No one delivers a philosophical smackdown like Condoleezza Rice. And she does it with such class and logic.

One of the ongoing issues that can and will be a winning one for the right is the issue of school choice. This is something we have addressed here at Victory Girls many times in the past. From charter school options to private schools to homeschooling, parents are the only ones with the right to decide which school option works best for their child and family.

The Covid school shutdowns exposed enormous cracks in the entire education system of the United States that no one in a position of power, either at the time or now, is willing to take responsibility for. When online school proved to be unworkable for the majority of students, teachers’ unions screamed about not wanting to go back into the classroom. Randi Weingarten worked hand-in-glove with the Biden administration, and now tries to cast herself as some kind of educational champion when at best, she’s a dirty union shill. Anthony Fauci, the master of never taking responsibility for anything while demanding respect for everything, insists that he had absolutely nothing to do with schools shutting down, and don’t you dare pin that one on his clean white lab coat.

Meanwhile, the elites are very much invested in making sure THEIR kids have the best possible educational opportunities while siding with school unions and trying to limit school choice, from Barack Obama to Terry McAuliffe to Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

And while the elites are doing that, kids in Baltimore can’t read or do math. Chicago is trying to spin their latest test scores into happy news, when in truth, their initial pre-Covid scores were nothing to brag aboout.

The Illinois Assessment of Readiness, or IAR, data released by the district on Thursday shows that 31% of elementary school students in Chicago Public Schools were proficient in reading, compared to 26% in 2023 and 28% in 2019 before the COVID pandemic. The IAR, a standardized test for Illinois third through eighth graders in English language arts and math, was administered in the spring of 2024.

In math, 19% of Chicago third through eighth graders were proficient on the IAR’s 2024 test, a 2 percentage point increase from the previous school year. During the spring of 2023, 17% of elementary school students were proficient in math, but in the spring of 2019, 24% of students were proficient.

“We know that state assessments are only one metric, but it’s very satisfying to see yet another sign that our investments in the classroom are yielding positive results, and that students are moving in the right direction,” said CPS CEO Pedro Martinez in a press release.

Black students saw the highest increase in reading proficiency rates with a 6 percentage point increase compared to the previous school year — a jump from 17% in 2023 to 23% this year. Latino students’ proficiency rates grew by 3 percentage points, from 22% in 2023 to 25% in 2024.

It is a good thing that the numbers are going up. But why is no one ever held accountable for the numbers being SO LOW TO BEGIN WITH??? Why are kids stuck in these schools, where the teachers unions don’t care about the students and Covid money was spent on things like Critical Race Theory instead of extra math and reading tutors?

These numbers, and this current situation, should be unacceptable to both sides of the political aisle. So why is only one side working to increase choices for students who are stuck in schools that are failing in their primary objective? Condoleezza Rice absolutely nailed the problem during a “fireside chat” at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institution earlier this month, which just went viral. Please watch this clip to see Condoleezza Rice roundhouse kick those who don’t want school choice into next year in the most classy way possible.

Condoleezza Rice ON FIRE for school choice:

"How can you say you're for civil rights? How can you say you're for the poor? When you're condemning those children to not being able to read?"

She also calls out hypocrites opposing school choice who send their own kids to private. pic.twitter.com/nnE10WHtII

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) June 20, 2024

“So are you for school choice or not? We already have a choice system in education,” Rice said. “If you are of means, you will move to a district where the schools are good and the houses are expensive, like Palo Alto, California.”

“If you’re really wealthy, you will send your kids to private school. So who’s stuck in failing neighborhood schools? Poor kids. A lot of them minority kids.”

Rice argued that not having school choice negatively impacts low-income families by regulating them to underfunded school districts.

“How can you say you’re for civil rights, how can you say you’re for the poor when you’re condemning those children to not being able to read?” Rice said. “By the time they’re in third grade, they’re never going to read.”

“If you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine, you write that editorial in the Washington Post,” Rice said in the now-viral video. “But then don’t send your kids to Sidwell Friends [an elite Washington, D.C., private school].”

And Condoleezza Rice lands the final blow with the comment about Sidwell Friends (looking at YOU, Barack Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton) and does it all without even raising her voice.

She is one hundred percent correct. The elites use their own version of school choice by either moving to better schools, or paying for private schools. And then the Democrats work with the teachers’ unions to make sure that all that teachers’ union support (money) goes into their coffers for elections, and then the Democrats back the teachers’ unions so that they get more money from government, which they then turn a part of into support for Democrats, and on and on the corrupt bargain goes. It’s a gigantic racket that is threatened by parents leaving the system or demanding better results. All Condoleezza Rice did was tell the truth about what the current state of school choice actually is – and it went viral because it is resonating with people who want better for the kids who are trapped within a failing system.

Featured photo: Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, cropped, public domain