“Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me,” Missouri congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver said in an 1899 speech: “I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”

Note to Missouri governor Mike Parson: You’re getting this “Show-Me State” business all wrong.

Parson tried to charge Elad Gross, a  candidate for state attorney general,  $3,618 for documents Gross requested under the state’s Sunshine Law, claiming more than 90 hours of required “research and processing” at $40 per hour. The “processing” involved having attorneys redact information from the requested documents. The state’s Supreme Court ruled against Parson last June.

In the meantime, the state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, claimed that he couldn’t investigate alleged violations of the Sunshine Law by the governor’s office because that office (rather than, say, the people of Missouri) is his “client.”

Now Parson’s asking the state legislature to amend the Sunshine Law so that he can keep more government documents secret and charge more for handing over such information as it might happen to please him to show.

It’s not just Missouri. Politicians and bureaucrats at every level of American government love keeping secrets from the media and from the mere serfs they claim to work for. They “classify” information, try to hide that information behind novel claims of “executive” or “attorney-client” privilege, or just jack up Sunshine Law fees so that the average taxpayer can’t afford to find out what his supposed employees are up to.

Those first two methods of thwarting transparency probably have to be dealt with in court on a case-by-case basis, but there’s an easy solution to the third.

How many billions of dollars has government spent putting a computer in every cubicle and building Internet-connected data centers complete with public-facing web sites?

Missouri’s legislature, and the legislatures of other states, SHOULD amend the Sunshine Laws — and the amendments should require all government documents and recordings of all government meetings to be posted in a timely manner to public-facing web sites with robust search functionality.

If a government employee, office, or department wants an exception for a particular document or recording, that document or recording should be posted to a closed database/site for review, within ten days, by a court. Or, better yet, by a randomly selected panel of registered voters, with a unanimous vote required to approve keeping the document or recording from public view.

Government transparency should be the rule, not the expensive exception.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “Missouri Governor Mike Parson Tries to Stick it Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 01/11/22
• “Missouri Governor Mike Parson Tries To Stick It Where The Sun Don’t Shine,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 01/12/22
• “Missouri Governor Mike Parson Tries to Stick it Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 01/13/22
• “Lawmakers should protect the right to information, not protect secrets,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Joplin, Missouri Globe [web and print], 01/15/22
• “Missouri Governor Mike Parson Tries to Stick it Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Wahpeton, North Dakota Daily News, 01/17/22

In mid-2020, I mused that if the COVID-19 pandemic ended up producing any silver linings, the most likely  bright spot would be its impact on government — so-called “public” — education. Throughout the previous spring, government schools had largely shut down in-person classes, switching to ad hoc and, it seems,  fairly lame, “remote learning.”

Some besieged, bedraggled parents held out hope for an autumn return to the previous normalcy. Others looked at the “remote learning” setup and decided they (perhaps in cooperation with other parents) could do a better job themselves — if not permanently, at least until the emergency was over.

By the fall 2020 semester, according to the US Census, the percentage of homeschooling households in America had doubled, from 5.4% of households to 11.1%.

That may have been just the beginning of a long-term trend.

Parents choose government schooling versus homeschooling or vice versa for many reasons, not all of them related to the overall better academic achievement (15-30% better performance on standardized tests, for example) homeschooling boasts.

One BIG reason is financial. In an age when nearly every parent works (regardless of whether the family is single- or multi-parent), homeschooling can mean significant loss of income. At least one parent has to be home to teach, rather than on an outside job.

The value proposition government schooling offers is: “Sure, we do a fairly crappy job of teaching your kids to read, write, and do arithmetic … but hey, who turns down free daycare?”

The pandemic threw a wrench into that value proposition. Suddenly, the kids weren’t disappearing on a yellow bus each morning, leaving Mom and/or Dad available to work a shift and earn a paycheck.

With “remote learning,” many parents had to either quit jobs or invest significant portions of their income in daycare. Some of them decided to turn “remote learning” lemons into homeschooling lemonade.

Others muddled through as best they could, waiting for that return to normalcy (or homeschooled in the interim with plans to send their kids back to government schools when possible). Because, after all, emergencies don’t last forever, right?

