Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders Unveils Education Plan: Hike Teacher Pay, Wreck Public Schools

Fresh off her incomprehensible culture wars rant about the State of the Union Tuesday night, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced a big new policy plan for education Wednesday, featuring a big increase in teachers’ starting pay and a full-on voucher program that would radically shift taxpayer dollars from public education to private and charter schools, just like rightwing opponents have wanted for decades. But for the teachers left in the gutted public schools, the pay raise would probably help some.

Here are the basic elements of Sanders’s plan to reform/dismantle schools:

  • A universal school voucher plan, phased in over three years, that would give parents public funds to use at private schools, charters, or even for homeschooling.
  • Repeal of a “Teacher Fair Dismissal Act” that offered very minimal job protections to teachers
  • Restrictions on how schools will be allowed to discuss race and gender
  • $50,000 minimum pay for teachers
  • Up to $10,000 in merit pay
  • Forgiveness of student loans for teachers who take jobs in “high need” areas
  • “Streamlined early childhood education programs,” which we can’t find any details on. Aerodynamic toddlers?
  • Sending 120 reading coaches to schools that need reading improvement
  • $500 in tutoring grants for K-3 students who don’t meet literacy benchmarks
  • “Dual diploma” program in high schools, to encourage students who prefer entering the workforce after high school instead of college

There’s actually some good stuff in that plan, as long as you ignore the toxic steaming shitwad at its core. No, we mean the voucher policy, not Sanders.


At the presser announcing the plan, Sanders said that making sure all children get a quality education is “the civil rights issue of our day, ” meaning that parents should be able to use public funding to get their kids out of public education and let them learn evolution instead of Gender Indoctrination, obviously.

“The longer we wait to reform our failing schools, the more future generations we’re condemning to a lifetime of poverty,” she said. “I promised to be the education governor and I’m proud to deliver on that promise only a month into my term.”

It’s the classic rightwing approach to governing: If there are problems with a government program (or if you can claim there are), the solution is to blow it up and give taxpayer dollars to private companies, which will just naturally use the money more wisely until they get caught defrauding the grant program. Then you cut the public funding and tell people who needed the service that government never fixes anything, so people should pay for mail service or education or healthcare themselves and not expect Mama Government to come and solve all their problems.

Sanders also announced that once the program is rolled out as actual legislation in a week or so, it will include new limits on how schools will be allowed to teach about race and gender, because what part of “Arkansas” did you not hear? Sanders said she wants schools to not teach children “what to think, but how to think,” which clearly means how to think only about race and gender in ways the state approves of. Sanders had already issued an executive order banning the teaching of “critical race theory,” but there’s always the danger that some white child might read a book about Wilma Rudolph and get the impression that segregation is bad. Just another reason to spend public money on private church schools that got their start as literal “segregation academies” as part of the campaign of “massive resistance” to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Fortunately, kids won’t learn about that history anymore, because it’s woke indoctrination.

The real mystery meat in the plan’s school lunch shit sandwich will be the new “Education Freedom Accounts” that will

provide state funding for parents to enroll their children in public, private, parochial schools or homeschool, Sanders said. The program will be rolled out to “at-risk” families first and be available to all families within three years.

State Rep. Brian Evans, chair of the state’s House Education Committee and who’s been involved in drafting the legislation, said he thinks the full GOP caucus will eventually support the bill, even if some foolishly cling to the obsolete notion that public schools are important to their communities.

“I think there are some Republican members on both ends of the General Assembly that think about their communities back home. What are the cornerstones of those communities? In many instances, it’s the public school system,” Evans said.

“I think they’ll get over the line, but right now they’re just a little bit hesitant until they see the exact particulars of the bill just to make sure that the benefit and the gain is going to outweigh any potential risks to their communities.”

He may simply need to show some Libs of TikTok videos of teachers with purple hair to scare them, and maybe remind them that “community” has the same root as “COMMUNIST.”

The Arkansas Advocate explains that the Freedom From Those People Accounts would, as Sanders describes them, amount to about 90 percent of the per-student funding that would ordinarily go to public education, or about $7,350 this school year. It would also provide funding for transportation and would “remove the caps on the number of charter schools or school choice transfers.”

