Letters on education secretary, school choice, Electoral College, voter fraud

DeVos is wrong person to lead education

Robert Litan has his charter school optimism largely misplaced (“Wichita should innovate, launch charter schools,” Dec. 6 Opinion). He began by praising Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary. She is a billionaire philanthropist whose record in Detroit is sketchy at best.

Douglas N. Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane University, wrote recently how DeVos devised Detroit’s charter school system to run like the Wild West. “It’s hardly a surprise that the system, which has almost no oversight, has failed,” he wrote. “Schools there can do poorly and still continue to enroll students.”

Also, Litan argued that schools should be like a business. Which business is he talking about? He seems to feel as if students are products. This leaves out the human factor, always a problem for advocates without education experience who forget or ignore that students are actually independent beings, not widgets or assembly line products.

No one should argue that schools cannot be improved, and I am not doing that. But the “just like a business” argument is thoughtless and shallow, and DeVos is not the person to weigh in on education policies.

So many who have never taught know exactly how to criticize and re-craft education, and their solutions reflect this lack of experience. Keep calm and propose smart improvements in league with some of those “best teachers from public schools.”

Trust parents

John H. Wilson criticized incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos for her support for educational choice policies, claiming that they “will not improve the quality of education” (“New education secretary like a ‘shot across the bow,’” Dec. 1 Opinion). He argued that “choice implies that parents somehow know what is the most educationally sound learning experiences for their children.”

The professor should give parents more credit.

No one cares more about a child than his or her parents, and no one is better positioned to understand that child’s unique learning needs.

The research shows our trust in parents is well-placed. More than a dozen random-assignment studies have found that, on the whole, students benefit when their parents choose their school rather than attending their assigned district school.

Nevertheless, Wilson has a point: Parents need resources to help them make informed decisions about their child’s education. Fortunately, websites such as GreatSchools.org provide information that enables parents to find the schools that work best for their kids.

Kansas policymakers should do more to empower parents, such as expanding the state’s tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students, so that children can receive the education that’s right for them.

Electoral alternative

In his acceptance speech, President-elect Donald Trump said that he would be “president for all Americans,” including the “few people” who have not supported him in the past. Actually, there were not a few people; there were many people. Hillary Clinton received more than 2 million votes more than Trump. A majority of voters choose not to support Trump.

Our system of electing the president, using the Electoral College, is irrelevant and archaic. We have the means to “hear” every vote in the country. It is time for every vote to count.

Discussions by federal lawmakers of abolishing the Electoral College go nowhere. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an ongoing attempt to have much less reliance on the Electoral College. It is “an agreement among a group of states to award all their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote.”

As of today, 10 states and the District of Columbia have enacted into law this pact for a total of 165 electoral votes. The NPVIC will not go into effect until the pact has passed in enough states to total 270 electoral votes.

I encourage all to read about this pact. I hope that many more feel that it is time to change our system so that all who vote have a say in our leadership.

Where’s evidence?

Secretary of State Kris Kobach needs to provide evidence of millions of non-citizens voting in the 2016 election. He should be able to come up with a thousand, or even just a hundred, such cases to show the public.

As in the past, however, when confronted on similar claims, Kobach will declare an active investigation, though this “investigation” has been ongoing for years. This lie bolsters President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to claim a popular election mandate, while also justifying efforts by Republicans to purge voter rolls of people who happen to have the same name as another registered voter in a different state.

Such voter pairs, whose birth dates and other details don’t even match, are easily checked out to be distinct individuals. But some authorities would rather just make a half-hearted effort, resulting in the removal of the names from their lists of registered voters.

This corrupt conspiracy to deny the vote from hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of legitimately registered voters undercuts democracy’s sacred franchise.

This story was originally published December 9, 2016 at 5:02 AM with the headline "Letters on education secretary, school choice, Electoral College, voter fraud."