Tag Archives: education

“Undemocratic”

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Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) used his “line-item” veto power to veto part of a legislatively-passed law regarding public school funding. His veto authority actually is less a line-item veto authority than it is a words and phrases veto authority.

Evers, a Democrat, used his veto pen Wednesday to strike out text intended to increase funding for the 2024-25 school years, crossing out the “20” and the hyphen. The updated language allows K-12 schools to raise their revenue per student by $325 a year until 2425.

Lucas Vebber, Deputy Counsel for the Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, says his organization is considering suing the State over the governor’s inherently undemocratic move.

Evers’ move was assuredly undemocratic, but existing law allows the move. Vebber expanded on his beef, and with that expansion, he has a case—and with that case, he may be able to get the law struck down as unconstitutionally (under Wisconsin’s constitution) vague.

Here you have the people who elected the legislature and are represented here in Wisconsin, in the Senate Assembly to write laws, have written a law they intended. The governor’s veto makes it something completely different.

In Wisconsin, as in each of our States and at the Federal level, it’s the legislature that writes the law(s). A governor’s authority, in this context, begins and ends with signing the legislature’s bill into law or vetoing it. Or, as is the case in a few States, a governor’s authority can include vetoing specific parts of the bill and signing the rest into law. Wisconsin allows a governor to veto words and phrases. However, in no State is a governor allowed to rewrite the bill before signing it.

That’s what Evers has done with his carefully chosen words and phrases veto: he’s rewritten a one-year funding law into a 400 year funding law, and that is plainly unconstitutional. Evers’ move also illustrates how flexible is a Wisconsin governor’s words and phrases veto authority: it’s so flexible as to be too vague to pass muster.

The matter likely will end up in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that court has an activist liberal Justice majority.

“Understand Their Identities”

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In a Fox News article centered on the decision by Georgia’s Professional Standards Commission to remove terms like “equity” and “inclusion” from the State’s teacher preparation standards, Aireane Montgomery, President and CEO of Georgia Educators for Equity & Justice was quoted as objecting.

I cannot imagine thinking that teachers should go into a classroom not having an understanding of how important their students’ identities are[.]

That’s not at risk from the removal of artificial criteria from the State’s teacher professional standards. Regardless, the question of students’ identities is easily resolved.

Have the students recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the first class of each day. Teach them American history, American civics, Western history and civilization.

Teach the students their identity as American children and American citizens. That’s the truly important student identity.

Nor is it really all that hard. It needs only for school boards to enforce standards, teachers to teach to them, and above all, parents to be involved in their kids’ education, beginning with the setting of those standards.

Banning the Bible in Schools

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The Davis School District, Utah’s second largest for public schools, has decided to ban the Bible from its elementary and junior high schools, retaining it only in district high school libraries.

The district’s officials aren’t even claiming the transparent fig leaf of separation of church and state for the ban. The Bible is out because of its vulgarity or violence. It’s true enough that the Bible has what some might consider vulgarity—all those begets and begots, even incidents like one man in a leadership role sending a rival off to war to be killed so the one could have the other’s wife for himself.

And that violence—all those wars, David so violently killing Goliath, the mass killing of Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea; sacrificing animals; the violence just goes on and on.

What’s the next set of books to be banned from the Utah district’s children’s tender minds?

History books, of course. History is rife with the violence of war and all those killings, destructions of whole nations, slavery, rape. There’s the vulgarity, too, of those rapes: the Sabine women, the rapes of slave women, the literal rape of Nanking, comfort women; the incestuous behavior of royals who married each other’s women for the sake of politics; one king’s serial use and abuse of his wives—these make up just a few examples.

This is the Left, infesting even Utah’s schools.

Gone Too Woke

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Speak the truth, and be fired. Hurt someone’s feelings with that truth, and be banned altogether from your profession.

That’s what has happened to a teacher in Great Britain, a public school teacher who happens to be Christian, after having mistakenly “misgendered” (can there even be such a thing in a sane world?) a secondary school student and then compounding his sin by speaking honestly about his thoughts on gay marriage when a student asked.

The United Kingdom’s Teaching Regulation Authority, which regulates teaching and deals with serious misconduct, found that [the] former math teacher at a public secondary school in Oxford, failed to treat a student with “dignity and respect” by “misgendering” biologically female student who identified as male, the Christian Legal Centre, which has been representing [the teacher], said Tuesday.

The TRA followed up by banning the teacher from teaching indefinitely, although the agency magnanimously permitted him to appeal in 2025. Sure. As a saying goes in the US military, “Disapproved. Resubmit in 90 days for further disapproval.”

This is where our nation is headed, if we don’t step up. “Be like Europe” is the Left’s mantra, and this business in Great Britain is an example of the disaster that would be.

A Parallel Solution

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DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona (D) wants to enact a rule that would expand Title IX (illegally, but that’s a separate problem) to require State education systems to include transgender athletes in all heretofore women’s sports programs and all on heretofore women’s sports teams. Half of the governors of our States object.

If it comes down to it, Cardona’s move is very likely to fail in the courts. That will be an expensive and time consuming enterprise.

I propose another solution to be pushed in parallel with the lawsuit effort. It also would be expensive and time consuming to put into effect, but I think it would have a more permanent, and more beneficial, outcome.

States should stop taking Federal dollars altogether into their education systems. That would put the States beyond the reach of Title IX, which applies only to those State systems that take Federal dollars.

Not taking the government’s lucre would be expensive, certainly, but only until the States’ budgets adjusted. However, the move would do more than place those States’ education systems beyond the reach of Title IX’s strings, it would free the States from a potful of Federal education strings—and demonstrate that States can get along just fine without those dollars and those strings and so encourage them to decline ever more Federal dollars and reap the increasing value of being free of those strings.