State Sen. Breanne Davis (R) took pains to make clear that this is the most liberty-est reallocation of public funds to private schools possible, because freedom, liberty, individualism (on the public dime), and also Luntzing It Up:

We call it a parent empowerment program because honestly when you say vouchers or school choice, that’s not really accurate because schools aren’t choosing. […] It’s parents and families choosing a school that meets their kids’ educational needs.

We have to fault the Advocate just a teensy bit for not demanding Davis provide an example of anyone, anywhere, who thinks “school choice” involves a school making a choice, while also failing to note that charter schools and privates absolutely are doing the choosing, and do not in fact have to accept your kid’s dumb ass — or your kid’s disabled ass, or wrong religion ass, for that matter. Also, it’s not a democracy, it’s a REPUBLIC.

House Minority Leader Tippi McCullough (D) said that Democrats would oppose any “omnibus” bill that paired the private education vouchers with increased teacher pay and other funding to help kids in need of extra support, noting that cramming too many things in one bill might violate the state constitution. Plus, there’s that school-wrecking elephant in the room.

“Even if there are some things that we would like to support, or could support, [we] just can’t do it because the voucher part of it’s going to be a systematic dismantling of the public school system in Arkansas,” she said.

The Advocate notes that in previous legislative sessions, a “coalition of Democrats and Republicans from mostly rural areas have blocked several voucher bills in committee,” and clearly that’s what McCullough is hoping can happen again if the vouchers are considered separately from the good stuff, like the pay increases. Arkansas currently has the fourth-lowest minimum teacher pay in the US, at just $36,000 per year, and raising it to Sanders’s proposed $50,000 would put the state in the top five in the nation. That would be pretty good, as long as the price isn’t getting rid of public education.

Also too, the Advocate notes that while Sanders didn’t mention it in her presser, her proposal would repeal the “Teacher Fair Dismissal Act,” which requires schools to notify teachers by May 1 each year whether their school districts plan to rehire them for the coming school year.

If teachers are dismissed, they are entitled to a written statement of the reasons why their contract is not being renewed, and they have an opportunity to appeal their termination to the school board.

Well dang, that sounds like it could slow the process of firing teachers because they were seen going into a movie theater showing Everything Everywhere All At Once or marching in a Pride parade two cities away.

[Arkansas Advocate / 40/29 News]

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Dear Shitferbrains: As Any Fool Knows, College Is Not For Encouraging Freethinking

It’s been a long darn while since I last did one of these Dear Shitferbrains things, in part because for much of the Trump administration the quality of our trolls declined sharply, but largely because I used to do those on Sundays until Rebecca made me take “weekends” seriously and I just got out of the habit.

I hope I can remember the format. Lessee … Copy-paste a really dumb wingnut comment, make fun of it, the end. OK, I can handle that!


Our study text today comes from one “Clarence,” who is probably neither an associate justice of the Supreme Court nor a bumbling angel trying to earn his wings by convincing Jimmy Stewart that he should go on living, if only so he can later star in Strategic Air Command with a lot of file footage of B-36 Peacemaker bombers. Clarence did not care for our article Wednesday in which we took the New York Times to task for treating Ron DeSantis’s war on education as if it were just one more bit of political “branding.”

Hey, Remember This? New York Times *Loves It* Some Goose-Stepping Dictator Ron DeSantis!

Clarence didn’t really seem to get the article at all, because he thought I was mocking Ron DeSantis, when in fact I was mocking the New York Times for treating DeSantis’s nigh-fascism as if he were simply marketing a new political flavor of the week. Why, Clarence even missed the chance to praise DeSantis for his success by exclaiming “Let’s go brandin’!”

That said, at least Clarence read my little author bio just enough to put me in my place:

It’s good to know you have PHD in rhetoric (aka bullshit and lying). That would explain this hit piece masquerading as reporting.

Well that hurt, even if he didn’t recognize that I was complaining about the Times puff piece masquerading as reporting. Clarence explained that clearly we dumb libs don’t understand what education is about, because we are hateful. Hang on. It’s a bit of a ride.

State funded schools (even “Institutes of Higher Learning”) are responsible to the State. This is esp true at the Elementary and High School level where the ostensible goal (unlike colleges where it is currently merely a bad joke) is NOT to ‘turn out freethinkers’ or ‘celebrate diversity’ or any of that BS. It’s to learn basic CIVICS and life skills not to be taught that any one Race has ‘inherent privilege’ and not to ‘critique’ Western Civilization or the United States or any of that. In fact, FEDERAL LAW and F EDERAL COURT cases and most State Constitutions require public institutions to be downright ‘colorblind’ when it comes to race, and allow no discrimination (‘positive’ or otherwise) when it comes to sex, disability and any other ‘protected class’. To the extent that ANY public funding went to any Institution that had ANY program that did not follow that dictate, then De Santis’s actions were not only necessary but they were morally and ethically laudible.

