Because, of course, we've already had School Choice Week for years, brainwashing the public into despising the schools this society so depends upon, so I guess this is a "bigger" proclamation than past presidents'. Or a huge one. Or a Trump-penis-sized one. Or, well, pick your buzzword. Anyway, the president is thinking big, and that's how we get things done in this country, apparently, so long as we ignore all tangible reality in the process.
So I was stymied. How to best celebrate the week, after the fact, in the spirit of our new administration and in the spirit of the America that, apparently, we've had all along? And how to make this celebration stand out amongst all the other big, huge, tremendous, gargantuan executive actions we've been reveling in this past week, everything from deporting Muslims to sparring with news executives?
I thought big. I thought huge. I thought irrationally.
And here's my planned School Choice Week Agenda, to be submitted after the fact but, sadly, all too easy to enact any day of any year for the foreseeable future:
- Hold a bake sale in your school's cafeteria. Make sure all the money to pay for the baked goods comes out of your low-income students' pockets, and make sure it goes straight to your school's Bible Study Group. (If your school has no such group, create one quick before you get deported.)
- Give students homework vouchers. It's up to them and their parents to decide which assignments deserve their effort and attention (making saddles for dinosaurs in science class; grizzly bear patrol practice in Health; Legs-Crossing 101 in Sex Ed) and which don't (history lessons on Jim Crow laws and their permutations in the 21st century; reading anything with sexual issues in it in English class).
- Hold an informational meeting about the values of choice in America. And if anyone asks about the growing segregation of students that winds up being a byproduct of such movements, scream "Choice! Choice!" until they give up and leave. Then you win.
- Find the wealthiest, most competitive soccer mom in your neighborhood and make her PTA head. If she can't discern between federal and state law concerning student aid, praise her love of competition. If she thinks she's doing God's work by privatizing schools or that organizations trying to cure homosexuality need money, write an op ed about how awesome it is she wants to make schools cut each others' throats for students.
- Set your local public school on fire. Remind them that if they'd done periodic fire drills with an Adequate Exit Progress plan goal of 100 percent of all students out the door by 2020, they would have been fine, but since they didn't, tough titty.
- Write an op ed defending the role of the public school and its subordination to outside externalities wreaking their havoc on the population, thus making the job of public school teacher tougher and more necessary. Then roll up your op ed and smoke it. Seriously, no one gives a shit anyway. We have unlimited job protection and are "flush with cash," so we might as well start gathering apples to sell on the street.
By Tuesday, we'll most likely have an Education Secretary looking to make connections with the schools that she's heard of who serve 50 million children in this nation but has never actually worked with. Time for the show of solidarity so many on the right are calling for, particularly when they won and want you to fall in line. So let's get some t-shirts made, and let's make sure our Pledge of Allegiance voices are in top timber. It's the dawn of a brand new, glorious, hideous, unavoidable reckoning.
