire school choice movement rests on a simple truth: Government pours massive sums into public education, and families need just a fraction of that money diverted to private options to have a real choice. In North Dakota, the average combined state and federal cost of public education hits about $13,778 per K-12 student. Yet under HB 1540, the proposed funding for education savings accounts ranged from only $1,100 to $4,000, depending on household income — all of it aimed at private school students.
The funding imbalance also explains the shortage of private schools across much of North Dakota. Armstrong cited the lack of private schools outside major cities as justification for pouring even more money into public schools. But with fairer funding, more private schools would emerge. In a duplicitous statement, Armstrong claimed he “strongly supports expanding school choice.” Yet, real expansion demands closing the funding gap — something Armstrong clearly opposes. His true allegiance lies with the teachers’ unions, not with parents seeking alternatives.
A pattern of reckless endorsements
The Senate bill Armstrong promoted also stuffs extra money into school lunch programs and ropes homeschooling parents into the scheme — despite the fact that North Dakota homeschoolers explicitly rejected involvement.
Conservatives had plenty of warning. Armstrong served in the leadership of the RINO Main Street Partnership during his time in Congress. Although North Dakota boasts a growing conservative bench, Trump’s premature endorsement last spring handed Armstrong the governorship in one reckless move.
If Trump keeps up his reckless endorsement habits, every deep-red state will soon struggle to pass even the most basic conservative priorities. Once Trump leaves office, Democrats won’t just revive Biden-era policies — they will escalate.
Deep-red states like North Dakota, immune from political swings in general elections, must become our last strongholds of freedom. Electing more governors like Kelly Armstrong will strip away that sanctuary and leave conservatives with nowhere to run.
How California’s crisis could lead to a big political shift
California’s wide range of problems — including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market — shows the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there exists a will to change.
Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents — including about 1.1 million since 2021 — have been fleeing to other states.
California needs a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents, and, most critically, moderate Democrats.
Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.
In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s Republican National Committee member.
New awakenings
Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and, most critically, moderate Democrats.
Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents — billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers — have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.
Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the board of supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.
Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideology-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.
Critically, the liberal elites are not the only ones breaking ranks. Pressure for change is also coming from increasingly conservative Asian voters and Jews — who number more than 1 million in the state and largely are revolted by the anti-Semitism rife among some on the progressive left. Protecting property and economic growth is particularly critical to Latino and Asian immigrants — California is home to five of the 10 American counties with the most immigrants — who are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans.
These minority entrepreneurs and those working for them are unlikely to share the view of progressive intellectuals, who see crime as an expression of injustice and who often excused or even celebrated looting during the summer of 2020. After all, it was largely people from “communities of color” who have borne the brunt of violent crime in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Minorities also face special challenges doing business here due to regulations that are especially burdensome on smaller, less capitalized businesses. According to the Small Business Regulation Index, California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.
The shift among minority voters could prove a critical game-changer, both within the Democratic Party and the still-weak GOP. In Oakland, for example, many minorities backed the removal of Mayor Sheng Thao (D), a progressive committed to lenient policing in what is now California’s most troubled, if not failed, major city.
Latinos, already the state’s largest ethnic group, constituting about 37.7% of the workforce, with expectations of further growth by 2030, seem to be heading toward the right. In the last presidential election, Trump did well in the heavily Latino inland counties and won the “Inland Empire” — the metropolitan area bordering Los Angeles and Orange Counties – the first time a GOP presidential candidate has achieved this in two decades.
Back to basics
After a generation of relentless virtue-signaling, California’s government needs to focus on the basic needs of its citizens: education, energy, housing, water supply, and public safety. As a widely distributed editorial by a small business owner noted, Californians, especially after highly publicized fire response failures in Los Angeles earlier this year, are increasingly willing to demand competent “basic governance” backed by a “ruthless examination of results” to ensure that their government supports “modest aspirations” for a better life.
California once excelled in basic governance, especially in the 1950s and '60s under Democratic Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. The state managed to cultivate growth while meeting key environmental challenges, starting in the late 1960s, most notably chronic air pollution. In what is justifiably hailed as a “major success,” California helped pioneer clean air regulatory approaches that have vastly reduced most automotive tailpipe emissions as well as eliminated lead and dramatically cut sulfur levels.
All of this starkly contrasts with the poor planning, execution, and catastrophist science evoked to justify the state’s climate agenda. Even Pat Brown’s son, former Gov. Jerry Brown (D), recognized that California has little effect on climate. Given the global nature of the challenge, reducing one state’s emissions by cutting back on industrial activities accomplishes little if those activities move elsewhere, often to locations with fewer restrictions such as China and India.
