There Goes My Social Life

by Stacey Dash

  Doesn’t that sound amazing? When Lady Gaga launched the initiative, she talked about her own experience being bullied and how horrible it was for her. (Believe me, Gaga, I understand!) Soon companies like Office Depot partnered with this anti-bullying initiative, signs popped up in their stores, and “Born This Way” merchandise was created and sold on the aisles of America’s stores. The Back-to-School items targeted young kids and advertised Gaga’s organization to them.

  But the “anti-bullying” organization wasn’t really about bullying at all. On the organization’s blog, Obama was cited as an example of courage because he was “brave” enough to support gay marriage; another example of courage was a student who came out as a transgender; another example was Chaz Bono for the “courage” to undergo gender transformation. The winning “Born This Way” poster was an image of two guys kissing.

  Should gay people get beat up at school?

  Never.

  But celebrities like Lady Gaga use something that everyone can rally behind—anti-bullying—to camouflage a radically liberal agenda that does the opposite of what they claim. (And by the way, this “courage” word is used too much when it applies to people like Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner for undergoing plastic surgery and hormone treatment because they “accept themselves for who they are.” Does that make sense to anyone? If they accept themselves for who they are, why did they have to undergo such radical self-mutilation? It’s not “courageous” to have plastic surgery . . . and using that word in that way does a real disservice to people like our American soldiers who have shown true, selfless bravery.)

  Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation says it’s about “tolerance” and “acceptance,” but how accepting do you think it would be of a student who doesn’t approve of gay marriage or transgender surgery?

  Anti-bullying initiatives are very common in American schools, but parents should be wary of the liberal indoctrination that’s behind them. Additionally, parents should be aware of this very sad fact: they don’t work. Recently, a study of these anti-bullying programs revealed that students who attended schools that had anti-bullying programs were shockingly more likely to be bullying victims than students who attended schools without them.1

  Since 70 percent of high school students will deal with bullying at some point,2 parents need to think soberly about how to protect their children. However, submitting them to liberal indoctrination is not the answer.

  2. BIG GOVERNMENT = BAD SCHOOLS

  I went to school in three states, and I can tell you that the top-down, government-run education system is failing everywhere. It’d be nice to report that our political leaders took a step back and came up with some innovative solutions. Instead, they just push for more of the same big-government solutions. In 2015, President Obama got in front of the press once again to announce another federal program. The program, supposedly designed to help blacks, was an increase in preschool education. But several studies, including those released by his own administration, have shown no significant impacts in education from such programs. A report even gave the nation a D+ for our early education index.3 I may not have gone to college, but that doesn’t sound like a program that’s working very well. Yet Obama wants more of it. President Obama also says he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students—good goals—yet he opposes the school choice options that are already doing both of those things effectively.

  What Obama and the Democrats—and even some Republicans—don’t understand is that big government solutions are not the answer. No Child Left Behind is a recent big-government flop, because it forces teachers to prepare students to do well only on a specific standardized test, takes authority out of the hands of local leaders and parents, and taxes us more to do so. Race to the Top, President Obama’s $4.3 billion initiative, gave states a payoff for getting out from under the NCLB restrictions and suffered the same problems found in most Washington solutions. Throwing federal funds at the problem doesn’t provide an answer for a major reason for low student performance: the culture of poverty and the lack of opportunity inherent in that culture. Common Core was supposed to figure out what students should know and how to best measure student progress toward learning it. The result is yet another top-down, big-government program being forced on parents at the taxpayer’s expense.

  As education results have declined, big government has grown. Not surprising. The solutions we need are the ones that get government out of the way as much as possible so parents and local leaders can develop real solutions, the kind that produce real results in the real world for our kids.

  3. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

  In Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character spoke to his agent over the phone and said four words, over and over.

  Show me the money.

  But unless you’ve got a really strong stomach, you don’t want to look too closely at where the money in our educational system goes. States have spent more than double the amount on education per student since 1971,4 but national testing scores for seventeen-year-olds remain unchanged.5 No statistical difference between scores for students then and now.

  The United States spends more money per student than any other nation in the world, but it’s stuck in the middle on international test assessments.6

  More money isn’t going to fix our nation’s schools, and neither is screaming about racial discrimination. That’s why I say . . .

