School choice is the new civil rights movement

In 1957, the eyes of the nation were focused on Arkansas, when Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus refused to allow nine black students to attend Little Rock Central High School three years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended public school segregation based on race.

Eventually, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the black students, who became known as the “Little Rock Nine,” were safely admitted to the previously “whites only” high school. With this, the era of public school segregation came to an end, as black students were finally able to enroll in public schools that had hitherto been open solely to whites.

Unfortunately, more than six decades after this monumental step in the civil rights movement, far too many American children — and black students in particular — are facing a much different problem. Now they are stuck in unsafe, poorly performing public schools simply based on their zip codes.

To solve this problem, many states are embracing a commonsense solution that also happens to be overwhelmingly popular among broad swathes of the American electorate: school choice.

On March 8, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the newly elected Republican governor of Arkansas, signed into law a universal school choice bill, joining Arizona, Iowa, West Virginia and Utah as states that offer education savings accounts so that families can choose whichever type of school — public, privat or charter — their children shall attend.

According to the State Policy Network, “The Arkansas LEARNS Act will give Arkansas families $6,600 per student per year to pay for education expenses, such as textbooks, tutoring and private school tuition. The program will have income requirements in the first three years, but by 2025 the program will be open to all families. The legislation will also increase the base salary for teachers from $36,000 to $50,000.”

As mentioned above, school choice is one of the rare issues that blurs political, racial, generational and socio-economic lines. As recent polling shows, among registered voters, 72% of all Americans “support” school choice. What’s more, 72% of whites, 70% of blacks, 77% of Hispanics and 66% of Asians support the concept of school choice.

And, perhaps most telling, 68% of Democrats, 82% of Republicans and 67% of independents agree that parents should have “the right to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs.”

In many ways, school choice is the new battleground for the modern civil rights movement.

Whereas in the 1950s, only certain people could attend certain schools based on their race, we now live in a time wherein only certain people can attend certain schools based on the location of their home and amount of money at their disposal.

Like it or not, this is the state of the American education system. Yet, this system is fundamentally flawed, hopelessly outdated, and in dire need of immediate and wholesale reform.

Myriad data demonstrate that our public education system, as currently constructed, is simply failing to educate and keep our children safe. While it is true that these problems became more evident during the pandemic, when the vast majority of public

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The answer was that the president’s and Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s agendas were the same and the only ones she permitted Congress to consider, such as the Jan. 6, 2021 stuff and climate change, but never scheduling anything important to Republicans, such as the border.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, controlled the Senate.

What were the president’s agendas?

President Joe Biden followed his inauguration speech proclaiming he was the “great uniter” with an executive order for federal agencies to “search and destroy” any actions taken during Donald Trump’s presidency without considering whether they helped the American people. He set another agenda item by prioritizing climate change issues.

His federal agencies implementing these two priorities led to the veto.

The federal agencies during the term of President Trump issued a rule that required the plan administrators under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act prioritize the congressional intent of “to protect the pensions and retirement savings from mismanagement and abuse by clarifying that those in charge of the savings be held to a high standard with the best interest of the plan participants.” Their rules limited the ability for plan fiduciaries for “mismanagement and abuse” by only allowing them to weigh the economical effects of climate change and other ESG — environmental, social and governance — considerations as long as the effects are relevant to the “risk-and-reward” economical analysis, and clarified that those in charge be held to a high standard with the best interest of plan participants.

How did this lead to a veto?

Well, the “search and destroy” executive order from President Biden and his fixation with climate change caused the heads of the federal agencies that administer ERISA — the Labor Department headed by Marty Walsh, the former union president, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, whose credibility faded with her prediction that this inflation was “transitory” — to alter the Trump rules that followed the congressional intent of ERISA. The federal agencies are requiring fiduciaries to invest in accordance with ESG considerations to “safeguard the economy from climaterelated risks that may threaten the pensions and life savings of working Americans and their families.”

What was it about ERISA that led to its being the subject of the first veto?

This young lawyer’s adventures with ERISA began when I was asked — OK, ordered — by Art Vangeli, the regional attorney in charge of the 1 Presidential Boulevard, Bala Cynwyd, Penn. law department office of my new employer, Gulf Oil Co. Mr. Vangeli “asked” me to become the company “expert” in ERISA that had just been