Don’t Socially Promote Vice President Harris’s Incompetent Education Agenda 

In a 2022 speech at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., Vice President Kamala Harris was trying to show some competency on the issues of mental health. As genuine as she tried to be, she demonstrated just how disconnected she was from normal families doing their best just to keep up with life made harder under her Administration. Her speech was panned for its vacuity. It was as if she were presenting an oral presentation in high school on the role of government in raising children and she had forgotten to study the night before. 

“You know, when we talk about our children — I know for this group, we all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community.  And in that way, we should all feel a direct sense of responsibility for their wellbeing.”

Nope. Our kids aren’t the community’s kids. And those comments are verbatim from the White House website. There is no need to make her look less capable than she has done innumerable times.

And as she races to replace a man she insisted was ready for the rigors of running the country up until a few months ago, voters are learning that her platform is as vapid as her candidacy; it’s a series of ill-advised and poorly constructed Potemkin Villages of progressive platitudes and government union talking points. As families want to know how education policy will fit into her campaign, they will unfortunately neither be inspired by what can be nor unburdened by what has been because there’s no there, there.

Harris’s rise in the San Francisco machine in the 2000s meant she didn’t have to have principles, but only be flexible for the policies that Bay Area big government types would impute upon her. As a prosecutor, she had very little interaction with California public education, especially as a District Attorney. It wasn’t until her campaign for Attorney General in 2002 where we see the California Federation of Teachers begin to contribute to her in lockstep with other government unions. Her version of being a hard-nose prosecutor was threatening parents of truant kids during her inauguration as AG in 2011. “We are putting parents on notice,” she announced. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

By the time that she was running to replace retiring Barbara Boxer in the United States Senate, she had burnished her leftist credentials by being soft on crime. As AG, she wrote the Orwellian “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” ballot title and summary for the disastrous Proposition 47 in 2014, which duped voters into watering-down criminal penalties and helped cause the catastrophic crime surge California is facing today. Harris also couldn’t have been a bigger proponent of California’s wrong-headed sanctuary state status protecting illegal immigrants over lawful citizens. 

Harris likely inherited much of her radical ideology from her father, Dr. Donald Harris, a professor of Marxism at Stanford University, and much of her early childhood was steeped in the effects of failed progressive policy that perpetuated a segregated society. Throughout her career, Harris has used her various bully pulpits to exacerbate racial division, rather than unite.

In looking at the last 4 years that she’s been Vice President, it’s impossible for the average voter to describe a singular policy initiative where Harris has demonstrated leadership or made a positive change in the country. In the realm of education policy, it’s no different.

It hasn’t taken much for her and President Joe Biden to be fully co-opted by the monolithic national teachers’ unions. At the unions’ behest, the Biden-Harris administration kept schools closed during the pandemic far longer than necessary and long after it was proven that children have statistically a zero percent chance of dying from COVID. The federal guidance kept children at home or in masks and accelerated the learning decline of poor and minority children who could not afford to escape to private schools. As such, many schools in California are nowhere near parity to their learning levels in 2020 and most K-12 students in Harris’s old stomping ground, Oakland, are functionally illiterate.

As Harris touts her hastily remodeled campaign for President over the next month, she’s hoping to pander to the same people she’s deprived of opportunity for the last two decades of her career. She opposes school choice and education savings accounts, despite the fact that her two step-children attended some of the most prestigious private schools in Los Angeles. 

Harris continues her anti-family escapade by supporting the separation of children earlier and more often from their parents through universal preschool programs, community schools or radical ideological curriculum. She didn’t raise a voice when her colleague in the Biden cabinet, Attorney General Merrick Garland, tasked the FBI with investigating parents who spoke out at the local school board meeting and labeling parents as “domestic terrorists.” 

Harris’ positions are almost a carbon copy of those held by the Center for American Progress (another misnomer). Her perfect score of 100 percent from the National Education Association is a major red flag. That’s why their daughter organization, the California Teachers Association, opposed the most reasonable bill of the year from a former teacher and Latina legislator, Asm. Blanca Rubio. Her bill, AB 2222, would have implemented the science of reading in the state’s public schools, but unions thought that the bill was, well, not the right approach. Harris was just as busy ignoring this important literacy debate as she was the border.

Just like her support of the United Teachers of Los Angeles strike in 2019, Harris is happy to oblige the machine squashing our children’s futures. No amount of happy talk will change her sorry record on education. 

Further, poor parents can’t see what can be because they are burdened with an inflated economy the Biden-Harris administration caused and Harris praises.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the current Administration’s student loan forgiveness program is unconstitutional, Harris persists in breaking the law. And not quietly. She boasts of forgiving six-figure college loans of some of her richest donors while asking blue collar workers – who were either prudent and didn’t go to college or simply didn’t have the means to get themselves into that debt in the first place – to cover those costs with higher tax rates. 

But this won’t be the only place where we’ve seen hard-earned American tax dollars thrown into a deep, dark virtue-signaling hole. Harris continues to raves about her yellow school buses — and when she put $5 billion into an electrification program across the country, and only 60 buses came out of that project. 

Harris’ vision for education is throwing tax dollars at failing programs without serious examination of what it will take to increase academic outcomes for our children. This is no different than the special interests who have ruined public education in California over the last generation. 

Future generations are at risk of being put on nonexistent buses to nowhere if Harris’ vision becomes reality. Let’s not socially promote her incompetent educational platform to the highest office in the land.