No tears for Lisa
Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Lisa Démuth (a more phonetic spelling) has a new campaign ad up on the teevee describing her hard scrabble childhood. You can see an Instagram cut of part of it here. It’s an effort to present a kinder and gentler Lisa.
It’s too bad that the effort is such a pile of prevarication and dissembling. She has no heart for the people she claims to come from.
In a recent presser, Démuth said she wanted to trim the state’s free school meal plan to means-test it but adopt a voucher and private school aid plan. She said well-off kids shouldn’t get free lunches. She apparently wants to return to the thrilling days of yesteryear when poor kids got a special funny-colored lunch ticket and got a peanut butter sandwich instead of what everybody else was eating. And their parents got dunned for a deficit in the school lunch account. It was an early lesson in second class citizenship, a concept that Lisa apparently champions.
In spite of her hard scrabble childhood.
Her means-tested sorting inevitably leads to ostracizing the poor kids. I know this from observation sixty-five years ago.
On the other hand, voucher and private school subsidies go mostly to students and parents who already send their kids to private schools. Rich kids. Not benefiting public schools, but harming them.
This transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the wealthy dwarfs the transfer of wealth from the school lunch program, but it’s great optics for the Lisas and Ryans of the world. It is also a great diversion.
In the same presser, Démuth remarks:
Demuth’s plan also includes changes to the state’s teacher licensing board to ensure the board is working to “prepare the next generation of workers and not the next generation of activists,” referring to conservative assertions that the schools are being used to indoctrinate Minnesota students in progressive politics.
This is a simple play to the bug-eyed control freaks out there who become catatonic when little Johnny or Janie comes home from kindergarten and says they made a friend who the parents don’t know.
My god, their parents might be liberals.
It is also a serious misapprehension of the role of a public education, which is not to merely to create worker bees, but to make thinking citizens. It apparently made a thinking citizen out of Lisa Démuth’s daughter. Thank goodness.
The Minnesota Constitution does not require that the state build roads or protect public safety, or do anything else, other than this:
The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.
That’s Article XIII, Section 1 of the Minnesota Constitution. “Republican” here, by the way, is derived from res publica, or “of the people.”
In other words, the state must educate people to be active participants in their democratic republic. It is our Constitution’s Prime Directive.
These active citizen participants might have another name: activists.
What really give the lie to Lisa’s bullshit, though, is a simple graph.
It came from this Left.MN story. Here’s a bit about the description of the graph:
Governor Gutshot — Tim Pawlenty — was elected governor in 2002, ushering in what is called by Minnesota policy wonks the “Lost Decade.” Education funding took it in the shorts, and in some way has never recovered. Here’s a story from the St. Paul teachers’ union.
In each of the years shown, the governorship and/or one house of the Legislature were controlled by Republicans, except 2013-2015, when the DFL had a trifecta. You will note that period is the only time when the slide reversed a little. And the pattern repeated itself in the ’20s with a material increase in funding after the election of another DFL trifecta in 2022.
With all of her talk about vouchers and private school funding, it is obvious that Démuth, in spite of service on a local school board, and running mate Wilson have no real interest improving the state’s public school system. Republicans as a class have no interest in it, either.
They see destroying public schools as an ideological project. They’re pretty transparent about it, too.
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