SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE: 

THESE AREN'T THE TEACHERS WE KNEW – FROM NATIONAL REVIEW:   The Chicago Teachers’ Union, which represents 25,000 teachers in the city, voted Tuesday to strike against in-person schooling and conduct remote instruction until the Omicron spike subsides.  The 600-member House of Delegates, the CTU’s governing body, decided to refuse to teach in the classroom until January 18 or until the virus infection rate hits below the threshold set last year. As pledged, Chicago Public Schools will cancel classes on Wednesday but keep schools open for students. Schools had resumed in-person learning Monday following the two-week winter break.  Last year’s school closure threshold is a test positivity rate of ten percent or higher that has increased for the previous seven consecutive days, each day at least one-fifth higher than the week before, according to the Chicago Sun Times.   It's time to tell these unions who owns the schools.  The unions are run from the hard left.  That's not where the parents are.  The best idea I've heard recently about education, although it is not new, is that funding should go with the student, not with the school or district.  If a parent isn't pleased with the school, that parent can pull his or her child out and enroll the child in another school.  The funding, which is paid for by taxes, would follow that student to the new school.   We used to have something called the G.I. Bill of Rights, established right after World War II, to provide tuition payments for those who had served, giving them a new start in life.  It worked very much on the same idea I just noted.  A former service member would choose a school, gain admission, and then direct the federal government to make payment directly to that school.  It worked superbly.  It should be tried among civilians today.
   

A SMALL VICTORY – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:  Facebook did an about-face after banning the account of Heroes of Liberty, a conservative children’s book publisher whose works include biographies of Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell and Amy Coney Barrett.  Andy Stone, spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, tweeted Monday that the decision last month to disable permanently the publisher’s account was a mistake.  “This should not have happened. It was an error and the ad account’s been restored,” Mr. Stone said.  His tweet came in response to a post from Fox senior political analyst Brit Hume, who called the ban “sickening.”  Mr. Hume and others rallied to Heroes of Liberty’s defense after editor and board member Bethany Mandel said that Facebook had shut down the newly launched publishing house’s advertising account over the “disruptive content” of its ads.  The company officially launched in November but had invested “considerable resources into building our brand on Facebook” beginning in July.  “When Facebook shut down our account, we lost all the data that we carefully gathered for the last six months,” Ms. Mandel said in a Monday tweet. “We can’t communicate with the audience that we built. Our ad account is permanently disabled. The consequences to our business could be devastating.”  Some on the left say that Facebook can do whatever it wishes because it's a private company.  Maybe so, but I wonder if anyone still uses the term "public trust."  There was a time when some publishers regarded their enterprises as public trusts, as well as private firms.  They had a sense of obligation and citizenship.  Haven't seen too much of that lately.

January 4, 2022