Project Veritas, Naughty Educators, and Choice

You've probably heard of Project Veritas, a right wing activist group that specializes in gotcha, often marked by deceptive and misleading editing aimed at making Democrats and liberals look bad. Apparently they've decided to get take aim at education for a bit, because they've released two pieces this week aimed at making some administrators look bad.

First we get an assistant principal in Connecticut revealing his anti-conservative, anti-Catholic hiring bias. And while Project Veritas is known for deceptive editing, it's hard to imagine a context in which any of the following is not problematic:

Boland dubbed Catholics “brainwashed.” When asked what Boland does when he finds out that a candidate is Catholic, he said, “You don’t hire them.”

Or, on the subject of slipping politics into the message

“Believe it or not, the open-minded, more progressive teachers are actually more savvy about delivering a Democratic message without really ever having to mention their politics,” Boland said. “They’ll never say, ‘Oh, this is a liberal or Democratic way of doing this.’ They just make that the norm.”

As I said, while this may have been twisted, I can't imagine a context in which either anti-Catholic hiring practices or selling your personal political beliefs as the norm are okay. Jeremy Boland is now on administrative leave while the district figures out what the heck to do with this. 

This, you may say, is why folks need school choice--so they can get away from this kind of public school misbehavior. But hold on just a minute-- because our second Project Veritas video comes from an administrator at Trinity School.

Trinity School is an uber-excellent private school in Manhattan. Niche rates it the #1 private high school in New York as well as the #1 Christian high school in New York. It has an impressive list of successful alumni (John McEnroe, Rudy Giulliani's daughter, Larry Hagman, the Ziff Davis heirs and, awesomely, a co-founder founder of Troma Studios). 

And they have a sneaky naughty administrator. She's on video saying she would never book a Republican guest speaker and complaining about white male students.

“Unfortunately, it’s the white boys who feel very entitled to express their opposite opinions and just push back,” Norris said. “There’s a huge contingent of them that are just horrible. And you’re like, ‘Are you always going to be horrible, or are you just going to be horrible right now?’ Don’t know.”

When asked if there was any saving Republican white guys, Norris responded: “I don’t know. I think they need to go. I think they’re really awful people. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of with my white students that are rich. I’m like — do you ever have to deal with this? They’re so protected by capitalism. It makes me sad.”

I can, in fact, imagine a context in which this would be less awful, but it's still not a good look. IOW, they may have made this look worse, but I can't imagine a world in which it doesn't look bad.

But beyond the cringe factor, this wrinkles up the whole school choice narrative. Because with school choice, everyone is supposed to enjoy the privilege of the rich, who can pick whatever school is the "best fit" for their kid. Except here is this elite, expensive school, and we're hearing (and not for the first time) that, beyond an extreme example like this one, such places can be plain old woke, biased, in the grip of political correctness, not right wing friendly, and not about to change to suit any kind of market forces, either. 

So what's a choice fan to do? Is the message here, "If you want a good education, you just have to suck it up about the other stuff?" Is it that private schools need to be regulated like public schools so that this kind of bias can be regulated into oblivion? Is that all that baloney about how public schools are a place of constant ideological battle that only school choice solve--that's actually not true?

There's only one kind of school that's allowed to chuck objectivity and balance out the window and advocate for whatever ideology it prefers, and it's not the public kind. 

I do not want to see an education system that discriminates on the basis or religious beliefs or political orientation, and we do not get there with unregulated, unaccountable school choice.