  4. STOP SCREAMING. START LEARNING.

  In 2013, the Obama administration Justice Department sued the State of Louisiana, claiming that its school voucher program was discriminatory.7 When Governor Bobby Jindal demanded that the federal government abandon its attack, I stood with him and called for the big-government bullies to back down. They understood the power of school choice, because “the program enable[d] around 8,000 Louisiana students from low-income families in school districts graded C, D or F to use public money to attend private schools.”8 I spoke up for those students, not because I’m against public schools, but because I know what it’s like to be stuck in a failing public education system. I know the difference it made for me when my family could finally afford to send me to a private school. Failing schools in Louisiana can improve over time, but these kids didn’t have time to wait.

  Here’s why: less educated men are finding it increasingly difficult to stay employed, with an unemployment rate 15 percent higher than for the highly educated9; less educated women are significantly more likely to have children outside of marriage than those who are highly educated.10 Not getting a good education perpetuates the breakdown of the family and continues the cycle of poverty, which traps so many in our nation today. In Home Economics, Nick Schulz connects the dots with this eye-opening statement: “While just 6 percent of children born to college-educated American mothers are born out of wedlock, the percentage for mothers with no more than a high school education is 44 percent.”11

  That’s staggering.

  5. EDUCATION NEEDS TO BE DE-STIGMATIZED FOR MINORITY COMMUNITIES

  We blacks have no shortage of opportunity today, but we have to want to learn. We have to want to improve. We have to want to get an education so we can make something better of ourselves and our families. When Frederick Douglass was asked by whites in 1865 what to do for the freed black man, he responded, “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! . . . All I ask is, give [the black man] a chance to stand on his own legs!” Freed slave Booker T. Washington, a founder of Tuskegee Institute and one of the most well-respected black leaders in the history of America, once said, “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” Of course, racial discrimination shouldn’t be permitted. But that’s not the problem facing most blacks when it comes to getting a quality education.

  Let me explain with a story.

  In the middle of tenth grade my mom moved us back
to the east coast, this time to New Jersey, where I went to Paramus High School. This public school had the same culture of violence, and—pretty soon—I was challenged to yet another fight. This time, I had to fight the biggest bully I’ve ever seen, a big white girl who terrorized the school. Why did she want to fight me?

  Because I talked like a white girl.

  “You do talk like a white girl,” my mom told me when she heard of the fight.

  This is a theme that keeps recurring throughout my whole life. I’ve been told, time and time again, that “because you’re black,” “you have to” do this, “you have to” do that. Now even my own mother was getting in on the act.

  “You sent me to the best school,” I said, “Because I took advantage of it, you’re criticizing me? How does using correct language have anything to do with the color of anyone’s skin?” Members of my own family said I didn’t think I was black. They called me Oreo. They said I didn’t like black people. Somehow, the fact that I wanted to learn made black people feel I was less black. It was hard to really get an education because I had to worry about who I had to fight at lunchtime. I looked at my mother in disbelief, but she didn’t even realize she’d said anything offensive.

  “What?” she asked, before flicking her ashes into a tray and blowing her smoke in my face. She didn’t get it. There was something about the fact that I loved school that made her question my very ethnicity. My own mom.

  But apparently, I’m not alone. Fox News commentator Jason L. Riley, editor at the Wall Street Journal, identifies a significant problem with this story from his own life:

  I was visiting my older sister shortly after I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”. . .

  I couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.12

  Jason, himself a black man, tells it like it is: “A big part of the problem is a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example. In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and sounding white by the time they are in second grade.”13

  These are the kids we need to reach. These are the kids who need to learn how to succeed. What good does it do to gain access to a better education if we don’t want to use it because we’re afraid of sounding “white”? Each of us must determine to make the most of the opportunities before us—no matter what anyone else may say to keep us down. We must stand and fight for the better and brighter future our children deserve. We don’t have to settle for the bondage of expectations handed down to us because of the color of our skin, even when the pressure comes from our own family. Just because your family didn’t respect the value of an education or dissed it as “sounding white” doesn’t mean you have to make the same mistake. In fact, it was my psychology teacher in high school who gave me some of the best advice ever: “You are not your family. You are who you choose to be.” I decided not to follow everything my family and friends told me I should be or do. I made my own choices when it came to learning and improving myself. And so can you.

  You may have been ridiculed for refusing to remain stupid and ignorant. You may have attended a failing school. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight for better options for your kids—if the Democrats will stop blocking your freedom to do so.

