The Outstater

February 5, 2025

Education: Partisan Is Good

BIPARTISANSHIP, the comedian George Carlin famously said, usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out. That has been our experience with school board elections. 

Back in the 1980s we allowed the local political machines, some of them actively corrupt and all of them black at heart, to control the election of school boards. Even so, the bosses understood that their constituencies would not take kindly to the mishandling of children’s futures. They made sure that at least in this area of their purview things were accountable and sensible. Resources were to be directed in ways that benefited the children and classroom learning. Otherwise, serious larceny in other parts of the city would be put at risk.

Today, thanks to supposed reforms, elections are controlled by the so-called teachers unions, 24-7, 12-month-a-year political campaigns that knock down the occasional uprising of hapless mothers aghast at how the schools are being run. 

If you can ignore the “it’s for the children” mantra, you will see that students and classroom learning are not motivating factors for the unions. Rather, hiring as many teachers with as few qualifications and the most union dependency is the goal. Indeed, higher teacher pay is only secondary to usurping management prerogative and controlling the system.

The Indiana Legislature, despite more than a decade of Republican super-majority, is unwilling to take on the derangement that holds all of this together, e.g., the Indiana Collective Bargaining Act, a statist tract that would make Lenin blush. The only option, then, is to turn it all back over to the local political bosses — yet another example of the iron law of amoral policy: “compared to what, at what cost and according to whom.”

Venal ambition, you see, is better than insipid Marxism. Bring back partisan school board elections.— tcl



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