“The British are coming! The British are coming!” That was the cry of Paul Revere, warning the citizens of the approaching British army as the Revolutionary War began. Today, the warning to private schools might be “The students are coming! The students are coming!”

The reason for this warning is the growth of school choice legislation in many states. According to The Wall Street Journal, Indiana this year reported an increase of some 20% in its voucher program. More than 53,000 students participated in 2022-23, compared with 44,376 the previous school year, according to the state education department. Thirteen more private schools were included, bringing the total to 343. All of this was before the state made vouchers nearly universal in May by raising the income cap and removing other restrictions.

Florida also made its K-12 scholarships universal this year by removing income limits. Step Up for Students, a nonprofit administering organization, recently said it had awarded 268,221 income-based scholarships, up from 183,925 at the same time a year ago. The group said it also had granted 74,711 special-needs scholarships, an increase of some 15,000.

Arizona beat Florida by a year in making its education savings accounts, or ESAs, universal. The state says it approved 47,667 new student applications in 2023, compared with 5,103 before the expansion. Nearly 700 private schools receive ESA funds. West Virginia’s ESA program, open to any student already in public school, is entering its second year. The program has received 6,323 applications for the coming school term, up from roughly 3,600 last year, per the state Treasurer.

Iowa’s new ESA program received 29,025 applications during a month-long window, according to Gov. Kim Reynolds’s office. In Arkansas nearly 5,000 students and more than 80 schools have applied or begun applying to another new ESA system, the state Education Department says. Applications opened in late June and continue through July. The Iowa and Arkansas programs aren’t universal in the first year, but they’re likely to grow as they phase in broader eligibility.

There may be bumps in the road in some states to implement these new programs. A recent Manhattan Institute report points out that getting ESAs through the political thicket is only the first step. Many parents are unaware of the offerings in their states, and a law does little good if it isn’t implemented well. “We fear a program in which 100,000 families want to participate,” the authors write, “but cannot log in to the payment platform, or cannot track their expenditures, or cannot promptly pay the educational providers helping their children.” The mainstream media reluctance to promote anything the GOP does may hinder parents’ recognition of these programs.

Some states might also find that the demand exceeds the supply of seats in private schools. But in time, states that are generous with ESAs are encouraging a variety of options to expand or open, whether faith-based, classical, Montessori or something new, and with families choosing what works best for them. That’s what a future of school choice looks like.

Although school choice has been solely an issue pushed by GOP lawmakers, the support for these programs crosses the political aisle. Parents of both parties want their children to get the best possible education and school choice makes this realistic for even low economic status families. This issue alone turned Florida into a red state, instead of a purple one, in the first election of Governor Ron DeSantis. Now he has made school choice vouchers available to every Florida student, regardless of economic status. Democrats can’t seem to free themselves from their devotion to teachers unions or they would also jump on the school choice bandwagon.

The students are coming! The students are coming!

If you don’t like history, rewrite it. That seems to be the mantra of Progressives. They didn’t like the history of the founding of our country, so they rewrote it in The 1619 Project, an attempt to claim our country was founded by slave traders rather than those seeking religious freedom. The New York Times colluded with Progressives in that rewriting of history.

Recently I wrote two blogs about other attempts to rewrite history. Weingarten Rewriting History was about AFT teachers union president Randi Weingarten trying to rewrite the history of her collusion with the Biden Administration to control the re-opening of public schools to suit her political agenda. Fauci Rewriting History was about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s attempts to escape responsibility for his inaccurate and self-serving advice about Covid while serving as the country’s primary advisor for Covid policy.

Now, Progressives are attempting to rewrite the history of Florida’s response to the Covid pandemic in an attempt to discredit Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is campaigning for the presidency. They see him as a threat to the re-election of President Joe Biden, their progressive puppet in the White House. Since the strength of DeSantis is his record as governor, they want to rewrite the history of that record. Sadly, former President Trump is joining their efforts because he recognizes DeSantis is the only true threat to his winning the GOP primary.

