Month: January 2022

A proposed bill allowing Oregon motorists to pump their own gas is stoking controversy among some state residents who say they aren’t sure they’re ready for that awesome responsibility.

Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers introduced legislation that would permit customers to operate pumps all by themselves, provided gas stations still maintained a number of full-service pumps manned by an employee.

Oregon, alongside New Jersey, is one of two states in the U.S. that still requires gas stations to have full-service pumps. It’s a feature of the state that many Oregonians find both convenient and character-defining. Their attachment to the status quo has successfully prevented all but the most marginal reforms to the Beaver State’s full-service mandate.

A pair of bills in 2015 and 2017 legalized self-service pumps in counties of 40,000 or fewer people, where drivers would occasionally end up stranded at rural gas stations that weren’t open 24 hours. The pandemic also saw the state temporarily allow self-service pumps as a COVID-19 mitigation measure, but this emergency freedom was permitted for only a few months.

A 2019 bill that would have allowed gas stations to let customers loose on up to a quarter of their pumps stalled in the state Legislature.

Undeterred, fuel nozzle freedom fighters are back with an even more radical proposal and a slicker marketing campaign to sell it.

Under lawmakers’ H.B. 4151, gas stations with two or three pumps could make one of them self-service. Larger stations with four to eight pumps would have to maintain a minimum of two attendee-manned pumps. Businesses with nine or more pumps could make up to 60 percent of them self-service.

“This legislation will provide relief for gas stations struggling to remain open during labor shortages, for station attendants racing to serve waiting customers, and for drivers stuck in line at the pump,” said bill sponsor Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis (R–Albany) to KOIN. “It’s a win for every Oregonian.”

To convince the public, proponents of the bill have also launched an “Oregonians for Choice at the Pump” website that enables people to email their state legislator a form letter supporting the bill.

“48 states in the U.S. allow drivers to pump their own gas. Isn’t it time Oregonians had a choice?” the website asks.

Standing athwart self-service gas pump reform shouting “help!” are some Oregonians who say the status quo is safer and easier for themselves, and fairer for gas station employees whose jobs could be at risk if pump deregulation passes.

When The Oregonian asked its Facebook followers, “Would you pump your own gas if you could?” the reaction from many commenters was swift and negative.

“No, don’t want to. Nor do I want to see people lose their job,” wrote one man in response. “This law is heartless and being pushed by greedy firms that want to fire people and make more cash off of you.” “Nope!!” wrote another woman. “I appreciate having someone who is employed and knows what they’re doing, do it for me.”

These attitudes weren’t universal, with some commenters saying that they’d gladly pump their own gas if it meant less time spent at the gas station. Whether that will be enough to get the self-service bill over the finish line remains to be seen.

Its passage would obviously benefit drivers who feel they’re up for filling up their own cars, and gas station owners who could redirect their employees to higher-value tasks.

That isn’t to say the end of the state’s mandate would be costless.

The perennial debate over self-service gas pumps in Oregon is a useful illustration of just how powerful people’s preference for a restrictive, ridiculous status quo over an innoxious bit of additional freedom can be.

Every day in the U.S., hundreds of millions of drivers may safely and effectively handle fuel nozzles without incident or complaint. The states that allow this have managed to avoid masses of out-of-work gas station attendants.

Despite having some 48 examples of self-service working out pretty smoothly, many Oregonians fret that things could go terribly wrong on attempt number 49. To overcome these fears, supporters of self-service gas stations must busy themselves writing compromise legislation and spinning up public relations campaigns about “choice at the pump.”

It’s easy to laugh at the learned helplessness of Oregon drivers. But, as economist Alex Tabarrok says, “we are all Oregonians in one form or another.”

That is to say, every jurisdiction in the U.S. imposes some unnecessary, irrational, or onerous restriction on freedom that its neighbors manage to do without—whether that’s a ban on unlicensed barbers or a requirement that restaurant patrons show proof of vaccination to eat inside.

Oregon reformers’ uphill battle to legalize self-service pumps gives people everywhere a chance to reflect on what petty or senseless regulations they too might be clinging to. Should that bill pass, the nanny stater inside each of us would have one opportunity for introspection.

The post Are Oregonians Ready To Pump Their Own Gas? appeared first on Reason.com.

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For those with moderately long political memories, and/or some built-in skepticism toward left-of-center depictions of political reality, the fall 2021 freakout over contentious school board meetings sounded an awful lot like the summer 2009 freakout over contentious congressional town hall meetings.