Now it’s January of 2022 and another problem with that financial equation, and with the government school value proposition, is rearing its ugly head: Reliability.

Parents who made the best of a bad situation while holding out hope that the government schools would get their act together Real Soon Now find themselves caught in a new cycle of alternating expectation and disappointment as we come up on “700 days to slow the spread.”

Will the government schools be in session this week? How about next week? And the week after that? Who knows?

Those parents can’t assure current or prospective employers that they’ll be available to work next week, or the week after, or the week after that.

They’re caught in the same “quit my job or fork over for daycare” trap they’ve spent the last two years in, with the added irritant of nearly daily uncertainty.

And many more of them are almost certainly eyeing the homeschooling exits.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “COVID-19 and the End of Government Schooling’s Main Value Proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 01/08/22
• “COVID-19 and the end of government schooling’s main value proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 01/11/22
• “COVID-19 and the end of public schooling’s main value proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Elko, Nevada Daily, 01/11/22
• “COVID-19 And The End Of Government Schooling’s Main Value Proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 01/12/22
• “COVID-19 and the End of Government Schooling’s Main Value Proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Roundup, Montana Record Tribune & Winnett Times, 01/12/22
• “COVID-19 and the end of government schooling’s main value proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Newton, Iowa Daily News, 01/15/22
• “COVID-19 and the End of Government Schooling’s Main Value Proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Columbia, South Carolina Panorama [web and print], 01/15/22
• “COVID-19 and the end of government schooling’s main value proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Wahpeton, North Dakota Daily News, 01/19/22
• “COVID-19 and the end of government schooling’s main-value proposition,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, 01/25/22

As “the city that never sleeps” turned the calendar to 2022 with the inauguration of Eric Adams just after midnight, partygoers didn’t need Frank Sinatra’s reminder to “start spreading the news” heard on the New Year’s broadcast from Times Square. New Yorkers were well aware, as Brooklyn’s Chris Matthew Sciabarra put it, that “the best news about the next mayor is that it won’t be Bill de Blasio.”

Few would vouch that de Blasio’s administration had lived up to Eric Alterman’s first-year hopes that the post-Bloomberg mayor would “use the power of the city government to make New York a fairer and more equal place for all its inhabitants.”

Was the relentlessness of inequality since 2014, even well before the unexpected effects of COVID, merely due to de Blasio being the wrong choice to steer “the power of the city government,” or disgraced governor and sometime de Blasio foe Andrew Cuomo likewise mishandling state government, not the nature of government power itself?

Elections don’t offer control over policies that persist no matter who is in office.  Concentrated political power, rather than being a counterbalance to economic consolidation, is more likely to promote and ossify the latter far beyond market levels. Columbia University alumnus Thomas E. Woods warned Americans that “no matter whom you vote for [president], you always wind up getting John McCain.” New Yorkers always wind up getting Rudy Giuliani.

It’s not too late to revive the plan offered by Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin in 1969, whose mayoral campaign literature told New Yorkers that they “want neighborhoods to govern themselves.” Since “politicians have ridden this city right into the ground,” they asked for decision-making to be transferred away from them to local communities who could have “power over their schools, police, sanitation, housing, parks and life styles.”

Citywide impositions of uniform policies on issues from standardized testing to indoor smoking inevitably makes them politically contentious. Decentralization would unleash the ability of voluntary groups to coordinate cooperative activities, the potential for which has expanded far beyond what was possible eight years ago, let alone 53. And it’s not too late for New York City to “be a part of it.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 7, 2022
2. “A New Year One For Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, January 12, 2022
3. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Ledger, January 12, 2022
4. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Forest Hills/Rego Park [New York] Times, January 12, 2022
5. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Leader/Observer [New York City], January 12, 2022
6. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, The Long Island City/Astoria [New York] Journal, January 12, 2022
7. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Examiner, January 12, 2022
8. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Greenpoint [New York] Star, January 12, 2022
9. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Brooklyn [New York] Downtown Star, January 12, 2022
10. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, January 13, 2022