Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson decided to dip his toes into the constituent-laden waters of town halls yesterday. Like most Republicans, Johnson is scared as shit of facing all of the people he is letting down, and like many politicians, he enjoys being in a position that allows him to condescend to people. So Sen. Johnson decided to meet at Madison East High School and town hall with students—like a minor-league tryout for meeting with the people who actually voted for him. Unfortunately for Sen. Johnson, high school students aren’t complete imbeciles and they had real-life questions to ask him and he was not prepared to answer them.
Student: I have a question about privatizing schools. How are you able to be here and say that you want to help students, when you voted for Betsey DeVos who has no experience with public schools? DeVos has been pushing ‘school choice’ for twenty years. This is creating charter schools that replace public schools. Public schools are losing their funding to voucher schools. Public schools are having to shut down in Milwaukee, how can you think this is helping us?
Just a break to let you know that I couldn’t stop smiling watching this.
Johnson: So one thing I recommend all of you to do, is watch a movie called “Waiting for Superman.” Anybody ever watched or seen that movie?
Just to break in. I stopped smiling here. If you haven’t seen Waiting for Superman, it’s a propaganda doc that says five successful charter schools—whose creators and administrators have come under fire over the past few years for being the monsters that they are—are fighting for inner-city students’ lives while teachers unions are trying to destroy education. Sen. Johnson tries to sell this film as being from “the left side of the political spectrum,” and then parrots “school choice” advocates’ talking points about students and parents being the best people to make education decisions—and I guess billionaires? High school students’ hands go up and Sen. Johnson tries to see if anyone from Breitbart goes to this high school. He ends up getting hit again and again on education, telling everyone that he believes the “free market” will set us all free. Finally, in the clip below:
Student: Do you think we should use stands of proficiency or standards of growth to measure student achievement, especially in relation to English classes that aren’t as straight-forwardly graded as math classes, and why?
Johnson: You’re getting into some pretty esoteric educational pedagogy and I’m not a, I’m not an education, I’m an accountant—a plastics manufacturer.
The Republican line, like with climate change, is to tell you how to do a thing and when you represent expertise and data from said thing, they pretend that no one can talk about it anymore. Here is a representation every voter who tries to communicate real ideas with a Republican official:
You can watch Sen. Ron Johnson going to school below.