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Unions, Coming for a Private School Near You
For the last week, I’ve been lobbying for our local private schools, which have been closed until at least October 1st by the executives in Montgomery County, Maryland. You may have heard about the controversy, which could become a battleground for private school parents across the country.
Last month, the public schools announced that they would not be opening for in-person instruction until at least January. In part as a result of that announcement, their projected enrollments saw a significant drop-off. Local media reported, “MCPS was expecting over 2,500 new students by the end of August. As of July 1, only about 300 K-12 new students had been enrolled.” There’s no word about how many kids who were enrolled have been pulled out, but it’s likely as significant as the lowered projected enrollment numbers. Schools are funded by the number of bodies enrolled, and this exodus is an existential threat to the stability of the public school model.
If private schools opened and offered a refuge for these parents, the public school system would suffer a crushing blackeye, not to mention guarantee their numbers (and cashflow) wouldn’t bounce back whenever schools do reopen. And so, what did the county do? They kneecapped the private schools, declaring that they would not be allowed to reopen until the day after public schools would receive money for an enrolled student. The county hopes that if a family are forced into choosing between online-only options, they’ll choose the school without tuition.
During all of this, one would think local teachers would be fighting for the school system to figure out a way to open safely in order to do their jobs. If that’s your guess, you’ve guessed wrong. Amidst this fight over reopening, the local unions are fighting over their contracts and making totally demands like “canceling rents and mortgages” and “Massive infusion of federal money to support the reopening funded by taxing billionaires and Wall Street.” In case you were under the impression this is about making the best possible educational choices available to families, here’s another demand to consider “Moratorium on new charter or voucher programs and standardized testing.” It’s not about doing what’s right for kids, it’s about eliminating the competition.
In response to the county’s decision to do the bidding of the teacher’s unions, Republican Governor Larry Hogan issued a statement barring “blanket closures” of private schools. The county hit back with another statement, restating their decision to lay down the blanket ban, to which Hogan pushed back again. It seems to be aimed for a fight in the courts, and I’ve heard from lawyers readying the case, they believe the case has a shot. One would hope so, or else this spells doom for private schools around the country wherever teacher’s unions may decide to leverage their power to take their competition.
Published in General
Possibly of use in your lobbying efforts: this analysis of reopening policies in multiple countries, and the results:
https://globalhealth.washington.edu/sites/default/files/COVID-19%20Schools%20Summary%20%28updated%29.pdf
Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out what the new normal is, paint a bunch of BLM signs, get together a group of friends, march to the local school, and burn it to the ground.
This isn’t a call to action. It is a prediction.
I guess someone needs to open a “Kids Club”, where they do fun stuff like math, science, music, literature, and english. Do what needs to be done, just don’t call it a school.
Public schools are child abuse. That is #1. The union teachers saw this crisis as an opportunity. They will not surrender that opportunity lightly. My grandchildren are in public high school in California. All three are athletes. Two are high school varsity members and will lose their senior year and sophomore year along with a chance of athletic scholarship to college. I sent their father to private school but the school he attended in now $28,000 per year. I don’t have that income anymore (and never did). Their parents are looking at other states but my son is not yet able to retire. In three years he can retire with his medical benefits (He is a fireman and is diabetic) and they will leave but not yet.
The state has already written a dishonest ballot description on a proposition to raise property taxes.
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/court-orders-changes-to-misleading-if-not-outright-false-voter-guide-for-property-tax-measure/
What they have next in store is anyone’s guess. There is a Catholic high school a half mile from our home in Tucson but I don’t know what Ducey is going to do about schools in AZ. Maybe she could finish her senior year in a real school but the Governor has been such a disappointment that I am reluctant to depend on his good sense.
If they do burn a school down, please make it a public school. At least at their trial they can claim they were doing it for the public good . . .
I’m sorry that I didn’t make that explicit.
Part of our problem is that so many teachers and administrators…”educators”…don’t think that this *is* fun stuff, and they don’t believe anyone else does, either. In other words, they do not value *knowledge* for its own sake…that’s why they have to contort everything to make it relevant.
Whaaaat???
That’s crazy.
Last night on Newsmax they were interviewing guests from California. They are using anti-gig laws to prevent education pods from opening.
The fiends . . .
The pandemic is a golden opportunity to redesign modern life. Crowds enable a lot of moneymaking to happen, and it concentrates wealth in an unnatural way. That’s why our society evolved to favor crowds.
I have always had an aversion to crowds so I am more aware of how we have packed people in to everywhere. The infectious disease people have been saying for a couple of hundred years now that urbanization and travel always always lead to disease. The criminologists have said the same thing. Ask any parent who ever had two kids share one bedroom. :-) Everything is great in the morning. It’s the end of the day when everyone is tired that the trouble starts. :-)
So let’s make today’s problem, How do we spread out. Build lots of more towns, for starters. Shut down the public schools that exist now and replace them with tiny garden-shed with a bathroom structures with one teacher, a few good books and one or two musical instruments. The crowded big schools that exist today belong in the dustbin with every other failed institution.
I bet we could reimburse parents to enable one parent to be at home with his or her children for whatever we are spending on schools and daycare.
Crowds are not good. Violence and disease develop and fester in crowds. Let’s use this virus event to reimagine the world we live in. Let’s free up the land the federal, state, and city and town governments have taken off the market and put it back on the market so that new small towns and small schools can spring up all across the country.
I think I’ll call my movement “Let’s Spread Out.” :-)