Rather than focusing on “climate leadership,” Sacramento needs to tackle the immediate causes of record out-migration, including sluggish economic growth and the nation’s highest levels of poverty and homelessness. The great challenges are not combatting global temperature rises but the housing crisis and the need to diversify the economy and improve the failing education system. As these problems have often been worsened by climate policies, there seems little reason for other states and countries to adopt California’s approach as a model.
Fixing housing
California now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High interest rates that have helped push home sales to the lowest level in three decades across the country are particularly burdensome in coastal California metros, where prices have risen to nearly 400% above the national average. The government almost owned up to its role in creating the state’s housing crisis — especially through excessive housing regulations and lawfare on developers — earlier this year when Newsom moved to cut red tape so homes could be rebuilt after the Los Angeles fires.
Current state policy — embraced by Yes in My Backyard activists, the greens, and unions — focuses on dense urban development. Projects are held up, for example, for creating too many vehicle miles traveled, even though barely 3.1% of Californians in 2023 took public transit to work, according to the American Community Survey. As a result, much “affordable” development is being steered to densely built areas that have the highest land prices. This is made worse with mandates associated with new projects, such as green building codes and union labor, that raise the price per unit to $1 million or more.
A far more enlightened approach would allow new growth to take place primarily outside city centers in interior areas where land costs are lower and where lower-cost, moderate-density new developments could flourish. These include areas like Riverside/San Bernardino, Yolo County (adjacent to Sacramento), and Solano County, east of San Francisco Bay. This approach would align with the behavior of residents who are already flocking to these areas because they provide lower-income households, often younger black and Latino, with the most favorable home ownership opportunities in the state.Over 71% of all housing units in the Inland Empire are single-family homes, and the aggregate ownership rate is over 63%, far above the state’s dismal 45.8% level.
Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.
More than anything, California needs a housing policy that syncs with the needs and preferences of its people, particularly young families. Rather than being consigned to apartments, 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences. The vast majority oppose legislation written by Yes in My Backyard hero Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener banning single-family zoning in much of the state.
Investment in the interior is critical for recreating the old California dream for millions of aspiring households, particularly among minorities who are being driven out of the home ownership market in the coastal metropolitan areas. The only California metropolitan area ranked by the National Association of Realtors as a top 10 pick for Millennials was not hip San Francisco or glamorous Los Angeles, but the more affordable historically “redneck” valley community of Bakersfield.
The numerous housing bills passed by Sacramento have not improved the situation. From 2010 to 2023, permits for single-family homes in California fell to a monthly average of 3,957 units from 8,529 during 1993-2006. California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9% between 2010 and 2023, lower than the national increase (10.3%) and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%).
A more successful model can be seen in Texas, which generally advances market-oriented policies that have generated prodigious growth in both single-family and multi-family housing. This has helped the Lone Star State meet the housing needs of its far faster-growing population. A building boom has slowed, and there’s been some healthy decrease in prices in hot markets like Austin. Opening up leased grazing land in state and federal parks — roughly half the state land is owned by governments — could also relieve pressure on land prices. Until California allows for housing that people prefer, high prices and out-migration will continue into the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, California has room to grow, despite the suggestions by some academics that the state is largely “built out.”In reality, California is not “land short,” either in its cities or across its vast interior. Urbanization covers only 5.3% of the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, while parks, agricultural land, deserts, and forests make up the bulk of the area.
Diversifying the economy
Even Jerry Brown has remarked that the “Johnny one note” tech economy the state’s tax base depends on could stumble. This would reduce the huge returns on capital gains from the top 1% of filers, who now account for roughly half of all state income tax revenues. This overreliance may be particularly troublesome in the era of artificial intelligence, where tech companies may continue to expand but have less need for people. Indeed, San Francisco County, which boasts many tech jobs, experienced the nation’s largest drop in average weekly wages, 22.6%, between 2021 and 2022.
To expand opportunity and, hence, its tax base, California has to make more of the state attractive to employers. The best prospects, again, will be in inland areas.Today, when firms want to build spaceships, a clear growth industry where California retains significant leadership, as well as battery plants and high-tech and food processing facilities, they often opt to go to Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, and Texas. Given lower land and housing costs, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, as well as spots on the Central Coast, should be ideally situated to compete for those jobs.
The current economic pattern creates a situation where AI developers, elite engineers, and venture capitalists may enjoy unprecedented profits, but relatively little trickles down to the mass of Californians. Not all Californians have wealthy parents to subsidize their lifestyle, and few are likely to thrive as AI engineers. To address the dilemmas facing the next generation of Californians, the state needs to focus not just on ephemera, software, and entertainment but on bringing back some of the basic industries that once forged the California dream. In this way, President Trump’s policies could actually help the state, particularly in fields like high-tech defense and space.
In the 1940s, California played a key role in the American “arsenal of democracy.” Today, it could do the same, not so much by producing planes and Liberty ships, but drones, rockets, and space-based defense systems. Indeed, there are now discussions of reviving the state’s once-vaunted shipbuilding industry that buoyed the economy of Solano County — something sure to inspire the ire of the Bay Area’s rich and powerful environmental lobby.
