School Choice in Wisconsin Survives Legal Challenge – for Now

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition
Issue #917
12/15/2023, 12/16/2023, 12/17/2023
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1) School Choice in Wisconsin Survives Legal Challenge – For Now
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We reported the good news yesterday that Pennsylvania became the 17th state to approve a major school choice measure this year.

Also yesterday, we received more encouraging news on the education front. By a vote of 4 to 3, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court declined to hear arguments in a case alleging the state’s more than two-decade-long school choice program violates the state’s constitution. That’s a preposterous claim by the public education blob coming now after Wisconsin has already graduated tens of thousands of kids – mostly minorities – who have materially benefited from the program.

Wisconsin pioneered school choice under former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson. He worked hand-in-glove with the late civil rights leader and “Mother of School Choice” Polly Williams, a Democrat legislator representing parts of Milwaukee, to empower parents to choose better schools for their kids. The plaintiff in the case claims that after all these years the public schools are hurt by the voucher program – when in fact the evidence shows just the opposite. Talk about turning back the clock!

The case was thrown back to the lower courts. Our worry is now that the seven-member Supreme Court has a 4-3 liberal majority, if the case comes back up, these new liberal justices may rule for the unions and against Wisconsin children.

Polly Williams: Is her legacy in danger in the Badger State?

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2) Million Dollar Yass Prize Awarded to Valiant Cross Academy of Montgomery, Alabama
Speaking of school choice heroes, Kudos to Jeff and Janine Yass and Jeanne Allen on another phenomenal Yass Prize ceremony this week, honoring and funding 10 of America’s most successful and innovative educators.

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The $1 million Yass Prize was awarded to Valiant Cross Academy, a trailblazing all-boys Christian school based in Montgomery, Alabama.

Founded by brothers Anthony and Fred Brock, Valiant Cross Academy follows a faith-based approach to student instruction while also focusing on workplace learning through a dual-enrollment partnership between three local universities.

Valiant Cross and the nine finalists, who each received $500,000, were selected for their alignment with the Yass Prize’s four core STOP principles: Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless education. The other finalists include:

“Tonight’s awardees exemplify the best of American endeavors in education – people and organizations that defy traditional roadblocks and stop at nothing to deliver highly personalized, pathbreaking education for kids,” said Jeanne Allen, who heads up the Yass Prize and related initiatives.

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Several of your Hotline editors attended the festivities. We came away inspired by the amazing alternative “choice” schools that are sprouting up all over the country on shoe-string budgets and headed by heroic educators/entrepreneurs. Most of them are black and Hispanic from low-income areas. Meeting these folks and seeing their joy and tenacity in educating the throw-away kids that the public school system spat out and gave up on gives up on. This gives us great hope for the future. But we also came away a bit depressed and angry.

Why can’t every child in America have access to a great education like these educators are providing?

Why do the politicians make this SO complicated?

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3) The Death of the New York Times
Back in June 2020, The New York Times editorial page published an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, recommending that troops be deployed to stop the BLM riots. James Bennett, the then editor of the editorial page was fired for printing the piece. He was done in because of a revolt among some 800 staff members at the Times, who were horrified that an opinion piece that they fervently disagreed with should ever see the light of day. But rest assured, it will never happen again.

The paper quickly issued a weaselly statement saying the op-ed “did not meet our standards.” Soon thereafter, the Times publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, asked Bennet to resign – which he did, reluctantly.

We read Bennet’s entire article, and as a service to our readers, here are some passages that jumped out at us:

The bias [at the Times] had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. . . . I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”. And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

Here's another one about the disdain with which the paper, and its publisher, had for the paper’s own conservative writers:

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics.

There’s a lot more in the article that will confirm the suspicions of everyone who's lamented the paper's hard-left ideology.

Among the many preposterous complaints by New York Times staff writers was that the Cotton article has “put them in danger.” As Bennett points out, actually it was Senator Cotton, not New York Times writers whose life was threatened when the article came out.

The grand irony of the entire controversy is that in hindsight, Senator Cotton was right to call for troops in some of these inner cities to help keep the protests peaceful and prevent the violent mobs, criminals, and hoodlums from ransacking and burning to the ground minority neighborhoods and small businesses.

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4) Chart of the Day – The Big Blue State Bailout
Almost all of the $2 trillion of Biden's “Economic Recovery Act” money has now been spent. We thought now would be a good time to remind readers where all the money went:

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5) Most Overrated and Most Underrated Political Figures of All Time

At the CTUP Christmas party this year we put this question to the team and board members:

Who are the most overrated and underrated politicians of all time?

We won't disclose who said what, but here were some of the picks that we can remember in our somewhat inebriated state:

Most Overrated
* Barack Obama (3 picks)
* FDR (2 picks)
* Alexander Hamilton
* Nikki Haley
* John McCain
* Mitt Romney
* Che Guevara
* Arnold Schwarzenegger

Most Underrated
* Calvin Coolidge (3 picks)*
* Pope John Paul II (2 picks)
* Donald Trump
* Bill Clinton
* Mark Sanford
* Steve Forbes
* Jimmy Carter (on regulation, it was specified, but there were groans)

* One of our board members is on the board of the Calvin Coolidge Foundation and we really believe that he should have recused himself from this vote!!

Want to participate? Reply to this email! We’d love to see your picks and later this week we will update this scorecard.

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6) Here’s a Reminder Why You Better Be Nice, Not Naughty

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