Cuckservative Ideas About Education

Josh Gelernter recently published an article in the National Review; the article is typical neocon/cuckservative nonsense about race and education. The article claims that the GOP should not “give up” on Black and Hispanic voters in the cities and should appeal to them on the basis of one issue: education. Education is, Gelernter claims, “the number-one issue among both black and Hispanic voters.” Gelerneter provides no evidence in support of his assertion. A Gallup poll found that just 5% of Black voters think education is America’s “most important problem:”

Perhaps Gelerneter really meant “education is what I think is the most important problem for Black and Hispanic people.” “Education” is to the cuckservative Right what “poverty,” “racism” and “White privilege” are to the Left: the cause of all the Black man’s problems which is so self evident to them it needn’t be supported by any evidence.

Steve Sailer has observed that liberals seem to have amnesia about how long they’ve been running things, which prevents them from having to see how their favored programs have failed. In much the same way cuckservatives think their education reform ideas are totally new things that only a few places have tried. Gerlernter singles out two cities as education failures: Detroit and Cleveland. Yet he apparently is unaware that 55% of Detroit’s students and 39% of Cleveland’s students are enrolled in charter schools. Gerlernter also seems unaware of two major episodes in the education reform battle: Michelle Rhee and the Chicago Teachers Union strike. Rhee was Washington DC’s Chancellor of Schools and an advocate for education reform. She became very unpopular with the local Black residents and the mayor who appointed her lost reelection; her “reforms” were widely considered a major factor in his loss. The Chicago Teachers Union strike occurred in 2012 due to opposition to Democrat Rahm Emanuel’s education reform agenda. A poll taken during the strike found that a solid majority of the Blacks and Hispanics in the city approved of the strike. If Democrats can’t get Black support for education reform, what hope do Republicans have?

Why do Blacks oppose education reform? I’m sure for a lot of them it’s the same reason I do: because they know it doesn’t work. But there are other factors that would make it hard for them to support an agenda that scapegoats teachers teachers unions. Racial loyalty is the most important one: these teachers unions in ghetto areas are made up of large numbers of Black teachers. And what race are these “bad teachers” reformers like to focus on? For cuckservatives the answer is “it doesn’t matter,” for racialist ghetto residents it does matter.

Gerlernter also likes vouchers, writing:

(…)Policy platforms should be devoted to proposals for more teacher accountability, more charter schools, and vouchers to let inner-city parents send their kids to the same swanky private schools that Democratic politicos’ kids go to.(…)

Vouchers are a key cuckservative policy which are also supported by politically correct libertarians. Just like SJWs, cuckservatives loath the fact that White people want to separate themselves from Blacks. Vouchers, in their theory, would promote integration. They almost never mention the main reason the Left has historically opposed vouchers, which has nothing to do with teachers unions.

Blacks are inherently suspicious of things the White devils promise which seem too good to be true. In the case of voucher programs their skepticism would be well justified. There are two types of voucher programs: those that pay for all of tuition and those that cover only a portion of it. The latter are rightly seen as a subsidy for the well off. What if the first kind of voucher were to be enacted in a racially mixed area?

Private schools would have many ways of keeping low income Blacks out. Immediately afterwards they could say something along the lines of “we’re glad that the state has passed this great voucher bill but unfortunately our school was designed for 500 students and we already have 511 students, so we can’t take any new students. Sorry!” Over time they could deploy many strategies to keep out low income Blacks:

-Raising the price of tuition. If the subsidy is $10000 and the tuition used to cost $9000 they could suddenly discover a need for more computer labs and higher paid teachers. Tuition would be raised to $11000.

-Preferences to those who have siblings already in the schools or those who have parents who are “involved” with the schools.

-Preferences to those who “live in the neighborhood.”

-Harsh discipline(already a common feature of these schools) to remove the worst kids. It doesn’t have to be outright expulsion, it can simply be done by putting the kid in detention so often for offenses that go unpunished in other schools that it makes him want to switch schools.

-An admissions test.

