Fighting for the Soul of Our Nation

Diane Ravitch published a great update on her blog yesterday, about Save Our School Arizona’s latest fight against universal vouchers and their urgent need for additional resources. Please read the post and then help support the effort by donating at, http://sosarizona.org/donate. If you live in Arizona and haven’t yet signed a petition, please go here to find out where you can do so tomorrow: https://teamsosarizona.com/signature-slam/

If you need any additional motivation, allow me to pass on the latest efforts of the voucher proponents I just heard about from my friend Tamar Rala Kreiswirth. Led by the Goldwater Institute and Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, pro-voucher protestors are heckling volunteers at petition signing events at libraries and business locations. They are also,

• Calling local businesses that have historically welcomed SOS AZ petition circulators;
• Emailing iloveschoolchoice@gmail.com to report signature gatherer locations;
• Taking a photo if a petition is left unattended as you must be present to witness each signature;
• Taking photos of the petitions to verify whether they have the dates correct, have been checked “volunteer” and have the county names written on the page.

They are relentless in their efforts to find any reason to challenge the petitions. If you want to learn more about the Goldwater Institute and American Federation for Children’s support of the effort, check out the respective websites they fund at DeclinetoSign.com and Power2Parents.org.

As Beth Lewis, the director of SOS AZ so astutely wrote to Diane Ravitch,

Universal voucher expansion is the KEY issue driving right-wing politics in the US, and hardly anyone is talking about the well-moneyed, dangerous forces driving it. The AZ legislature’s myopic focus on pushing private school voucher expansion over any other piece of legislation for the past 6 years is enough to tell us that — not to mention the massive focus FOX News has placed on vouchers since the bill’s passage here in Arizona. Recently, Christopher Rufo admitted he created the CRT furor in order to advance universal vouchers.

If you live in Arizona, support public district schools, and haven’t yet signed the voucher, DO IT NOW! We still have a voice and a vote in the USA, but we must act now before it is too late. Think we can’t lose our right to vote, our right to free speech, and our right to self-govern? Just look at the “pledge of allegiance” Diane Ravitch also posted about yesterday. A North Carolina charter school operator requires his students, faculty, and staff to recite at each of his schools every morning:

I pledge to be truthful in all my works, guarding against the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts, the temptation of vanity, the comfort of popular opinion and custom, the ease of equivocation and compromise, and from over-reliance on rational argument. I pledge to be obedient and loyal to those in authority, in my family, in my school, and in my community and country, so long as I shall live.

Read that pledge again and let it sink in. Don’t listen to experts and don’t rely on rational arguments. Just OBEY! Make no mistake, we are in the fight for the very soul of our nation and so far, at least at the state level, we are not winning. The fight is here, the time is now. We must be as relentless as our adversaries. Will you step up?