Sabrina Schaeffer (close relation*) has a thought-provoking article up on NRO today about republicanism, gender and how Michele Bachmann might represent an emerging modern republican motherhood.

What’s that? Here’s the gist, but its well-worth the full read:

“The Republican Mother’s life was dedicated to the service of civic virtue; she educated her sons for it; she condemned and corrected her husband’s lapses from it. . . . The theorists [of the early republic] created a mother who had a political purpose and argued that her domestic behavior had a direct political function in the republic.” . . .

The goals of modern republican mothers are broadly similar to those of the original ones: to foster a relationship between citizen and state in which the citizen is sovereign over government. But whereas the republican mother of our Founding era participated in politics only indirectly, the new republican mother plays a decidedly active role in our public life. Gender has been not overcome, but integrated. . .

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Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed an expansive new voucher law today. It’s a disaster for educational freedom. Read the full explanation here.

The voucher program has been widely praised as a momentous victory for school choice and Gov. Mitch Daniels on the brink of his long-awaited presidential campaign announcement. In reality, the voucher program is a tactical victory for highly constrained choice won at the price of a broad strategic defeat for educational freedom. This program will greatly expand state regulation of and authority over participating private schools.

In our efforts to expand educational choice across the country, we can’t lose sight of what makes that choice valuable; educational freedom and the diversity of choices it allows to develop. School choice is meaningless if all the choices are the same.

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South Carolina is one of the few states where school choice supporters have been working to pass a great education tax credit program that’s broad-based and well-structured (please excuse me if I sound like a cattle-breeder or wine-taster).

Senator Jim DeMint has been a real champion of choice for SC and the country, and he has a great new video promoting education tax credits (brought to you  by South Carolinians for Responsible Government, the guys in the trenches for good policy there).

The lead-in hits it perfectly; school choice is about self government, and public education means an educated public, not government-run schools.

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A few weeks back, I was preparing for a talk about school choice in Indiana.

Since I was going to talk about how big a burden K-12 education is for state and local governments, I thought I should try to get the most recent total spending figure. I say “try” because I know getting a good, recent, comprehensive total K-12 spending figure is not easy. Indiana is no special case in this regard; it’s a problem across the country.

But I was surprised by how officials at the Indiana Department of Education reacted to my simple request . . . usually government education officials aren’t so obvious about their obfuscation. They referred by request to their legal department. I was asked to explain who I was, what organization I was with, and how I would use the information before they would approve the release of what should be very public information.

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School Choice Week is here, and there are a lot of people trying to spread the good word about the benefits of increasing educational freedom.

But what benefit of choice is best to focus on?

You can make at most a few points in an oped or on talk radio. On TV, and even in print reporting, you’re lucky to get one point across. And with friends and family, and even politicians, you need to keep the focus where it will do the most good.

So, should you focus on how horrible inner-city schools are, how many lives are destroyed in a failing government system? Maybe. Depends on the person, certainly.

But the evidence suggests that the best message overall is one that focuses on the financial benefits of school choice (and this is even before the financial crisis). People think about vouchers and education tax credits differently. And be careful trying to pull at Democratic heart-strings with arguments that choice will increase educational equity for poor kids . . . there’s evidence that it backfires!

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I have to say, I never thought I’d read a blogger on NRO endorse the notion that all of the money you earn belongs to the state. I certainly never thought that read it twice in a year. But here we are, again . . . and I feel compelled to engage in an excruciating debate with Robert VerBruggen of Phi Beta Con.

Question: Is there any substantive difference between the government cutting you a check and cutting your taxes?

VerBruggen agrees with the Progressives on the Supreme Court I wrote about recently: Nope, all your money is the government’s!

But his odd insistence that government checks and tax cuts are the same began months ago, when he expounded more extensively if not coherently on this same subject.

I attempted to illustrate where he had gone wrong in his thinking by taking his positions to an extreme. To my surprise, VerBruggen agreed with my modest proposal to eliminate all charitable tax deductions and credits and capitulate comprehensively to the welfare state

More specifically: “The feds should eliminate the charitable tax deduction and send out the average (tax-forgiven) amount donated per adult to every citizen in the country to donate as they wish!”

VerBruggen supports a “charity entitlement” over charitable tax deductions. He favors a “social security” model for “kind of a ‘forced charity’” over tax deductions.

I’m not sure if he’s thought his rather radical and odd argument through to the end point.

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments in an appeal of a 9th Circuit decision, Winn v Garriott, a challenge to one of Arizona’s education tax credit programs. It’s been getting more press than I’d expected, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today. That’s great news, because the case is far more important than just saving a program that improves education and expands educational freedom.

The 9th Circuit’s reasoning arrogates to the state all property , dissolving the distinction between public and private funds as well as public and private choices. It is a disturbing, dangerous decision.

They assert that tax cuts are the equivalent of government funds, a conclusion possible only if one assumes that all personal income belongs by default to the state rather than to the individual who earned the money. It asserts as well that when taxpayers and parents privately choose to support religious educational organizations, they are in violation of the First Amendment. This reasoning blatantly ignores the logic and plain meaning of the 2002 Zelman decision upholding school vouchers, among others.

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It’s fascinating to read Progressives as they think through a difficult policy problem. Kevin Drum writes (at Mother Jones!) that we can’t improve education or mitigate poverty:

“I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers. . . You can go down the list of every ed reform ever touted, and they either can’t scale up, turn out to have ambiguous results when proper studies are done, or simply wash out over time. . .

So is the answer to address concentrated poverty? Sure. Except that, if anything, attempts to address poverty have a worse track record than attempts to improve education.

I would really, really like someone to tell me I’m wrong. So far, though, no one has. At least, not to my satisfaction. But I’m willing to be schooled if anyone thinks I’m missing the big picture here.”

Wow, Progressives really are depressed this year. Ezra Klein mostly agrees, Matt Yglesias and Kevin Carey seem more optimistic. But I doubt any of them have compelling answers to Drum’s concerns.

So Kevin, Ezra, I’m here to tell you . . . you’re wrong. Let me rephrase that. You are right that all your Progressive solutions to these problems are perpetual and necessary failures. But there is a solution.

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President Obama still gets overwhelming support from black, largely Democratic voters. His support hovers around 90 percent despite the economy and high unemployment.

But a new poll out hints that Obama might have lost black voters on policy . . . Obama’s position on education vouchers and merit pay for teachers has no significant impact on black opinion.

Question-experiments in the yearly Education Next/Harvard poll allow us to compare support and opposition to various education reforms when respondents are just asked in the standard way to their levels of support when they are told what President Obama thinks about the issue.

In 2009, informing respondents that Obama supports merit pay for teachers increased the margin of black support for the policy by 30 points. Obama’s opposition to vouchers dampened the margin of black support for them by 26 points. But this year, mentioning that Obama supports merit pay actually decreases the black margin of support by a couple of points and Obama’s opposition to vouchers increases the margin of black support by a few points.

In other words, even core supporters don’t seem to trust President Obama on policy.

The intersection of race and politics is a complicated place; a jumble of socio-economic, ideological, and Party differences. Black Americans are predominantly Democratic, are more liberal than the general population on many issues (although more conservative on some), and on average have lower incomes. All of these characteristics have a major impact on an individual’s political opinions, and they are highly correlated with race in America. What this confluence of correlations translates into is overwhelming support for Democratic Presidents in general and President Obama in particular; 88 percent approval compared to 54 percent from Hispanics and 38 percent from whites.

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