This is not my opinion alone; it is the opinion of The Wall Street Journal editorial board. They say, “Progressives want Donald Trump to win the GOP nomination, which explains why they’re distorting Ron DeSantis’s Covid record. The press knows the Florida Governor’s opposition to lockdowns is a political selling point, so in Trumpian fashion they are rewriting history.”

They say Democrats have never forgiven Mr. DeSantis for defying the lockdown consensus and reopening his state in spring 2020. DeSantis and some other GOP Governors, notably Brian Kemp in Georgia and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, broke ranks in early May by easing virus restrictions. Democrats denounced DeSantis for “letting it rip,” but he reopened the state in phases and took into account the healthcare system’s capacity to treat sick patients.

On May 4, restaurants and retail stores were allowed to open at 25% of capacity. Two weeks later Mr. DeSantis announced that theme parks, including Disney World, could submit plans to reopen as early as June if they could keep patrons safe. In June Mr. DeSantis gradually eased other restrictions. That summer Covid swept Florida and southern states that had largely dodged a first wave in the spring. But Mr. DeSantis, having examined the data and consulted scientists such as Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya, refused to shut down businesses. Instead, he focused on protecting the elderly who faced immensely higher risk.

Seniors over the age of 75 years were hundreds of times more likely to die of Covid than young adults. And lockdowns disproportionately harmed young people who were more likely to die of drug overdoses than Covid. The public-health clerisy focused narrowly on virus risks, ignoring the social, economic and psychological damage from lockdowns.

Not least of these was learning loss from school closures, which may never be made up. Mr. DeSantis was among the few Governors to reopen schools for in-person learning in autumn 2020 despite opposition from the teachers’ unions. His reopening mitigated learning loss and helped parents return to work.

Mr. DeSantis’s strategy of focused protection was articulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, which progressives still revile despite its vindication. To date, over 937,000 healthcare providers and scientists have signed the declaration in support of its conclusions. In 2020 Florida had the tenth lowest age-adjusted Covid death rate in the country, which was nearly 20% lower than California’s despite the Golden State’s prolonged lockdown.

Florida experienced a lower Covid death rate than most states in late 2021 and early 2022. The press likes to cherry-pick data and focus on discrete periods to present Mr. DeSantis as a grim-reaper. But Florida’s overall age-adjusted Covid death rate during the pandemic is 13% lower than the U.S. average and about the same as California’s. Progressives and Mr. Trump also won’t concede that Mr. DeSantis’s Covid strategy proved to be an economic boon. Between April 2020 and July 2022, 622,476 people moved to Florida from other states, including families who wanted children in school. Employment in Florida has grown by 7.4% since January 2020 versus 2.5% in California and a 1.2% decline in New York.

More people are moving to Florida than any other state. More people are moving out of California than any other state.These facts alone should make people question anything progressives say since California is run by the very progressive Governor Gavin Newsom.

The WSJ editors summarize this history rewriting well: “The lockdown damage continues, but progressives can’t admit they were wrong. Nor can Mr. Trump. So they are trying to take down Mr. DeSantis for being right.”

We have a crisis of violent crime in America. We have a crisis of mental health in America. We have an explosion of homelessness in America. These crises are all related.

David Oshinsky, writing in The Saturday Essay for The Wall Street Journal, says, “The ongoing saga of the severely mentally ill in America is stirring attention again in a sadly familiar way. In Los Angeles in early 2022, a 70-year-old nurse was murdered while waiting for a bus, and two days later a young graduate student was stabbed to death in an upscale furniture store where she worked. That same week in New York City, a 40-year-old financial analyst was pushed onto the subway tracks as a train was arriving, killing her instantly. All three assaults, random and unprovoked, were committed by unsheltered homeless men with violent pasts and long histories of mental illness. In New York, the perpetrator had warned a psychiatrist during one of his many hospitalizations of his intention to commit that very crime.”