Both took place in the first year of a new Democratic administration replacing a Republican presidency that had soured at the finish line. Both were staged against a backdrop of sharp national crisis and upset. You had similar pundit assertions about the citizen pushback in question being rooted in either grassroots “white supremacy” (2009, 2021) or corporate overlord “astroturf” (2009, 2021); you had vastly inflated and journalistically repeated claims of violence (2009, 2021), heightened federal law enforcement alertness toward the potential dangers of domestic dissenters (2009, 2021), then a bit of an immediate tonal shift after a surprise GOP victory in a usually safe Democratic electoral contest (2010, 2021).

The size and scope of 2022’s “parental revolt” is a topic of increasing interest and dispute. “Covid School Closures Won’t Hurt Democrats in the Midterms, went one New Republic headline on this Rachel M. Cohen article this week. “The Democrats’ Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump,” counters Matt Taibbi, who has been doing some deep-dive reporting into the Virginia education controversies that impacted the surprise November election of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

The heightened parental interest in decision making at schools is already producing a wave of legislative proposals that could potentially curtail the use of controversial texts, as well as individual incidents like this week’s removal of Art Spiegelman’s classic Maus from the 8th-grade curriculum in McMinn County, Tennessee.

Time will tell who’s more right about the political impact of the parent revolt, or the wisdom of the policies it produces. In the meantime, thanks largely to the work of Ballotpedia, we can at least preliminarily measure both the unusually high activity of school board recall efforts, and also the comparative drop in the ocean they still represent in the administration of these special-purpose government entities. First, the spike:

So that’s 92 instances of people filing paperwork in 2021 to recall a combined 237 school board members in the 23 states that allow for recall efforts, smashing the previous post-2006 highs (as tracked by Ballotpedia) of 38 recall efforts targeting 91 board members in 2010. Seems like a lot, right? Well yes, and also no.

Fifty-four of those 92 initiatives never made it to a vote. Another seven were defeated; three led to resignations, and another seven (encompassing 22 school board members) led to nine no-votes, five resignations, and two defeats. Only one school board recall vote in 2021 led to a school board member being recalled—Lance McDaniel, one of seven members of the Montezuma-Cortez School District Board of Education in Colorado, who was bounced last February after constituents grew weary of the old hippie’s social media posts containing such pronouncements as “I’m antifa.”

To be sure, of the 92 filed school board recall actions of 2021, 22, covering 57 members, are either scheduled for this year or already underway. So 2022 could yet be the year to challenge 2010’s record of recalling 25 school board members. (All the counting numbers should be understood as approximate.) So where are these challenges, and what are the underlying issues?

Three states have around a dozen local school board members each facing a recall this year: COVID-hammered Michigan, the education battleground commonwealth of Virginia, and the safe Democratic state of California. Most spring from disputes over pandemic-related policies, with a sprinkling of personal behavior thrown in, plus concerns over critical race theory (CRT) in Loudoun County, Virginia, and Tustin, California.

The splashiest recall case by far is scheduled for February 15 in uber-progressive San Francisco, where three of the seven board members—Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga—face removal after having failed to open schools full time for more than a calendar year, a period during which the district made national headlines for voting to change the allegedly problematic names on 44 of its buildings.

Recall opponents are trying to take a page from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful defense against his own attempted voter removal last year—pin it all on conservative and possibly Trumpy opportunists, including shadowy Dark Money outsiders.

“When there’s this much money behind a special election, it’s worth looking at who’s behind it,” Collins told The Washington Post‘s David Weigel earlier this month. “I’ve never seen this type of energy and this much money involved in a special election. It’s an opportune moment for folks who want to privatize public education, because right now, teachers are really suffering. It’s an educational emergency right now.”

Added anti-recall organizer Brandee Marckmann: “It’s a moderate/conservative power grab….I can see why sleep-deprived people are really easy to co-opt into a parents ‘reopen’ movement. But it’s not just about keeping the schools open. These people are basically trying to take advantage of parents.”

False-consciousness arguments are always a political hard sell, particularly when one of the biggest supporters of the recall is none other than Democratic Mayor London Breed (“Sadly, our School Board’s priorities have often been severely misplaced,” Breed wrote on Facebook in November, adding: “It was clear from the start that this recall effort was a grassroots effort led by parents; that’s who got out there and collected the signatures. I am supporting the parents’ call for change”).

So far, unpredictable political things have happened in places where motivated parents no longer have even the ghost of former President Donald Trump to vote against anymore. And it’s worth remembering that the recall mechanism is one of the rarest electoral tools in the shed.

