One of President Trump’s campaign promises was to “bring schools back to the states” and expand what he views as quality education through school choice, including vouchers and scholarships. As part of this effort, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently cut her department’s workforce by 50%, arguing that U.S. education will improve once its “bureaucracy” is reduced.

Opponents of school choice warn of its negative impact on public education, the loss of rights for special needs students under school voucher programs, and the limited options available to students in rural areas who rely on public schools.

Watch the video above as Straight Arrow News contributor Timothy Carney celebrates the growing shift toward school choice, arguing that public school systems have become quasi-religious institutions that position themselves against parents.

The following is an excerpt from the above video:

These school systems want to tear children away from their parents. The schools see themselves as the enlightened liberators, freeing the next generation from their backwards, racist parents. This ideology obviously endangers children. In Arlington, Virginia, county officials allowed a registered sex offender who had recently been arrested for exposing himself to enter a girl’s locker room at a pool shared with a public high school because the man identified as a woman, and this was county policy. Look around the country, and you will find 1,000 stories like these.

Soon you realize that the public schools have become, in effect, religious schools, preaching a harmful new religion, and these school systems try to insulate themselves from parents and the community. Notably, the insanity happens the most in the big school districts, where the school boards are most immune from accountability and democracy. When parents speak up, they get branded as domestic terrorists. In this context, state governments have a duty to help parents opt out of these far-left quasi-religious schools. The best way to do this is to create universal school choice, and here’s hoping the trend continues.