Fast forward to this May, 2023, when Jordan Neely, a homeless and schizophrenic man, threatened violence on a Manhattan-bound subway car.  Neely has spent most of his adult life in and out of emergency rooms, psychiatric wards and prison. He had 42 prior arrests, mostly for nuisance crimes, but also for assault. He’d recently pleaded guilty to punching an elderly woman in the face, fracturing her eye socket. Neely died subsequently when subdued by a former Marine, who is now on trial charged with second-degree manslaughter. Many of the witnesses on that subway car are referring to him as a hero. Oshinsky says, “Most of all, Neely’s death highlights the failures of a mental health system that allows profoundly disturbed people to slip through the cracks.”

How did we get to this failure of our mental health system?

In 1977, I was a third-year medical student when I spent three months on a psychiatry rotation at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Philadelphia. The hospital was a state-run psychiatric facility for voluntary and involuntary treatment of the mentally ill. Most of my patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia. A recently developed drug, called Thorazine, showed great promise in treating these people – as long as they took their medications. Unfortunately, there were many uncomfortable side-effects that caused many of the patients to stop their medications unless they were in a hospital setting.

However, the promise of Thorazine was that these patients could be managed as out-patients, reducing the need for state-run psychiatric institutions – asylums as they were often referred to. Although the term “asylum” actually implies “refuge” for those in distress, the term has sometimes had a negative connotation due to reports of patient abuse and Hollywood versions such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with the famous “Nurse Ratched.”

Therefore, pressure mounted to close these institutions. This began actually in October, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy signed his last bill called the Community Mental Health Act, which aimed to demolish the walled-off world of the asylum in favor of 1,500 local clinics where patients could receive the drugs and therapies they needed. It seemed like a good idea at the time – and then reality set in.

Surveys of those released from state asylums found that close to 30% were either homeless or had “no known address” within six months of their discharge. One critic called it “a psychiatric Titanic.” The problem is these mentally ill patients need to take their medicine to avoid psychotic episodes, but without a stable family home with someone to make sure they took their medicine, most were off their medications in weeks. Homelessness became their new way of life.

On an average night, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, close to 600,000 people in the country will be homeless—a figure seen by many as an undercount. More than 40% will be “unsheltered,” or “living in places not suitable for human habitation,” and about 20% will be dealing with severe mental illness. Experts sharply disagree about the contribution of homelessness to rising crime rates. Some emphasize that most of these crimes are low-level victimless offenses, such as loitering or public urination. But others note the disproportionately high level of all crimes, including assaults and homicides, committed by those battling homelessness and mental issues simultaneously.

Oshinsky says, “Had Jordan Neely and the others been born a generation or two earlier, they probably would not have wound up on the streets. There was an alternative back then: state psychiatric hospitals_, popularly known as asylums. Massive, architecturally imposing, and set on bucolic acreage, they housed close to 600,000 patients by the 1950s, totaling half the nation’s hospital population. Today, that number is 45,000 and falling.”

This explosion of homelessness and violent crime was predictable. In 1973, a Wisconsin psychiatrist named Darold Treffert wrote an essay about the dangerous direction in which his profession was headed. His colleagues had become so fixated on guarding the patient’s civil liberties, he noted, that they had lost sight of the patient’s illness. What worried him was the full-throated endorsement of recent laws and court decisions that severely restricted involuntary commitments. What purpose was served by giving people who couldn’t take care of themselves the freedom to live as they wished? He titled his piece, “Dying with Their Rights On.”

The impact of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill on them, as well as society as a whole, is hard to measure, but the statistics are frightening. The role once occupied by the asylum has been transferred to the institutions perhaps least able to deal with mental health issues – prisons and jails. The number of inmates in the U.S. in 1955 was 185,000; today that figure is 1,900,000. Unsurprisingly, the nation’s three largest mental health facilities are the Los Angeles County Jail, the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and Rikers Island in New York City. Approximately one quarter of their inmates have been diagnosed with a serious mental disorder.

This is no way to treat the mentally ill, nor to treat society as a whole. It’s time to bring back state-run mental health institutions to treat the thousands that need in-patient treatment. The cost of not doing this far exceeds the cost for taxpayers to run these institutions.