The normal stuff of school board elections, and noisy meetings, is where much of the action will continue to happen (in addition to competing state-level bills dealing with pandemic school response, CRT, and curriculum transparency). In November, fewer school board incumbents ran for reelection, a lower share of those incumbents won, and a higher share of candidates ran on an explicit anti-CRT platform, according to Ballotpedia.

We are talking about numbers in the low hundreds, in a country with an estimated 13,800 school boards. The normal stuff of boring civic life is undoubtedly still mostly normal and boring.

But pandemic K-12 policies in Democratic-run U.S. jurisdictions negatively impacted kids and families in searing, hard-to-forget ways that were largely out of step with the rest of the world. To the extent that Democrats and progressives try to dismiss these intensely held feelings among a subset of voters (many of them longtime Democrats) as either mistaken, manipulated, or manufactured, during a midterm election swinging reliably against the president’s party, is the extent to which they are going to be in for more unpleasant political surprises.

Meanwhile, as more previously apathetic taxpayers look under the hood of government-run schools, they are not going to like what they see, and will seek to make changes. It’s not hard to see how those efforts, too, may lead to some unwise school policies.

At this the end of National School Choice Week, it’s worth reflecting on one of that concept’s highest-order virtues: creating smaller-scale units of voluntary affinity, rather than relying on increasingly distrustful families, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers to hash out what works best in a one-size-fits-all system for students.

The post Will 2022 Be the Year of the School Board Recall? appeared first on Reason.com.

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“It is a fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their minor children.” That’s the opening line of Florida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, signed into law in June 2021. Similar bills have been proposed in Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, and even at the federal level.

“Our children do not belong to the government,” says Patti Sullivan, state coordinator for Parental Rights Florida, which has pushed for legislation of this sort since 2013.

“We do not co-parent with the government. And these entities seem to think that they are entitled to our children, and they are not,” says Sullivan.

State bans on the teaching of critical race theory (CRT), which have swept the nation, are a more aggressive attempt to limit the discretion that teachers and administrators have over what’s taught in school. They’ve been especially popular with voters.

Republican Glenn Youngkin ousted the heavily favored Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race after he campaigned against CRT in schools, and on his first day in office, he banned it from classrooms via executive order. Four other states have also banned CRT, and several more are considering similar bills.

However, opponents of CRT bans and more modest bills to force schools to post their curricula online say that “curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools,” as the American Civil Liberties Union recently tweeted.

Parents have never had the “right to shape their kids’ school curriculum,” authors of a recent Washington Post op-ed argued. If that’s what parents want, it says, they should opt out and “send their children to private or religious schools.”

But why should families who can afford private school be the only ones who have a say in how their children are taught?

“I’m pretty skeptical of the government deciding what should be taught in any type of school,” says Corey DeAngelis, national director of research for the American Federation for Children and a senior fellow at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website). He says public school parents should also have the right to choose the most fitting academic setting for their kids. The solution is to “fund students, not systems,” giving families the choice to spend education dollars on the schooling of their choosing instead of the one-size-fits-all approach offered by traditional public schools.

“[CRT] bills are just a form of whack-a-mole, where your CRT battles of today were the common core battles of yesterday, and it’ll be something else going forward because the reality is parents disagree about what kind of education they want their kids to have…And the better solution is the bottom-up accountability in allowing families to vote with their feet,” says DeAngelis.

This has become such a hot-button issue because the pandemic gave parents direct exposure to exactly what their children were and weren’t being taught.

“Parents are awake now that they have seen the curriculum,” says Tina Descovich, a former Brevard County, Florida, school board member and co-founder of Moms for Liberty. “They now understand school district policies, which they had never looked at before. They are understanding the structure, who holds authority, and what types of authority, within the education system. I think that’s vital, and it’s something that’s been lacking for a long time.”

In contrast to CRT bans, the Florida Parents’ Bill of Rights broadly affirms that parents have a right to know what schools are teaching and providing to their children.

One of the most controversial aspects of the bill is how it applies to medical and mental health services. It establishes that any medical services provided without parental consent can result in misdemeanor charges.

Sullivan says some parents are particularly concerned that schools are counseling their kids on their sexuality and gender identity without parental consent. The parents of one student in a Tallahassee public school sued after the staff held a meeting without their knowledge to discuss accommodating their 13-year-old’s shift to a nonbinary gender identity. They also noted in a file that the student’s “privacy when [staff are] speaking to parents” must be considered.

