June 28, 2020 

By Stephen Frank

Oak Park schools in Ventura County will allow children to spend two half days a week in school and claim that is education.  Simi Valley schools may have two full days a week in classrooms—hoping student do distance learn the other three.  LAUSD had 40% of the students disappear the last four months of the semester.  I believe statewide it is 20%.  Think parents are going to put up with less education at a higher cost and not leave government education or leave the State?

“But “our hands are tied” is not an excuse for an entire school district announcing that it has abdicated the mission of educating children just because the logistics have become complicated. At private schools around northern Virginia, their phones are ringing off the hook with parents looking for another option to provide their children with an actual education. Distance learning didn’t work last year, nor does it have a chance, especially for elementary-aged children or the children of parents too busy or unwilling to babysit their online activities. Fairfax County was a particularly failed experiment, with the Washington Post calling it a “disaster.”

If districts continue the experiment “indefinitely,” we know what will happen: Parents will be left to their own devices, as they were last school year. Children of those advantaged enough to provide supervision and an actual education.”

This is a racist policy.  Minority children are being left behind—why doesn’t the media, BLM and Newsom admit these are racist policies?

Don’t like your school’s reopening plan? Pull your child out

by Bethany Mandel, Washington Examiner,  6/25/20 

School districts across the country are still trying to decide what school looks like amid a pandemic. In districts across the country, they’ve sent out surveys to parents about what parents would feel comfortable with and what they need from their children’s districts. In one large and affluent county in Washington’s suburbs, Fairfax, Virginia, it has already made an announcement that has sent shockwaves through the community:

Fairfax may be a trendsetter among districts, especially crowded districts near cities, and more may follow its lead about how to handle reopenings. This crowding is proving to be its undoing thanks to health department regulations about keeping children 6 feet apart, which is, it turns out, a fairly arbitrary rule as the World Health Organization recommends individuals from different households keep half the distance apart than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does.

But “our hands are tied” is not an excuse for an entire school district announcing that it has abdicated the mission of educating children just because the logistics have become complicated. At private schools around northern Virginia, their phones are ringing off the hook with parents looking for another option to provide their children with an actual education. Distance learning didn’t work last year, nor does it have a chance, especially for elementary-aged children or the children of parents too busy or unwilling to babysit their online activities. Fairfax County was a particularly failed experiment, with the Washington Post calling it a “disaster.”

If districts continue the experiment “indefinitely,” we know what will happen: Parents will be left to their own devices, as they were last school year. Children of those advantaged enough to provide supervision and an actual education will do so, and the disadvantaged children will fall even further behind.

Even if parents of means and opportunity can provide an education to their public school children, it doesn’t mean they should have to. Nobody should be forced into homeschooling against their will.

So, what can parents do? The answer is simple: protest.

The most effective form of protest is to unenroll their students from public school. We now know that they will not be receiving anything resembling an education from the public school system, and as such, they should not be paid tax dollars in order to provide it. Money talks, and parents should walk.

School choice advocates concur that parents need to stand up and walk out of the system if they aren’t being served by it. Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, told the Washington Examiner: “School choice has long been a lifeline for those students in poorly performing districts. But it can also provide something equally important for parents everywhere: leverage. School districts and superintendents will not be able to blithely ignore parents’ wishes when every family can take their $17,000 (about the average per-pupil expenditure in the U.S.) and walk. Parents already form petitions with hundreds of signatures; imagine if each name of a dissatisfied parent represented a direct threat to superintendent salaries rather than an easily dismissed nuisance.”

We already have a window into what school districts could have chosen to do with the example set by daycares serving essential workers during the shutdown. NPR reported:

Throughout the pandemic, many child care centers have stayed open for the children of front-line workers — everyone from doctors to grocery store clerks. YMCA of the USA and New York City’s Department of Education have been caring for, collectively, tens of thousands of children since March, and both tell NPR they have no reports of coronavirus clusters or outbreaks. As school districts sweat over reopening plans, and with just over half of parents telling pollsters they’re comfortable with in-person school this fall, public health and policy experts say education leaders should be discussing and drawing on these real-world child care experiences.

Pushing for full school reopenings is a winning position with working parents for any politician in a district making announcements such as those in Fairfax County. Parents should be able to take the money the public school district would have been paid had they not abdicated their responsibility and take it to a private school that will actually do the job of educating children.

In the meantime, parents need to make clear to their districts: If you won’t educate my children, I will not allow you to be paid for their enrollment. If parents will be homeschooling anyway, make the decision official and bleed the public school system dry.

Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet.com, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.