Now in its second decade, National School Choice Week (observed January 23-29 this year) concentrates that movement’s steady, decades-long drumbeat into a few days of all-out advocacy. After two years of pandemic-related school closures, “remote learning,” and homeschooling from necessity rather than preference, this year’s National School Choice Week had its amplifiers turned to 11.

I’m all in favor of “school choice,” in terms of parents and students having the ability to choose the educational options they prefer, but it’s important to be realistic about who’s really making — and who’s entitled to make — which choices.

While the “school choice” movement pays lip service to homeschooling and other non-institutional options, it mainly emphasizes “public” charter schools and voucher or tax credit schemes for private schools. A perennial favorite  slogan in favor of those alternatives is “funding should follow students, not institutions.”

The problem with that slogan is simple: Where there’s funding, the funder calls the tune. That’s especially true when the funder is government.

The charter / voucher / tax credit line of thinking doesn’t give new choices to taxpayers who don’t have children to educate. They’re still expected to write those checks, with no say in how the money is spent.

It does give additional choices to parents with children. They can send the kids to government schools (whether “regular” public schools or charter schools), or they can receive financing for private school tuition.

That, in turn, gives private schools a choice to make: They can turn down the money, or they can become de facto government schools.

This isn’t a hypothetical. We’ve watched it happen in higher education for nearly 80 years now.

Since the inception of the GI Bill, Pell Grants, and government-guaranteed student loans, formerly “private” colleges and universities have increasingly found themselves required to implement government-mandated standards on everything from curricula to athletics to hiring practices if they want to accept the students who bring that money with them, or receive federal grants for things like research.

The result: Of about 4,500 colleges and universities in the US, a grand total of 18 remain truly private, refusing federal grants and declining to admit students who participate in federal student aid programs so that they retain full control of their admissions standards, curricula, etc.

The main practical (as opposed to philosophical) argument for “school choice” is that government-run schools fail to provide America’s children with quality educations.

How would turning the vast majority of private schools into clones of those government-run schools fix that problem?

The answer, as I tell my libertarian friends who mistakenly think of the charter / voucher / tax credit  approach as “a move in the right direction” is that it wouldn’t. As both a practical and philosophical matter (for those who want less government involvement in education, period), it’s a move in the WRONG direction. It may increase choice in superficial ways, but it reduces choice where choice really matters.

Real “school choice” for taxpayers, parents, and students, as opposed to government, can only be achieved through separation of school and state.

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

As the founder and leader of Oath Keepers,  an organization allegedly organized to defend the US Constitution,  Stewart Rhodes seems like the last guy one might expect to “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof” (18 U.S. Code § 2384 — Seditious Conspiracy).

Nonetheless, Stewart finds himself charged with doing exactly that in actions related to the 2021 Capitol Riot. And while he entered a “not guilty” plea in federal court on January 25, it seems pretty clear that the intent of the rioters in general and of the organized Oath Keepers presence among them was, in fact, to forcibly “prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of” Congress’s constitutionally mandated counting of electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election.

The devil, of course, is in the details. What did Rhodes actually do? Who did he do it with or for? What was his intent? The obvious counter-argument, from those who believe the election was stolen, is that Congress itself comprised the “seditious conspiracy” and that Rhodes and company were attempting to put down an insurrection against the “legitimate” government. That argument seems unlikely to take flight in the courts, but it’s going to be an interesting show.

My interest in the affair is more by way of noticing a massive contradiction between the US Constitution in general, and the seditious conspiracy statute in particular, on one hand, and the founding principles of the United States on the other.

Governments, the Declaration of Independence declares, “deriv[e] their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” and absent such consent for a particular government, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Which, as you may recall, America’s British colonists proceeded to do. By force.

But then came the Constitution: “Oh, we didn’t mean THIS government!”

The ink wasn’t dry on that document when George Washington led an army into Pennsylvania to suppress, among other things, the “setting [of] seditious poles” — liberty poles, the symbols of the very revolution which brought Washington to power.

The Constitution was, to put it bluntly, the American counter-revolution. Its purpose was to put the pre-revolution planter/merchant aristocracy back in charge, albeit without the King of England over them, to put the serfs back in their place, and to lay all that “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” guff to rest once and for all.

The dust-up between Congress and the Oath Keepers wasn’t about your rights or your freedom. It was about which tyrant’s hand would wield the scepter of power for another four years in service to a machine which assumes itself permanently entitled to rule you.

Fortunately, such assumptions of permanency are always wrong.

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

The UK’s Home Office, Rolling Stone reports, is ramping up for a new offensive against end-to-end encryption, starting with a $750,000 payment to advertising agency M&C Saatchi for a publicity campaign aimed at scaring the bejabbers out of parents.

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson said in 1775, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” These days, it tends more toward first resort than last refuge. Both the UK and US governments have leaned into that approach for years — “TERRORISTS use encryption! You don’t like TERRORISTS, do you?” — with little success in budging public opinion.

So, naturally, they’re moving to their true last refuge: “Child pornographers and child sex traffickers use encryption! You don’t like child pornographers and child sex traffickers, do you? End-to-end encryption must be stopped FOR THE CHILLLLLDRENNN!”

Yes, terrorists and child pornographers and child sex traffickers do presumably use encryption. They also presumably use cash. And cars. And locks on their front doors.  Just like you.

Government anti-encryption advocates hope you won’t notice that, like those other things, encryption is just a tool. Yes, it can be used to facilitate crime. It can also be used — in fact mostly IS used — to protect your private affairs from the prying eyes of criminals and governments alike.

Government anti-encryption advocates also hope you won’t notice that  criminals and other evil-doers will always have resort to strong encryption if they’re willing to make even minimal efforts to use it. That cat’s been out of the bag for more than 30 years, since Phil Zimmerman released PGP (the first widely used “public key” encryption application) in 1991. Game over, voyeurs.

End-to-end encryption — encryption built directly into apps and requiring little or no effort to invoke — brings the benefits of online privacy to everyday Internet users. The campaigns against it aren’t aimed at terrorists or child pornographers or child sex traffickers. They’re aimed at you.

The same governments which resist even minimal transparency when it comes to their own operations, declaring huge troves of information “classified” and threatening those who reveal it with lengthy prison sentences, want to peek into your private affairs at will.

Not because they think you’re a terrorist or child pornographer or child sex trafficker, but because they consider themselves entitled to run your life and can’t abide anything which might get between them and that entitlement.

If encryption should be forbidden, it should be forbidden to governments, not to the rest of us.

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

• “‘For the children’: last refuge of anti-encryption scoundrels,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Palm Beach, Florida Post, 01/28/22
• “Anti-encryption scoundrels,” by Thomas L. Knapp, The Philippine Star [web and print], 01/29/22