Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist and The Epoch Times’ Editor at Large Roger Simon in-studio to comment upon Tennessee ACLU’s request for open records of Bill Lee and his goal to bring Barney Charter Schools to three counties in Tennessee.
Leahy: In-studio with us is our very good friend, all-star panelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter –
Simon: I’m a little embarrassed by that point.
Leahy: Why are you so embarrassed?
Simon: Hollywood is so awful that having any association with it is kind of not exactly what it used to be.
Leahy: Good point. Of course, I think you know who probably might agree with you is Sam Elliott. Did you see that?
Simon: I saw it. He was on it. They don’t make Westerns like they used to.
Leahy: But have you watched the Yellowstone series?
Simon: No, I haven’t.
Leahy: I haven’t either. It’s been given great reviews.
Simon: Yes. I wonder if it’s like John Ford. Why am I skeptical?
Leahy: A lot of people have reviewed it well. I watched a little bit of it. It just seemed contrived to me and for dramatic effect as opposed to historical accuracy. But it’s a fictional series.
I want to talk to you about this: This is something where you have some very personal knowledge, and it’s an interesting story. It’s our top story at The Tennessee Star. And the headline is: ACLU Requests Tennessee Records on Announced Charter School Partnership with Hillsdale College.
Now, Hillsdale College, of course, is a great institution, one of the few really great institutions of higher education left in the United States.
Simon: Absolutely. I’ve been doing some things that I’ll announce later on this show and elsewhere, a lot of research on higher education in this country. And Hillsdale may be the Harvard of our time.
Leahy: I think so.
Simon: As a Harvard grad, I know.
Leahy:Â I completely agree with you.
Simon: It is. And you know what else it does? It offers free education online on such things as the U.S. Constitution to anybody. And I’ve actually taken a couple of these courses.
Leahy: And they’re very good.
Simon: They’re excellent. They are provided by terrific professors. And the fact that the ACLU is on a fishing expedition against Hillsdale College is a sign of the decline of the ACLU.
Leahy: Let me just say I agree with you completely that they are on a fishing expedition. However, I will say this. I think there’s nothing wrong with having every communication between Bill Lee and Hillsdale College about this charter school partnership made available to the public. I think that’s totally fine.
Simon: No, I would agree with that. But the ACLU, to which I used to be a donor back in the 1980s and ’90s –
Leahy: Before you saw the light.
Simon: Before I saw the light. Well, no, but I didn’t change that much. They did. And it used to be a great defender of civil liberties. Now, actually, the idea that they’ve chosen Hillsdale, even though what you’re saying is entirely true, I’m for transparency on all kinds of public interactions, whether it’s Bill Lee with Hillsdale or anything else. But why they’ve chosen them is very interesting.
Leahy: Yes. It seems to me like a stupid fight to pick.
Simon: Yes.
Leahy: But okay. So let’s see what their complaint is. Heidi Weinberg, the executive director of ACLU of Tennessee. Far-lefty. Far-lefty that’s been here doing her far-lefty thing for decades. Here’s what she said about this. She’s already made a conclusion about this, and it’s a wrong conclusion.
But here it is. ‘Outsourcing the operation of our public schools to a private out-of-state religious college is not in the best interest of Tennessee’s children and is deeply concerning. Governor Lee’s plan raises serious constitutional concerns, (Simon laughs) and the public deserves full transparency.
Simon: The most constitutional of all schools, and also very secular at this point. There’s not a lot of religious stuff going on.
Leahy: They were founded in the 1850s by Methodists but it’s a secular constitutional institution, which is, that’s the real problem they have with it. It’s constitutional.
Simon: It’s constitutional. The ACLU of all people is going after a Constitution.
Leahy: And to be clear, this partnership is very very modest. And all Governor Lee says is, hey, it’s the Barney. That’s the name of the last name of the donor. It’s the Barney Charter School initiative.
And they’ve got, I think, like 30 schools around the country. Figure out 30 times, let’s say, if there were even 1,000 kids from school, just 30,000 kids out of like millions in the country.
Simon: On the other hand, I think Hillsdale is making an effort to do things that almost no one else is.
Leahy: Oh, I agree. Just to elaborate on this. All this is, as Governor Lee said to Hillsdale, I like what you’re doing with the Barney Charter Schools. Why don’t you come into Tennessee and go through the process, that the law set up for the establishment of charter schools?
And they’re doing it, I think, in Rutherford County and two other counties, that’s it. Three charter school applications that are going through the process.
Simon: And it’s very hard to do. You actually set things up like that. The other thing the ACLU ought to look at is public education in the United States is abominable.
That’s not an exceptional word. It is abominable. I believe it’s, other than Switzerland, we spend more per student in this country than any country in the world.
Leahy: And our return on investment is terrible.
Simon: It’s atrocious.
Leahy: And you know why? Because the schools have been taken over by the left-wing unions and the elite educrats. The schools actually are no longer there for the purpose of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to your kids.
Simon: No. They give you a Doctorate of Wokeology.
Leahy: And to promote the financial interest of the teachers’ unions and the school administrators. Just a note on teaching. Public school teachers in Tennessee make far less than public school teachers.
For instance, the independent school districts in the Dallas, Texas, area, they pay pretty well, and they do attract better quality teachers. They’re also stuck in this horrible K-12 public school institution where it’s all captive of the educrats and the teachers’ unions.
Simon: It’s a reactionary force in our country. They think they’re liberals or progressives but they’re reactionaries. They’re old-fashioned nitwits.
Leahy: Not only that, if you look at the evidence of the ability of kids to read, write, do arithmetic, and reason, it is a plummet downhill.
Every year it’s been going down, down, down as the union power and the education bureaucracy and the educrats get more and more power. It’s a debacle.
Simon: And you know what the interesting thing about education is? Money has nothing to do with it. Really. The more money you throw into education doesn’t help at all.
I mean, Abe Lincoln was in a one-room schoolhouse yet he wrote the Gettysburg Address. Do you think anybody coming out of our schools now could write anything?
Leahy: I think some kids might, but it is very few. Well, I will tell you honestly, the ability to write a basic sentence, to write an essay, is virtually nonexistent among high school graduates.
Simon: I’m now in my ’70s. I have written many books. My great aunt, when I was about 6, taught me how to diagram a sentence. They don’t know what that is, even.
Leahy: Let’s talk about diagramming sentences. Way back when, you are precocious compared to me because you learned how to diagram.
Simon: I had a nice great aunt.
Leahy: I know, when you were 6 years old, but diagramming sentences is something that I learned in a little small school in upstate New York. Stockbridge Valley Central School, in 8th grade.
Simon: Think they teach it now?
Leahy: Well, I’ll find out. I’m going up there to give away a scholarship in memory of my recently deceased best friend in June. But I’ll find out.
Listen to the full interview here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