  UNLEASHING THE FREEDOM OF CHOICE

  Education is the great integrator. If we can empower everyone with a quality education, we can take our country back from the big-government bullies who prey on ignorance. People of all races who are disenfranchised are dependent on these bullies. By freeing them to learn, we can end this cycle of oppression and inequality.

  When it comes to educational equality, this nation is behind almost every other industrialized nation.14 This mires kids in an endless cycle of failure and poverty, even by fourth grade. By that point, African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students are already two years behind the grade level they’re supposed to be at. If they even reach the twelfth grade, they can expect to be four years behind.15 Poor-quality education leads to less education; less education dooms many young people to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Americans with doctoral degrees earn on average $1,623 per week with only a 2.2 percent unemployment rate. Americans who have attained nothing more than a high school diploma, however, earn a median income of $651 per week and suffer an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent.16

  How can all students get a fair shake? The same way we go about getting the best deal on anything—shop for it. By unleashing the freedom of choice in education, we can emancipate children of every race from failing schools. We love the power of choice in every other part of life, don’t we? Don’t like your cell coverage? Switch carriers. Don’t like the produce selection at your local grocery store? Go to the one next door. Find out your auto mechanic is ripping you off? There are plenty of other options out there. We have nearly unlimited choices everywhere else, so why not in education? Why should a parent be forced to send kids to a failing school when other options are out there—better public schools, charter schools, private schools, and innovative online learning and homeschool options?

  Across America, the idea of using vouchers to fund private school is catching on. In 2013, more than a quarter of a million students used school vouchers or tax-credit scholarships, and thirteen states created additional tax credits, scholarships, and vouchers for tuition.17 A 2013 report found that “the benefits provided by existing voucher programs are sometimes large, but are usually more modest in size. This is not surprising since the programs themselves are modest—curtailed by strict limits on the students they can serve, the resources they provide, and the freedom to innovate. Only a universal voucher program could deliver the kind of dramatic improvement our public schools so desperately need.”18 As more families are given the opportunity to use vouchers, the demand will only grow. And the evidence overwhelmingly supports them. School choice improves student outcomes, improves public schools, saves money for taxpayers, moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools, and improves civic values and practices.19 One out of every twenty kids in America is enrolled in one of the ever more popular charter schools. While that’s encouraging, many charter schools have waiting lists filled with families desperate to get their kids into better learning environments.

  Families must be free not only to choose the best schools, but also to demand the best teachers. But students stuck in bad schools—especially those from minority families in low-income areas—have to suffer as the teacher unions fight to protect bad teachers. In Chicago, a big-government mess if ever there was one, “only 28.5 percent of 11th graders met or exceeded expectations on that state’s standardized tests. [And yet,] Newsweek reported that only 0.1 percent of teachers were dismissed for performance-related reasons between 2005 and 2008.”20 That’s just one tenth of 1 percent of teachers who were replaced in a failing district. Can anyone justify these numbers? Only the teachers unions. They use their members’ mandatory dues—billions of dollars—to support political efforts. And 93 percent of those contributions go to—wait for it—the big-government Democrats.21

  When we take the freedom to choose from parents, we replace it with big-government control. When money is no longer connected to the parents who care most about a student’s p
rogress, we remove financial accountability from the equation. How different would schools be if parents were thought of as customers, and the child’s learning as the product? A lot of schools would be out of business, that’s for sure. Instead we have a monopoly where no one seems to care what parents think or whether or not kids are actually learning anything. Crazy! It’s like we’re still back in the 1860s and have to fight for our freedom to learn all over again. But it’s not 1865—or 1965 either.

  It’s time to stop acting like we’re still in bondage. It’s time for parents to throw off the bureaucratic chains and take back control of their children’s education. Proclaim your own emancipation from the big-government, top-down education system defended by Democrats and defined by poor planning, poor administration, poor teachers, poor academics, poor classrooms, and poor grades.

  It’s time to demand something better.

  SEVEN

  THE POWER OF FAMILY

  Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  I paced nervously outside the door of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Auditions were at four o’clock, which meant I had three minutes to prepare myself. After Cecil’s job required us to move to California, I had found a great ballet studio where I realized I loved dance. When we moved back to the East Coast, I had had to leave my wonderful California studio and start all over again. The Dance Theatre of Harlem was a very competitive school, but my training in California had prepared me well. I tried to calm myself down, but the clock told me it was time to go. Ready or not.