Improving education
Climate and environmentalism are not the only barriers to California’s revival. No problem is more pressing and consequential than the state’s failure to educate California’s 5.9 million public school children. In fiscal year 2023-2024, California will spend about $128 billion on K-12 public education — an amount exceeding the entire budget of every other state except New York. Despite this level of spending, about 75% of California students lack proficiency in core subject areas based on federal education standards.
Two out of three California students do not meet math standards, and more than half do not meet English standards on state assessments. Overall, less than half of California public school students performed at or above grade level for English language arts (reading, writing, etc.), while only 34.62% met or exceeded the math standard on the Smarter Balanced 2023 tests. The failures are particularly clear among minority students. According to the latest California testing results, only 36.08% of Latino students met or exceeded proficiency standards for English language arts. Only 22.69% met or exceeded proficiency standards in math. Latino students, for example, in Florida and Texas do somewhat better in both math and English, even though both states spend less per capita on education than California.
Not surprisingly, many parents object to a system where half of the state’s high school students barely read at grade level. One illustration of discontent has been the growth of the charter school movement. Today, one in nine California schoolchildren attend charter schools (including my younger daughter). The state’s largest school district, the heavily union-dominated Los Angeles Unified School District, has lost roughly 40% of its enrollment over two decades, while the number of students in charters grew from 140,000 in 2010 to 207,000 in 2022.
In addition to removing obstacles to charters, homeschoolers are part of the solution. California homeschool enrollment jumped by 78% in the five-year period before the pandemic and in the Los Angeles Unified School District by 89%. Equally important, some public districts and associated community colleges, as in Long Beach, have already shifted toward a more skills-based approach. Public officials understand that to keep a competitive edge, they need to supply industrial employers with skilled workers. This is all the more crucial as the aerospace workforce is aging — as much as 50% of Boeing’s workforce will be eligible for retirement in five years. In its quest for relevance, Long Beach’s educational partnership addresses the needs of the city’s industrial and trade sectors.
This approach contrasts with the state’s big push to make students take an ethnic studies course designed to promote a progressive and somewhat anti-capitalist, multicultural agenda. They will also be required to embrace the ideology of man-made climate change even if their grasp of basic science is minimal. A “woke” consciousness or deeper ethnic affiliations will not lead to student success later in life. What will count for the students and for California’s economy is gaining the skills that are in demand. You cannot run a high-tech lathe, manage logistics, or design programs for space vehicles with ideology.
More to come
Conventional wisdom on the right considers California to be on the road to inexorable decline. Progressives, not surprisingly, embrace the Golden State as a model while ignoring the regressive, ineffective policies that have driven the state toward a feudal future.
Yet both sides are wrong. California’s current progressive policies have failed, but if the state were governed correctly, it could resurge in ways that would astound the rest of the country and the world. Change is not impossible. As recent elections showed, Californians do not reflexively vote for progressives if they feel their safety or economic interests are on the line.
If change is to come in California, it may not be primarily driven by libertarian or conservative ideologies but by stark realities. Over two-thirds of California cities do not have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other expenses. Twelve of the state’s 15 large cities are in the red, and for many, it is only getting worse. The state overall suffers $1 trillion in pension debt, notes former Democratic state Rep. Joe Nation. U.S. News and World Report places California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states. This pension shortfall makes paying for infrastructure, or even teacher salaries, extraordinarily difficult at the state and local levels.
Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable, even if a handful of people get very rich and the older homeowners, public employees, and high-end professionals thrive. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.
This can only happen if the state unleashes the animal spirits that long drove its ascendancy. The other alternative may be a more racial, class-based radicalism promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies. They have their own “cure” for California’s ills. We see this in debates over rebuilding Los Angeles, with progressives pushing for heavily subsidized housing, as with the case of the redevelopment of the Jordan Downs public housing complex, while seeking to densify and expand subsidized housing to once solidly affluent areas like the Palisades.
California has survived past crises — earthquakes and the defense and dot-com busts — and always has managed to reinvent itself. The key elements for success — its astounding physical environment, mild climate, and a tradition for relentless innovation — remain in place, ready to be released once the political constraints are loosened.
Fifty years ago, in her song “California,” Canada-reared Joni Mitchell captured the universal appeal of our remarkable state, not just its sunshine, mountains, and beaches, but also how it gave its residents an unprecedented chance to meet their fondest aspirations. Contrasting her adopted home with the sheer grayness of life elsewhere, she wrote, “My heart cried out for you, California / Oh California, I’m coming home.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
The Rich Control Their Kids’ Education — The Middle Class And Poor Deserve That Choice, Too
Without allowing education funding to follow the child, only parents who can afford to pay a premium are permitted to direct their child’s education, but every parent deserves this freedom.How No-Consequence Schooling Turns Kids Like Karmelo Anthony Into Killers
We lower expectations, excuse bad behavior, and pretend that endless second chances build character. But they don’t.Weak Republicans may derail Tennessee’s bold move against illegal immigration
We either make illegal immigration illegal — or we stop pretending.
