Free Lunch: Cooked in the Squat

THREE POINT EDUCATION IMPROVEMENT PLAN

Three decades ago, the prevailing thought, even after the experience of the Spanish Flu of 1918, was that, because of superior education, pandemics would be most lethal to developing nations, but, today, America leads the world in overall fatalities to a novel coronavirus, and account for 43% of the daily deaths that today exceed 6.5 million, exceeding the Holocaust in half the time. Yet, progressives have pointed to disparities in America and blamed poverty as the cause, which does not correlate with the world picture. It is at most a hypothesis that fails the empirical tests.

As one of only 13% of African American males with at least a baccalaureate, of the 50% who can say they went "to" college, and as a graduate of the most competitive private college in Virginia, I was one of the fortunate to whom pandemic came to every man, each according to his several abilities, while early on, by August 2020, it had become apparent at CDC, with some evolutionary pressure through litigation I commenced in July 2020, that, in a respiratory tract infection pandemic, there was still a need to retain a cartoonist to graphically illustrate the locations of the entrances to the upper respiratory tract (nose and mouth) to at least wear the nonmedical grade facial coverings properly, not even getting to the fact that they had been definitively determined to be wholly ineffective by NIOSH over a decade ago, using the same diagnostic equipment that is used to rate the N95, a finding revalidated by a hasty review of 172 more current, nonpeer reviewed observational tests, commissioned by the WHO, which concluded that 12 to 16 layer surgical cotton masks would probably not be effective against the novel coronavirus.

Yet, indicative of the achievement gap, had NIOSH required my approval a decade ago to fund a test to establish that one-ply cotton was not impervious to microbial penetration, I would have rejected that request, which, in litigation, has been now my best friend and strongest evidence.

Even the WHO, after a review of 55,924 laboratory confirmed cases in China in February 2020 had concluded what the CDC has only recently endorsed: fully educating the general public saves lives and unnecessary costs in pandemics.

Arlington Public Schools and other public schools have practically abandoned education, as evidenced by closed schools during the pandemic, declining proficiency scores dating before the pandemic and exasperated thereafter and directing an inappropriate focus on values training and critical race theory, while ignoring the fundamentals that are on the achievement tests: math and reading.

So, running in the 45th District of Virginia against Delegate Alphonso Lopez, I am proposing a three point get well plan on education:

1) Build that wall of separation between church and state to remove public schools from values training, which the Founders had established as in the domain and province of the separate religious sects and civic associations, and we are commencing litigation soon against Arlington Public Schools to enjoin their resistance to the modifications of the transgender student policy.

2) Internet and broadband access for rural and impoverished communities is only a part of a solution if you do not have access to an internet capable device, and VA8 enjoys the leverage as one of the largest beneficiaries of defense spending and defense contracts, while periodically, often driven by career enhancement objectives to obtain a good OER, DoD regularly discards older generation computer equipment to replace with the new, resources that can be provided, even if slightly used, to rural and other marginalized communities even at substantially reduced cost for equipment that otherwise would simply be discarded as trash.

3) Providing parents choice through vouchers, home schooling and public charter schools, the first and last of which are practically nonexistent in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

With the highest per student expenditure in the state, Arlington Public Schools is clear empirical evidence that simply tossing more money in a sink hole is not the solution. Nor, for teachers with a calling, is more competitive salaries the way to attract better teachers, as the numbers of persons who decide to be all that they can has demonstrated since the founding of the republic. I left a lucrative job in the financial industry to enlist in the army, making about $12,000, but, in a tradeoff, I got to do things I could never do making more money.

Does it work? I graduated from a college no child in Arlington can dream to get in. What do you have to lose?