Legitimate Parent Advocacy vs. Conspiratorial Movements

Photo Credit: Nik

 

As much as the work we do at KPS4Parents focuses on social justice issues that include parents' legal rights in the special education process and related areas of public agency regulation, I've been hesitant until now to say anything about what has been charading as a parents' advocacy movement, lately. This is mainly because of the most recent developments involving the leadership of one such faux parent advocacy organization, Moms for Liberty, which pretty much speak for themselves and eliminate the need for me to work that hard at supporting my arguments with evidence.

 

I'm busy. I don't have time for deep dives into the world of politics when I'm already doing deep dives into the peer-reviewed research and case law during the regular school year. I see every bit of stupidity and ineptitude in local government as we see in Congress on the daily. Idiot politicians are the reason why lay advocates and civil rights attorneys are needed in a democracy. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, "In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards." It's not like any of this is new.

 

I've got over 20 students on my lay advocacy caseload, at least two of those cases are going to due process, several of those cases have outstanding remedies due to them from a federal investigation of their local school district that have not yet been negotiated, and others are requiring me to work with families at the local agency level to hopefully resolve their concerns, all the while also making the record just in case formal complaints or litigation become unavoidable. I'm not going to stop all of that to write a blog post/podcast episode unless the moment is right, and it's now right.

 

I'm won't rehash the Moms for Liberty scandal, here. You can read up on that on your own time, if you don't already know about it. What I'm focusing on here are the social and psychological sciences as they interact with the rule of law in our democratic republic, and what that means for this country to have a government that is "of the people, for the people, and by the people" with respect to legitimate parent advocacy.

 

We're meant to have a representative government and it isn't representative of most of "the people" when a tiny minority of whack-job conspiracy theorists and con artists with prefrontal cortices made of cottage cheese or something close to it, are put into positions of authority, or otherwise have influence over those with authority, and have access to taxpayer resources with no effective systems of oversight or accountability. Once in power, people like these then attempt to bend reality to fit their whacko notions of how things should be, regardless of what the majority of their constituents want or need or the actual facts of the situation, usually for their own financial gain and without regard for any harm done to others. Berkeley Breathed referred to such an individual as a "tax-fattened hyena," in one of his old Bloom County cartoons. I find the term eternally apt.

 

I find that these are "the people" employed within the public sector who are the most opposed to any kind of data collection that could be used as an audit trail and enforcement tool, which is why the backend business automation of most publicly funded agencies at the local level is such garbage. It's really hard to misappropriate public funds when you're leaving digital footprints right back to yourself in the process. Effective office automation on par with what has been happening in the private sector for decades has been limited in the public sector for supposed budgetary reasons, but the reality is that the ROI on a good system would make the upgrade pay for itself in no time. It's not costs that are being avoided, it's audit trails.

 

Because "the people" are expected to hold their government accountable according to the rule of law, it is necessary for "the people" to know how to do so and be given access to public agency information through various client'