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| courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain |
Extortion - The obtaining of property from another induced by
wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color
of official right.
While the Federal Government has, throughout the existence of
the United States, predating even the Constitution, occasionally provided
funding and direction for public schools, most often in terms of land grants
for universities and colleges, until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
of 1965 it had not interfered all that much with education below the
collegiate/vocational school level. The ESEA of 1965 held as its basic tenant
that students from low-income homes needed more educational services than
children from affluent homes.
As with most of President Johnson’s rosy predictions about his
Great Society, his prediction of the ESEA as a road out of poverty for millions
of children from low-income families soon proved woefully inaccurate. Studies
in the years following implementation of the Act showed the school improvements
made with the funding had only moderate impact on those students’ scholastic
achievement.
No one who understood the real impetus behind the ESEA of 1965
was surprised by the results. The Act was not as much about education as it was
about political strategy to appease members of the civil rights community and
influential members of the Democrat Party. Providing funds to improve education
for poor children was a guaranteed way to attract support from those
constituencies.
Perhaps the most important thing to come out of the ESEA of 1965
was the paradigm shift in how the federal government viewed its role in public
education. Instead of providing general aid to all levels of public education,
the Act provided a vehicle for increasing aid to certain sectors and
withholding it from others based on the political winds of the day. It was this
Act, more than any other federal legislation that led to the situation we find
ourselves in today, where who gets to use which bathroom has risen to a
question of such importance that the federal government is willing to extort
compliance out of school systems in states that disagree with the federal
directive to allow students of either gender to use the bathroom, locker room,
or shower of their choice based on which gender they feel most like that day.
This extortion comes in the form of a threat to withhold federal
education funding from the public universities, colleges, and public schools,
thereby willfully endangering the education and future of all students for the
sake of allowing a few, a very few, to potty where they please.
Distraction - a thing that prevents
someone from giving full attention to something else.
Meanwhile, nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise in Europe,
a Muslim ‘invasion’ of Europe that may have been in the planning stages since
the days of Saladin seems to be underway, militant Islam is spreading its Cult
of Death further around the world, China is growing bolder and more militant,
and a resurgent Russia led by a egomaniacal megalomaniac rivalled only by our
own Donald Trump is playing dangerous military games with our Navy and
threatening war if we continue to build a missile shield against Iran and other
Middle Eastern ballistic threats.
And people wonder why our children have a hard time
understanding what is truly important.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
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