“School districts are not medical facilities. That’s a complicated issue. And there should be no reason why parents should not be aware of what’s going on with their children in any way, shape, or form,” says Sullivan.

It is a complicated issue. Where do the rights of parents end and the privacy rights of teenagers who want to confide in a trusted teacher or counselor begin? It was a topic hotly debated on the floor of the Florida Legislature during the passage of the bill, as representatives echoed the concerns of LGBT constituents who worry that the Parents’ Bill of Rights will force staff to disclose the sexuality of gay students who aren’t ready to come out to their parents.

There’s some dispute over whether the law does indeed require that, with LGBT group Equality Florida issuing a statement that “the bill does nothing to change current law related to disclosure of a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” while Sullivan says that it does.

“The law states that they must share all information with the parent,” says Sullivan. “I think that it’s very important that we maintain the fact that these parents are entrusting their children to these [government] entities, and they are not qualified or equipped to make those decisions [regarding sexuality and gender].”

DeAngelis maintains that the clash of values is best addressed through increased school choice.

“We force families into a one-size-fits-all, government-run school system, and these bills try to prohibit or encourage certain types of policies in that one-size-fits-all system,” says DeAngelis. “The only way to move forward with freedom rather than force is to allow the money to follow the child to wherever they want to get an education that aligns best with their parents’ values.”

The pandemic-related school closures have bolstered the school choice movement, with 22 states expanding, improving, or implementing new school choice programs in 2021.

Florida is already far ahead of most states in providing parents with school choice, but DeAngelis says it should go further by offering universal vouchers and education savings accounts, which would truly empower parents and children to opt for any school of their choosing.

“What better way to assert parental rights are important than to empower them directly by allowing the money to follow their child to wherever they get an education? Funding students directly truly empowers parents when it comes to their kid’s education. That is the best way to assert those rights,” says DeAngelis.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller; additional camera by Isaac Reese; graphics by Nodehaus

Photo credits: Karla Ann Cote/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Karla Ann Cote/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Max Herman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Kostas Lymperopoulos/Cal Sport Media/Newscom; Ken Cedeno/UPI/Newscom; Annette Holloway/Icon Sportswire DMJ/Annette Holloway/Icon Sportswire/Newscom; Photo by fauxels from Pexels; Video by RODNAE Productions from Pexels; Dirk Shadd/ZUMA Press/Newscom

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North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has declared this week “North Carolina School Choice Week” for the first time since he took office in 2017. National School Choice Week began in 2011 and is marked each year by advocates for families having more options for their kids’ K-12 education.

“The NC Association of Charter Schools requested this proclamation and we honored that request,” Jordan Monaghan, a spokesman for Cooper’s office, tells Reason. “Over the past two years, educators at all levels have responded to unprecedented challenges with grace, flexibility and determination.”

The proclamation has garnered mixed reactions from school choice advocates, given Cooper’s past rhetoric and actions regarding school choice in North Carolina. He has fought against the expansion of charter school enrollment in the state and opposed efforts to expand the state-funded Opportunity Scholarship program, which provides low-income students with vouchers of up to $4,200 to attend a select number of private schools.

In April 2021, Cooper and North Carolina Democrats opposed House Bill (H.B.) 32, which would have increased funding for the Opportunity Scholarship program. H.B. 32 would remove the $4,200 cap and instead tie scholarship amounts to the state’s per-pupil funding amount. When the state increases funding for public school students, funding for the Opportunity Scholarship program would also increase.

“I think [private school vouchers siphon] money away from our public schools. We only have so much to invest,” Cooper said in a 2020 interview with the Public School Forum of North Carolina. “I know this is something that has been a real project of Republican leadership. I felt better just eliminating the funding.”

“This year (2021-22 school year) there were 16,516 new applications for the opportunity scholarship program,” Brian Jodice, executive vice president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, tells Reason. That “ultimately ended up in 6,500 new scholarships.” Jodice explains, “That means some were not eligible for the scholarship (based on whatever criteria for the scholarship they didn’t meet).”

In 2021, Cooper vetoed H.B. 729, which would have made it easier for charter schools to directly hire teachers on a special type of permit, rather than having to go through their local school boards. The bill would have also made North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt, a Republican, a voting member on the North Carolina Charter School Advisory Board.

Now that Cooper has offered talk, school choice advocates in North Carolina want more action.

“The proclamation is a welcome addition,” Jodice says, “but it is counter to his priorities in the past.”

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