After the U.S. Senate voted to invoke cloture on the nomination of President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called her the “worst nominee to ever be presented for confirmation before this body,” and then urged his colleagues to “think about it” over the weekend before returning to Washington, D.C., on Monday to vote for her confirmation.
Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is going to give them something else to think about.
His Super PAC, America Next, has launched a multimedia campaign to call out Democrats’ hypocrisy over DeVos’ nomination. Two videos (see above and below) are now circulating that remind voters what’s at stake.
“Conservatives have failed to articulate and sell a national policy agenda to the country, a vision of what conservative policies can accomplish when put into practice,” America Next’s website states. “We’ve detailed the awful things the Obama administration has done, all the failings of the left, and we’ve pledged to undo as much of that as we can.
“That’s good; it needs to be done. But conservatives must be willing to demonstrate that we have the courage of our convictions by going on offense in the war of ideas.
“That’s where America Next comes in.”
DeVos has been an ardent champion of school choice for more than two decades, an area where America Next is deeply involved, as well. The organization has offered its own K-12 education reform “roadmap”—click here to read the six-page executive summary.
The report states:
In short, America’s education system is set up as a collective, a series of interlocking, coercive monopolies, instead of an individual-driven ecosystem of freedom and choice where people willingly work together to accomplish their mutual goals. How should lawmakers and citizens cultivate a thriving education ecosystem and improve the lives of their fellow Americans? By holding education policies against three criteria:
-
- Parent choice,
- Limited government
- And educator freedom.
Parent choice is the most foundational of these, as it supports the rest by establishing a consumer-driven market ecosystem. As parent choice grows, the need for central mandates decreases. States need to enact temporary measures to restrict the effects of monopoly education while it persists. These effects include policies that, among other things, assign students to schools based on their ZIP codes, direct dollars at the local level based on school buildings rather than students, determine curricula at the state or federal level, prescribe teacher evaluation systems that penalize teachers at higher performing schools and prioritize schools as a jobs program for adults rather than a place to teach kids.
{eoa}
See an error in this article?
To contact us or to submit an article
