Joy Pullmann is the managing editor of School Reform News and a research fellow in education policy at The Heartland Institute. Before that, she was the assistant editor for the American Magazine at the American Enterprise Institute. She has published several books, including high school curriculum, and spoken at venues nationwide. Pullmann has been published in the New York Times, Washington Examiner, Weekly Standard, National Review Online, American Magazine, Toledo Free Press, Jackson Citizen-Patriot, and various other newspapers and outlets across the country. Joy graduated from the Hillsdale College honors program with an English major and journalism concentration. She, her husband, and two children live in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

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Joy Pullmann

School Lunch Food Fight Pits Government Regulations Against Each Other

States and school systems around the country have been reformatting cafeteria menus, partly pushed by Michelle Obama’s 2010 “Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act,” which essentially has taxpayers triple-paying for the food schools serve under wild and conflicting nutrition regulations, and partly pushed by a desire to be politically correct. This has led to some outrageous incidents, including the recent North Carolina incident where a teacher forced a child to swap her homemade lunch for the school’s chicken nuggets, a Michigan state child obesity registry and tracking system, and now a new set of rules in Massachusetts that forbid school vending machines, bake sales, door-to-door candy fundraisers, and snacks at after-school events and parties.

The state’s justification is “an obesity epidemic.” And, to be fair, lots of American kids are fat–not pudgy, fat. But does this justify blanketing schools with often conflicting and nonsensical food requirements? Massachusetts State Sen. Susan Fargo thinks so.

“If we didn’t have so many kids that were obese, we could have let things go,” she said. “But this is a major public health problem and these kids deserve a chance at a good, long, healthy life.”

Ah, yes, government. Giver of good, long, healthy lives!

These regulation-happy state officials don’t seem to understand the law of unintended consequences, and this action has several. The problem for them is that some of the unintended consequences pit government regulation against government regulation, with the not-unlikely possibility the public begins to notice the Kafka-esque absurdity of it all.

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Inter-Parent Trigger Warfare

The Tampa Bay Times printed a flattering story of how “parent groups” stopped the Parent Trigger legislation in Florida recently. Unfortunately, the reporter completely bought the labels of this “grassroots” “coalition of disparate, but determined parent groups.” Indeed, it’s reflected in her lead: 

It was one of the hardest-fought battles of the legislative session.

On one side: a coalition of disparate, but determined parent groups.

On the other: former Gov. Jeb Bush and the powerful school choice lobby.

I did have to laugh that she considers the school choice lobby powerful, but makes no mention or comparison of their power compared to teacher unions, their most consistent and much better (publicly) financed foe. 

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Truth About NC School Lunch Fiasco Makes Things Worse

The story of a schoolteacher ripping away a 4-year-old girl’s carefully packed lunch from home–containing a turkey sandwich, banana, and snack bag of chips–to make the girl eat school-served chicken nuggets has ripped through the talk show circuit and prompted angry letters to the U.S. Ag Department from her family’s elected representatives.

Now the school principal and Associated Press have come in to set the story straight. Except that learning more facts makes the truth uglier.

The child’s teacher mistakenly sent the girl to the wrong school line at lunch, said Hoke County Schools Assistant Superintendent Bob Barnes yesterday. Instead of handing her a carton of milk to “round out her lunch,” the teacher wrongly made the girl eat the entire school lunch.

“We’re not trying to force government down anybody’s throat,” Barnes said. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that our children get a good education and a nutritious meal every day. It comes back to: We had an employee who made a mistake.”

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The Atlantic Gets School Choice Wrong, Fakes Objectivity

It always annoys me when people write what they think are “even-handed” pieces that gyp both sides of an argument by pretending they have equal merit. That’s not fair-mindedness, it’s mental homelessness.

The Atlantic, which I generally enjoy reading, published an article entitled “How School Choice Became an Explosive Issue“ during School Choice Week, this week. The magazine’s first mistake in this regard was to present writer Kevin Carey’s think-tank, Education Sector, as an “independent” organization. Independent sounds hip because it implies this same detachment, which is the very essence of cool.

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Congress Broadens School Lunch Choices — for Thanksgiving

Public schools nationwide have started “to look at every single thing” that could ease widespread budget woes, says a National School Boards Association spokesman. In the spirit of Thanksgiving’s food revelry and abundance, Congress has just offered them some financial flexibility on school lunches.

A House and Senate compromise on a big agricultural bill November 14 pulled the funding for school lunch rules the U.S. Department of Agriculture had implemented earlier this year, which would have required schools to offer “dark green and orange vegetables,” limit starches such as potatoes and peas to one-quarter cup every week, ban 2 percent milk, and make half the grains available whole-grain.

Those unable to get past the incessant, incestuous kabuki between big government and big business, such as the New York Times, painted the move as a fight between virtuous bureaucrats attempting to give poor kids more broccoli and whole-grain kale rolls versus industry giants evilly hoping to stuff transfat-soaked junk food into virgin bellies.

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WSJ Notes Heartland’s Contributions to Parent Trigger

The Wall Street Journal is out with a video editorial discussing the Parent Trigger on it’s first birthday—and the Heartland Institute’s contribution to chronicling and explaining the parent empowerment law.

At about the 1:48 mark, David Feith and Jason Riley discuss (but don’t name outright) this recent Heartland Policy Study on California’s experience with the Parent Trigger.

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School Lunch Becomes More Obvious Wealth Transfer

The New York Times reports that one of many “little-noticed” provisions in Obama administration laws is forcing school districts to raise school lunch prices for those families that pay for them. Schools duly complying have faced a barrage of parents questioning the change.

Of course, as I report in today’s School Reform News, school lunches are already a massive subsidy from middle-class and wealthy families to poor ones. Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 only made this wealth transfer more explicit by immensely expanding federal food subsidies (including forcing states to let districts choose “free for all” lunch programs by 2014) and effectively insisting middle-class and wealthy families pick up the tab, both beforehand as taxpayers and at the lunch counter with higher prices.

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Time to Share that Voucher Love

The massive success of voucher program expansion by intrepid legislators this past year in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio has commentators in nearby states begging their own legislators to share the love.

This recent report from the Allegheny Institute in Pennsylvania responds to criticisms of voucher programs, such as that they send money to religious schools and take money from local public schools. The report documents how the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled voucher programs constitutional, how states save money, and parents and kids benefit from better education options.

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D.C. Attempts to Close Underused ‘Parent Centers,’ Faces Inevitable Resistance

Soon after her gutsy firing of the city’s worst 5 percent of teachers, D.C. schools chancellor Kaya Henderson is attempting to save the district $1.2 million by closing three “parent and family resource centers” and reopening them later under nonprofit management. Great idea, right?

Well, not according to The Washington Post and the usual suspects it interviewed for an article about the decision. The entire article revolves around “community anger” for the decision and quotes from the three parents who apparently used the centers.

The only justification the reporter gives for Henderson’s move is in this paragraph:

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Teachers Union Generated Anti-Rhee Website

Politico has tracked the IP address of a website attacking former D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to the American Federation of Teachers.

The site, which refers to Rhee as “the Sarah Palin of education” among other things and is the main online source of attacks on Rhee, was launched in February. An tracking tool traces the IP address back to the AFT’s offices in D.C. The site has since jumped to several other IP addresses.

Coming on the heels of an accidentally released-and-then-pulled document explaining the AFT’s strategy to quash the Parent Trigger in Connecticut, we see a clear emerging pattern of aggressive, anti-reform and anti-family empowerment actions by a teachers union that purports to show a friendly hand to education reform.

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