Here we must apologize for out headline, because honestly Clarence isn’t interested in college at all, even though that’s what both the Times article and my critique were about. The only things children should learn in elementary and high school are basic CIVICS and life skills — but perhaps CIVICS and life skills include getting along with one’s fellow citizens of other creeds and colors, and to know the history of why that is necessary, which might possibly include a ‘critique’ of things that aren’t now perfect or weren’t perfect in a past era?

No, that can’t be right.

Clarence goes on to explain that if you go teaching about American history in a way that discusses things that make Clarence feel bad, then bigot, bigot, Clarence isn’t the bigot, you are the bigot.

Also all education at the college level is a bad joke, this is just so obvious that it doesn’t need to be mentioned, and certainly not in the context of an article that was about college, mostly.

We ran Clarence’s assertions about F EDERAL COURT past Wonkette legal correspondent Liz Dye, who replied, and I quote: “hmmmm.”

Clarence did hang around a little longer yesterday; in reply to a Wonkette reader’s question about who even buys the Times anymore, since it’s hated by both the Left and the Right, Clarence offered this:

“Hard” lefties might hate the NYT, but soft lefties and any of the Trump Deranged downright love it.

I do think the vast majority of its subscriber base is aged hippies who still think the paper reports the news, or , at least “All The News That’s Fit To Print”

So that’s something: Clarence is no Trumper, although he sort of sounds like one in his commenting history at other sites; he griped about how Trump never had the chance to drain the swamp because for his entire time in office, Congress was controlled by the “uniparty,” so we guess Clarence is a true independent who sees no difference between Democrats and Republicans, even now. He also likes guns a lot and hates open borders, and wishes people would stop saying “gender” instead of “sex,” because the former doesn’t exist?

Update/Mea Big Gulpa: As astute commenters have pointed out, I misread our visitor. He is absolutely a Trumper, and “Trump Deranged” refers to all those lefties who have Trump Derangement Syndrome, because those people are crazy. Wonkette regrets the error.

Finally, in reply to a comment about the College Board’s revisions of the AP African American Studies course, Clarence had a LOT to say, which we will reproduce in full for its brilliant rantiness, which builds from one grievance to another like John Belushi (Crom rest his soul) doing one of his editorial replies on “Weekend Update.” When Clarence gets to the last sentence, you can nearly hear the thud as he flings himself off his chair:

Oh, Waaaaaah Waaaaaah Wahhhhhhhh. I bet you don’t say a Goddamn thing about “Academic Freedom” when it comes to Conservative Professors being fired or otherwise “canceled”. I haven’t seen a single Academic Leader (as opposed to the occasional professor ) who has had any balls in literally decades. They’ve caved on everything, (Hell, I’ve watched videos in which students bullied the Prefects and Directors and Presidents and whatever other Title around. The students TELL them what they are going to do, and give them no respect whatsoever.) which is why most colleges now have faculties that vote 90 to 99 percent plus Democratic, and Cancel Culture is a ‘thing’. And African American Studies or Black Studies or whatever you want to call it, just like “Gender Studies” aka feminism has been trash for decades, mostly concerned with turning out increasingly radical activists. Where do you think the 1619 project came from or the idea that “colorblindness” is just racism, or that “White People” and ONLY “White People” have ‘implicit bias’ , and other such BS? These programs are pretty much BEYOND critique on modern college campuses. So cry some more because of the ‘damage’ that DeSantis has done. Far as I’m concerned both the Higher Education system and the Public Education system in this country need to be burned down and rebuilt from the ground up as education, esp classical education is not their concern any more.

I sort of wanted to hear about all these conservative professors being fired, but that “or otherwise ‘canceled'” suggested he wouldn’t be too likely to deal with specifics. I also don’t know anything about “prefects” in American schools, and suspect he may be thinking of Hogwarts.

The end.

Hey, I’ve still got it!

And you filthy fuckaducks have got yourselves an OPEN THREAD.

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