I had a big laugh this morning reading the liberal Vivian Paige’s column in the liberal Virginian-Pilot.
Her belief is that schools are failing to educate. And guess what? It’s Republicans’ fault. See, her solutions are simply more money, for both her employers at Old Dominion University and school employees as a whole.
Why the Virginian-Pilot gives her space to publicly advocate for more money for her employers without so much as a disclaimer is beyond me.
But there’s a much more biting flaw in Vivian’s logic. Republicans aren’t running schools. Democrats are. Republicans aren’t running teachers unions. Democrats are. Republicans aren’t opposing reforming education. Democrats are.
Someone please hand Vivian a mirror.
Vivian teaches at ODU and must have noticed by now that college campuses aren’t bastions of conservatism.
At the K-12 level, it’s possibly even more left-tilted.
Democrats run these teachers unions. They endorse Democrats. They support Democrats. They flood Democrat conventions. They give buckets of money to Democrat candidates.
They love to oppose Republicans. They alienate themselves from every Republican legislator by calling for their defeat, no matter what the Republican has supported for their agenda. Examples abound of teachers unions taking Republicans who have supported pro-teacher funding and legislation and endorsing the no-chance-in-Hades Democrat who ran against them and lost by 25 points.
When you can’t bring yourself to endorse a 10-year legislator who supported everything you brought to him because you supported a Democrat who wound up with 30% of the vote, you are liberal-partisan and nothing else.
Democrats run schools, too. Oh, occasionally you might find a school principal that was a Romney voter, but I haven’t yet. I’m what you call an “active” parent. I meet teachers and principals and assistant principals of every school my daughter attended.
Maybe when I meet those at my son’s future schools, I’ll meet my first Republican. I met one Principal who commented at the start of a conference that my daughter said she met the Governor.
I smiled and explained that happens quite a few times, and that I’ve known Bob McDonnell since the 90s and he’s known her since she could crawl.
The Principal replied, “Maybe she can tell him to stop cutting education.”
I then quoted his salary to him and said maybe that could be a start to help make up the difference.
He learned two things. 1, don’t bring partisan attacks into a school setting and 2, don’t battle with me on impromptu one-liners.
Here’s the point. If schools aren’t doing the job and even liberal columnists are starting to realize it, they have to look no further than their own Party to change things.
Republicans aren’t to blame for your lack of satisfaction with education today in America. It’s the Democrats who have controlled schools for decades who have fought to keep them from modernizing, reforming and improving.
