Teachers’ Unions Show Desperation in Nebraska

A fter several years of unprecedented wins for education freedom, the unions are desperate to hold on to their power. This year, school choice finally came to Nebraska for the first time with the passage of the Opportunity Scholarships Act. It’s no surprise that the government school monopoly is throwing everything at it.

Support Our Schools, a group that has already received over $1 million from the teachers’ unions this year, is carrying out a campaign of lies in Nebraska, and brave parents just revealed it. In a now-viral video, parent and activist Clarice Jackson takes on a teachers’ union president, Tim Royers, who is fighting against school choice, asking the visibly uncomfortable man, “Am I supposed to sit there and watch my daughter suffer . . . because you don’t agree with somebody giving my daughter an opportunity scholarship?”

He had no answers for her. Instead, as she had just revealed at a Thursday press conference, he and his fellow union leaders are lying to her and other parents to try to steal opportunity before it ever comes to Nebraska.

Thanks to brave parents and whistleblowers like Clarice, we know the reality. Their goal is to defeat a nonexistent version of the bill they have created from lies they share with voters.

The same union leader told local media that he was against school choice because some students “[don’t] necessarily have an adult in their life who could advocate for them and move them through a system.”

Opponents of educational freedom think they know better than parents what’s best for their own children.

After his condescending anti-parent remarks went viral on Twitter, he resorted to name-calling and reiterated that school choice couldn’t be supported because, seven years ago, he “had a student we could barely get to class because she lived with her single mom who had MS.”

That’s right. No parents can have a choice, apparently, because he found one family with a unique situation that might not choose. I wonder if Mr. Royers believes all government schools should be abolished just because they don’t all meet the needs of every single student? Should we all be assigned to government grocery stores because some parents might not make the best nutrition decisions? Of course not. But to Royers and others, only they know best and only they should be empowered to choose.

The misinformation that Support Our Schools (SOS) Nebraska is peddling goes far beyond questions of opinion. Their misinformation campaign goes beyond disagreement about the proper levels of funding for government schools or the appropriate role of taxpayer funding for students. The lies from petition-gatherers and SOS leadership are blatant and shameless and show exactly why they want to put the bill on the ballot — so they can lie on an even larger scale to voters. Their goal is to stop competition by using special-interest money to rip the opportunity away from some of the state’s neediest children.

For example, Clarice was out shopping when an SOS petitioner told her that the petition would give scholarships to low-income children, the exact opposite of its goal. Another Nebraskan was told that “a really rich person could apply for the scholarship,” again, exactly what the law’s income restrictions do not allow. SOS has told others that the bill is a “giveaway to the rich” and takes money from public-school funding, even though no such thing is the case.

The last lie is particularly rich considering the traditional schools received historic funding increases as part of the governor and legislature’s comprehensive education-reform efforts.

The reality is that voters support school choice, and it’s not even close. Super majorities of virtually every demographic indicate support of education freedom in multiple polls over the years. It’s no surprise that school-choice candidates overwhelmingly prevailed at the ballot box last election cycle, including in Nebraska, and it was great news when they advanced the will of their constituents and finally passed school choice in the Cornhusker State. What SOS Nebraska is framing as a voter-empowerment campaign should more properly be considered a mass fraud attempt — and treated as such.

This isn’t the first time the unions have mounted desperate last-minute attempts to steal opportunity. In West Virginia, they tried to leverage a union-endorsed judge to block the program after 3,000 students had already been approved. In Arizona, the “Save Our Schools” organization mounted a similar petition campaign. Both efforts failed. So, too, should the current campaign of lies in Nebraska.

Unions and their “bought and paid for” front groups will stop at nothing to trap kids in their failing government schools. But they can’t stop the school-choice wave; they can only hope to slow it down. The parental-rights revolution is here to stay.