But I Did Stay At A Holiday Inn Express

Passengers not pilots know what is best for their plane. https://t.co/auXtSIfUpW

— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 16, 2023

One of the happiest moments of my teaching career was the father who called me to demand I tell him about his son's grades and other academic matters.

His son was a high school student, enrolled in a dual-credit class being taught by me through the community college I worked for.  That made him a college student to me, and under FERPA, I can't reveal any information about a student without written permission from the student (IIRC on that last point.  I just knew I couldn't tell Daddy anything over the phone.).

Which ended the conversation very quickly.  He was quite demanding until I told him federal law all but blocked me from even taking his call or acknowledging his son was in my class.

I never heard from him again.

Parents can be jerks, IOW.  When I was a kid, if I got in trouble at school my parents would ask one question:  "What did you do wrong?" (Not as rigid as it sounds.  One year I contracted hepatitis and was out of school for the spring semester.  One of my teachers reportedly made a very disparaging remark about how I contracted the disease, and my father was very angry with her over it.  Could have knocked me over with a feather.  He was actually quite fair, IOW.)  Today, the experience for teachers and administrators tends to be more:  "What did you do to my little Jimmy?"  Parents don't know what's best for their kids.  The ones Abbott is appealing to just want their kids to get into Harvard, and straight "A's," they think, is the way they get there.  And that's pretty much all they know.

I don't have a lot of truck with "education experts," though there is a lot to know about education. I just find reliable experts in the field to be thin on the ground, but then that's true in almost every field of human endeavor.  The "experts" tend to be clowns like Richard Dawkins talking to the public about "selfish genes" which true geneticists recognize as quackery and nonsense, or journalists like the late Christopher Hitchens playing to the ignorance and prejudices of his audience by denouncing Mother Teresa or religion in general by constructing straw men that betray, not his insight, but his ignorance.

Yes, there are experts; but they are difficult to understand and demanding in their reasoning, and most of us can't be bothered with the struggle to follow them.  So I'm not a big fan of swatting down stupidity like Abbott's with appeals to authority.

That said, Abbott is a clown.  Parents can, should they choose, keep their child at home and homeschool them.  Texas has frighteningly loose laws about this.  I'm quite sure no school district in the state has the manpower to investigate and regulate parents teaching their children at home in accordance with Texas law.  They can barely keep up with students who give a false address so they can be zoned to the "right" school within their district.  Parents can choose to keep their children from reading school books in the school library (although in my 12 years in public schools I was usually the only person in the school library, unless a class was taken there by their teacher.  Almost no one went there voluntarily, or expected to find any interesting or challenging books when they did.  Librarians haven't changed that much; I've known a few since then.  Lovely people, but hardly dangerous thinkers.).  But parents now want to choose what books all the students can read.  Or choose to send their children to private schools, but take their tax dollars with them.  Which is gonna be fun.

Texas is once again in the throes of funding private education with public funds.  We did this at the end of the last century (long enough ago we've all forgotten, I guess.)  The money left state coffers, but regulators were not hired to be sure the money was being spent for the purpose of education.  The exemplar case was in  Dallas, where the "school" provided tables and chairs, few if any teachers (none qualified to teach anything), a handful of out of date "textbooks," and the "cafeteria" was a vending machine.  You can't make this up.  The "founders" of the school were, IRRC, never found.  And now the state wants to do it again.

The only bulwark, oddly enough, will be the rural areas of the state, the bane of progressives and liberals in Texas, but also where the only educational game in town is the public school system.  Some of those are so small the superintendent of schools is also the high school principal.  They can't afford to lose their tax money to private schools, which will pop up like weeds and be even less qualified to educate than the underfunded public schools are now.  That's usually where vouchers go to die every two years, and I don't think this year will be any different.  Texas only has 35 state senators, but many, many more representatives. That makes the House very conservative, but not quite as ideologically insane as the Senate (where Dan Patrick is pushing hard for vouchers, again).

Abbott is obviously on the side of Patrick.  Much as handfuls of crazies in the cities (where the largest districts are, but also where there are more private schools.  But those schools aren't eager to take the students who can't pay now, and tax dollars will hardly match their tuition rates.  So lots of crappy schools can be expected to spring full blown from the brow of....Dan Patrick and Greg Abbott, I guess.) will back this play, I think the rural dominated House will kill it once again.

Here's hoping, anyway.  Now if we could just do something about the censorship of the libraries.  Maybe give every schoolchild an Amazon account.....