A Ray of Sunlight in Pennsylvania
A message from the front in the battle for parental rights in public education
In a 1913 Harper’s Weekly article entitled “What Publicity Can Do,” Louis Brandeis wrote “[p]ublicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” With the election just over three months away, the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is having a moment in the spotlight.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, PA offered yet another example of the spiraling incompetence of government institutions, while Joe Biden “stepping down for our democracy” might end up giving Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro the role he’s been dreaming of since his days as a county commissioner. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania families are at the front of a different political battleground – the fight for parental rights in education.
While Gov. Shapiro is probably hoping everyone forgets his empty campaign promise to expand school choice, his bipartisan brothers and sisters in the state legislature just approved his $47.6 billion budget, of which nearly $20 billion (or 44% of the entire budget) will go to a broken and corrupt public education bureaucracy.
Institutional failure, all the way down.
As state spending on education has ballooned by nearly $10 billion in just the last five years, many Pennsylvania families are looking for a way out. Abandoned by politicians in both parties, some parents (like me) have decided to take the fight to Harrisburg.
In October of last year, I wrote about my experience fighting for transparency and accountability regarding COVID-era misconduct and violations of law by public officials. Over the last four years, I have taken this battle to my school board, elected state representatives (including Republican state representative Craig Williams and Republican state senator, and chair of the senate education committee, David Argall), the Chester County District Attorney, Democrat Deborah Ryan, state ethics boards and even the Committee on Oversight and Accountability of the United States Congress. At each stage I have either been completely ignored or passed off from one government bureaucracy to another. Not a single institution or elected official has been willing to do what they exist to do.
That changed last week. Sort of.
On July 19, 2024, the Pennsylvania Department of Education finally acknowledged its legal duty to do something about an educator misconduct complaint I filed in April against the superintendent of the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District. To say that I had to drag the Department – kicking and screaming – to order this investigation would be an understatement.
The Department did not even start its investigation until I sent an email (copying several investigative journalists who had taken an interest in my story), asking why my complaint had been completely ignored for more than three months. About an hour after sending that email, I finally received a letter acknowledging that the Governor’s Office of Chief Counsel had “determined that the allegations in [the] complaint are legally sufficient to warrant professional discipline” under Pennsylvania’s Educator Discipline Act. A copy of that letter is attached here:
If not for a case called Doe v. Shorn earlier this year, that might have never happened. In that case, a father (who is the lone Republican school board member in Bucks County, Pennsylvania) filed a complaint against a school district counselor who improperly used personal information about his children in order to pressure him to vote against a “controversial” school district neutrality policy that would have barred social and political advocacy in public school classrooms. The father filed an educator misconduct complaint against the school employee, but the Department dismissed it without an investigation.
Adding insult to injury, the Department warned the father that he would be prosecuted if he publicly disclosed information about his complaint, including the fact that the Department dismissed it without an investigation. He filed a lawsuit alleging that the confidentiality provision of the Educator Discipline Act violated the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution. Judge Karen Marston of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania agreed.
Unshackled by the unconstitutional restriction on speech, I have been able to shine some light on egregious conduct by public officials and compel the Department of Education to do what it is legally obligated to do. But it hasn’t been easy.
My local “newspapers of record” – the Daily Local News (owned by Media News Group) and the Philadelphia Inquirer (owned by the Philadelphia Foundation) – have shown no interest in covering this story. Fortunately, the editor of a small community news site and a journalist at an independent Philadelphia outlet called Broad + Liberty have offered some local coverage, and National Review, Daily Wire, The Federalist, and Chris Bray (Tell Me How This Ends) have helped me bring national exposure to this story. I am deeply indebted to each of them.
Justice Brandeis was inspired to write his Harper’s Weekly article because he was troubled “about the wickedness of people shielding wrongdoers and passing them off (or at least allowing them to pass themselves off) as honest men.” If the Pennsylvania Department of Education ensures a full, fair and impartial investigation of my educator misconduct complaint, the dishonest wrongdoers in this case won’t be able to hide anymore.
Here’s hoping that the light keeps shining on all of them for just a little while longer.