-Not providing a school bus and thus requiring parents to either live close to the school(conveniently located in a rich neighborhood), drive the kids to school everyday, or, if it exists, have the kids take the city bus.(which takes a long time and which kids who are too young can’t be trusted to do)

-Having a reputation(deserved or not) for “high expectations” and harsh grading which will dissuade students from wanting to attend. And it will be students who would make a lot of these decisions.

The only way that vouchers would “let inner-city parents send their kids to the same swanky private schools that Democratic politicos’ kids go to” would be if the state were to force the private schools to take them. If the voucher scheme was not restricted to low income people it could end up primarily benefiting White people who save money on tuition.

In addition to supposedly racial reasons, cuckservatives and libertarians support vouchers because they see them as being “free market.” Cuckservative Kevin Williamson writes the following about vouchers:

If instead of food stamps, we had a system of government-run farms, ranches, distribution systems, warehouses, and grocery stores to support the nutritional needs of the poor, we would probably spend a great deal more on feeding them with worse results. But that is more or less the model we use for education. Who would denounce reformers as “market fundamentalists” for wanting to replace government farms and state grocery stores with food stamps? The resistance to making similar reforms with education is rooted in inertia, bias, and the narrow financial self-interest of public-sector workers and the politicians who depend upon them for money, campaign manpower, and votes.

Similar logic is deployed by libertarian A. Barton Hinkle(link in original):

After all, what is a school voucher but a kind of Obamacare subsidy?

Obamacare’s subsidies make private medical care accessible to their recipients. With it, they can choose from among a variety of approved providers—just like those who use school vouchers. The NEA, which supports Obamacare, certainly doesn’t consider this “dangerous.” Nor does it fret that offering people a range of choices among health care providers commoditizes medicine. Nor, evidently, do public-education advocates think Obamacare’s limited freedom of consumer choice places “individual benefit before the public good.” After all, the public good is served when people get medical care—not when they get it through one particular source only.

Granted, while health care reform was being debated the NEA said it “strongly supports a public health care option.” Guess what? School voucher programs include a public option, too—existing public schools. Nobody is forced to use a voucher. That means a school voucher program resembles precisely the public-private hybrid arrangement the NEA sought for health care.

But what the teachers unions fought to pass in health care, they fight against in education. Go figure.

This makes sense if you think that parents(and even students!) will choose schools on the basis of “which school will provide my kid/me with the Best Education?” If you live in a fantasy world. But in reality parents will be thinking about other things, mainly about peer environment and grades(for the college bound). As for what the student wants, do you remember being a grade school student? I do.

Expecting parents and students to select the schools that provide the Best Educations through a voucher program is like expecting food stamp recipients to use free market judgement to select the healthiest food in the supermarket.

References

Josh Gerlernter, Take the Cities Back from Democrats, National Review Online, October 30 2015 http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426378/education-winning-issue-Republicans

A Growing Movement: America’s Largest Charter School Communities, ninth annual edition, December 2014, National Alliance for Public Chater Schools http://www.publiccharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014_Enrollment_Share_FINAL.pdf

Bill Turque and Jon Cohen, D.C. Schools Chancellor Rhee’s approval rating in deep slide, Washington Post, February 1 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013102757.html

Andrew J Rotherham, Fenty’s Loss in D.C.: A Blow to Education Reform?, Time Magazine, September 16 2010 http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2019395,00.html

Whet Moser, Poll Shows Substantial CPS Parent, Racial Divide on Chicago Teachers Strike, Chicago Magazine, September 17 2012 http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/September-2012/Poll-Shows-Substantial-CPS-Parent-Racial-Divide-on-Chicago-Teachers-Strike/

Alfred W Clark, Another #Cuckservative Cause: School Choice, Occam’s Razor, September 18 2015 https://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/another-cuckservative-cause-school-choice/

Kevin D Williamson, Inequality in Education, National Review Online, August 8 2015 http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385002/inequality-education-kevin-d-williamson

A. Barton Hinkle, The Case for School Vouchers, Reason Magazine, June 10 2015 https://reason.com/archives/2015/06/10/the-case-for-school-vouchers