For years, we’ve claimed to oppose illegal immigration while offering taxpayer-funded benefits to those here unlawfully. If life in the United States became less accommodating, many would choose to leave on their own. A logical first step: Stop offering free public education to those who entered the country illegally. That policy has flooded our schools with linguistic chaos, cultural fragmentation, and administrative strain.
Denying free education to those in the country illegally is not a punishment — it’s a refusal to provide benefits to people who have no legal claim to them.
Tennessee is the first state in recent memory to move in the direction of sanity.
Last Thursday, the Tennessee Senate passed SB 836, sponsored by state Sen. Bo Watson (R). The original bill would have required school districts to verify legal residency before enrolling any student. The amended version gives school districts the option to deny enrollment to illegal immigrants or charge a base tuition of $7,000 per student.
The bill passed 19-13 but not before seven Republicans joined all six Democrats in voting to continue free tuition for illegal aliens.
A companion bill, HB 793, is making its way through the House. That version is tougher. It gives districts the authority to deny admission outright and requires them to report undocumented students to the state. Both bills allow families to stay enrolled while appealing a denial. But critically, both also include an opt-out provision — meaning districts with large illegal populations, like Memphis and Nashville, will likely choose not to enforce the law at all.
Target: Plyler v. Doe
This should be an easy one. It’s a disgrace that we continue offering free tuition to the children of illegal immigrants — all because of a flawed 43-year-old Supreme Court ruling. The public would have demanded action decades ago if not for the court’s intervention. Texas, in fact, did act — until Justice William Brennan invented a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded education for illegal aliens in the 1982 decision Plyler v. Doe.
That ruling flatly contradicts a long line of Supreme Court precedents dating back to the 1880s. For more than a century, the court consistently held that illegal aliens stand outside our legal boundaries until they are granted lawful status. In other words, they are not entitled to constitutional protections reserved for citizens or legal residents.
Even if we accept the dubious logic of judicial supremacy, states have every reason to mount a fresh challenge. The Supreme Court has shifted rightward since the days of Brennan’s activist bench. It’s time to put Plyler back on the chopping block.
If Republicans truly believe illegal immigration must end, they should act accordingly. That means removing the incentives to stay here unlawfully. Cutting off free benefits should be the first step, not the last.
Yet, too many Republicans still treat education as a separate, sacred category. Senate Speaker Pro Tem Ferrell Haile, a Republican from Gallatin, voted against the Tennessee bill and tried to justify his position by misapplying Ezekiel 18:19: “The child will not share the guilt of the parent nor the parent share the guilt of the child.” He said, “I believe that we are punishing children for the wrongdoing of their parents.”
Haile’s reasoning is flawed. Denying free education to those in the country illegally is not a punishment — it’s a refusal to provide benefits to people who have no legal claim to them. If the goal is deportation, why should we subsidize their continued presence? No one is proposing to imprison children for their parents’ actions. We’re proposing to send them home.
Republicans claim to support President Trump’s immigration agenda. But if we intend to remove illegal aliens from the country, it makes no sense to pack public schools with hundreds of thousands of noncitizens who require costly language and academic support. The only children being punished under this system are the children of American citizens — the ones to whom our elected officials owe their allegiance.
An uncertain fate
If Haile and other lukewarm Republicans in red states feel so strongly about educating illegal aliens, they are free to open schools overseas and fund them privately. But they have no right to do it at the expense of American families.
So far this year, only Texas, Indiana, Idaho, and Ohio have introduced similar legislation. None of those bills appear likely to pass. Other red states, like Florida, face constitutional hurdles that make it difficult to deny public school admission to anyone living in the state — regardless of legal status.
Even in its watered-down form, the Tennessee bill’s fate remains uncertain. Gov. Bill Lee (R) has yet to signal whether he’ll sign it. Like many Republican governors, Lee often talks tough but governs soft. He’s not known for favoring strong immigration enforcement.
If he vetoes the bill, conservatives likely won’t have the two-thirds majority needed to override him, thanks to multiple GOP defections. He has remained silent while the legislative session barrels toward its end next week. Time is running out for the House to pass its version and reconcile it with the Senate’s.
With federal mass deportation efforts stalled, red states need standing deterrents. The next time a Democrat takes the White House and unleashes a fresh wave of illegal immigration, we need policies in place to keep that flood away from inundating states that still value sovereignty.
That starts with ending incentives — especially taxpayer-funded benefits like public education. Letting illegal aliens tap into the same resources as citizens sends exactly the wrong message.
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