CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY VS. TRUSTING THE PLAN

       During the 2024 Campaign, many of us raised the question about what the New Right actually intended to do once they'd disposed of the hated Biden/Harris Junta. Mostly we were told, in essence, to shut up and trust the plan even though they were short on details of what the 'plan' was. What many of us feared is now becoming apparent: the only plan that the New Right had was taking control and farming out governmental functions to their Corporate cronies (because that worked out so well with Bush).

      This lack of any planning or foresight has become painfully apparent in addressing the crisis in American Public Education. Naturally, many Trump supporters probably assumed that the incoming Secretary of Education would be someone who had a long history of battling Trash Culture and standing tall for the values that America was built upon. Unfortunately, that isn't what we got.

    As we pointed out in our last post, Linda McMahon's only plan for American Public Education is to retain the Department's collection enforcement under the Student Loan scam and to enforce Neocon Political Correctness over the Democrat version. The rest gets dumped onto State Governments, NGOs, shady religious organizations, for-profit educational factories or whoever else wants to deal with it with little to no oversight. 

    Nobody, of course, bothered to think about Linda McMahon's qualifications to do much of anything related to Education. To the Republican Party, her multi-billion dollar bank account was only qualification needed, and to the True Believers, the fact that she wasn't a Democrat was all that mattered. 

    Likewise, nobody among the True Believers bothered to think about whether or not there were better and more productive ways to reform our broken schools. Acting first and thinking later is standard operating procedure for Americans these days; taking a chainsaw approach and hoping for the best is a lot easier than trying to think through a situation and come up with ideas that might actually work.

     Just when we all thought that sterling characters like Ryan Walters and upstanding institutions like PragerU were poised to lead our schools back into a Golden Age, a disturbing story reaches us from New Mexico:

     "A teacher has been arrested for alleged sexual abuse against children while inside of a classroom. According to New Mexico State Police, agents were told about alleged incidents of criminal sexual contact by Devin Henderson at Mountain View Christian Academy in Ruidoso. State police say agents began investigating in 2024 and learned eight children 10 years old and younger reported Henderson inappropriately touched them on more than one occasion while attending a computer class. State police learned during forensic interviews with the children that Henderson would show them explicit photos of himself on his cell phone...

  "Henderson has been charged with the following: Sexual exploitation of children (22 counts); Enticement of a child (7 counts); Criminal sexual contact of a minor (7 counts); Sexually oriented material harmful to minors (3 counts); Indecent exposure (1 count)."

      Oops! I wonder if the families of the victims involved get a tuition refund for any of this? Now that Musk and Bessent effectively have eliminated Consumer Protection Agencies, we suppose not.

      Mountain View Christian Academy bills itself as "partnering with parents in the education of their children since 1992. With a solid Biblical Foundation and a Christ-centered approach to education, your children will graduate from MVCA with a clear idea of what the Christian World View is, and how to live lives of integrity in their homes and in their communities." The School is accredited both in New Mexico and neighboring Texas; and we can see how well those States fare in managing Public Education. 

     The case of MVCA underscores again that simply transferring responsibility for education from one top-down establishment with feel-good slogans to another isn't going to solve anything. Americans need to start facing this problem squarely and stop latching onto every promised panacea. The US currently ranks 31st overall in educational standards worldwide. A good start might be observing what the 30 countries ahead of us are doing right.