Leslie Hiner

Attorney for freedom: educational choice, constitution as written, religious & individual liberty. EdChoice VP of Legal Affairs. Views expressed are my own.

[EdChoice @edchoice]

Oklahoma's Governor Stitt just increased the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit cap from $250 million to $275 million. This increase will allow more families to choose an alternative to a traditional public school education for their student.
https://t.co/6ke58KX7Cn

[sᥕᥱᥱ𝗍 𝗍һіᥒg❤️‍🔥(𝙰𝚜𝚒𝚊) @55SweetThing]

Reagan’s atheism joke👇

[PA Families for Education Choice @PaEdChoice]

Yesyesyes

And

YES!

[Leslie Hiner @lesliehiner]

@SharonSedlar is one of my favorite heroes for educational freedom. Listen to her voice - you’ll hear the passion of a good person spending her life helping parents access options to help their kids learn and thrive. Beautiful. @JoshShapiroPA @edchoice

[PA Families for Education Choice @PaEdChoice]

We’re tired. Just for today.

But you know what? Today made us stronger. Today made even more of us family. Today, students shared their stories. Today, we found more strength and resolve. And today was a day people will be talking about for a long time.

Thank you, all. Tomorrow we get back at it with renewed strength, energy and resolve. 🔥💕😊

[Leslie Hiner @lesliehiner]

Ear-piercing, ‘fingernails on a chalkboard’ screaming and jumping up & down like a toddler having a tantrum cannot fix lousy arguments. Still wrong. They are old enough to know better (I know). @ldsand @Dyrnwyn @nickineily

[Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist @DeAngelisCorey]

Free advertising for homeschooling.

[Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist @DeAngelisCorey]

The Chicago Teachers Union is also under congressional investigation for failing to provide its own members with financial audits for five years in a row. The union’s own members, with help from the @LJCenter, had to sue to force transparency.
https://t.co/xg9xqUabDi

[Sarah Huckabee Sanders @SarahHuckabee]

The Arkansas Legislature just funded another year of universal education freedom.

That means Higher test scores. More learning pathways. Students reading at and above grade level.

The freedom to choose whatever school best fits your kid.

[Stephen Moore @StephenMoore]

Public K–12 spending just topped $1 TRILLION.

Average cost per public school student is now higher than typical private school tuition.

Meanwhile, students are falling behind and can't read or write proficiently.

[EdChoice @edchoice]

Critics of school choice use fearmongering to make it seem like these programs don't work. We're seeing this happen in Arizona with inaccurate information being reported about the programs. EdChoice's John Kristof, one of the authors of a rigorous study done on the AZ ESA, breaks down the report's findings.
https://t.co/PqTdn0eUZF

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Been waiting for this moment. There is a lot in my head that I must process and very little has to do with leaving the planet. Today is my first step. I have never in my life felt peace like this.

[Cedra Crenshaw @CedraCrenshaw]

If you're waiting for 100% of the answers before you homeschool, just stop.

Did you have 100% of the answers before you became a parent?

Could you foresee who your child(ren) would be — what interests, talents, strengths, and weaknesses they would have?

Could you anticipate circumstances – life's ups and downs – that would impact your family?

Sure, you read books, gleaned from family, and drew from your experience. But until you held your newborn in your arms, it was all theory.

Then reality hit.👶

✅️Homeschooling is like that (because homeschooling is parenting).

Over the past 8 years, I trusted God and took one step at a time. I did the first right thing and then the next right thing and then the right thing after that, and so on.

➡️Things changed along the way.
➡️I made adjustments.
➡️I found my rhythm.

✅️I developed competence and confidence as a home educator by being a home educator.

Just like I developed competence and confidence as a parent by being a parent.

After graduating from the public school system myself and having my older three children graduate from the system, developing a mindset of 100% accountability for my youngest child's education has been a daily walk with the Lord.

As a result of being 100% accountable for my daughter's education, I am:
•a better parent
•closer to the Lord
•continuously learning
•proactive, not reactive
•building something better by leading in my homeschool community

I could not have anticipated any of this before homeschooling.

✅️Homeschooling has changed me.

By trusting God, He has done and continues to do a marvelous work in my life, my daughter's life, and my family.

Whatever your next right step is in your homeschooling journey, take that leap of faith, trusting that God will be a "lamp to your feet and a light to your path." Psalm 119:105 ❤️🙏

[Leslie Hiner @lesliehiner]

This brilliant & beloved MIT professor retired at age 88. As a person “of an age” when some automatically think I must be retired (no; or as I say to school choice opponents, hell no), this throws a new wrinkle into the mix. Gee whiz.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[EdChoice @edchoice]

EdChoice's Cooper Conway pens a Washington Examiner article about the truth of Arizona's school choice program to combat false allegations that have recently been made.
https://t.co/XepuL5YEG9

[EdChoice @edchoice]

Last week, a Missouri judge ruled that the MOScholars program is constitutional. EdChoice Legal Advocates' Bryan Cleveland was on the team that was defending 3 families in Missouri who rely on the program for their children's education.
https://t.co/0X7FZpAPOK

[Jimmy’s Famous Seafood @JimmysSeafood]

You need valid ID to enter our bar. This isn’t a voting booth.

[Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist @DeAngelisCorey]

Idaho Governor Brad Little signed a bill BANNING taxpayer funding of teachers unions.

It passed the House 43 to 23.
It passed the Senate 20 to 14.

[Leslie Hiner @lesliehiner]

Keeping the Monty Python spirit, ‘It’s just a flesh wound’ - thousands of kids can’t read or read w/comprehension, can’t write anything longer than a text, can’t do math without a calculator, don’t know which bathroom they’re supposed to use, and think communists and socialists are nothing more than political parties like the others - but many say don’t worry, that harm is ‘just a flesh wound’, developed slowly over 12 years of compelled conformity. No room for a child to thrive naturally. Real joy comes from independent inquiry and learning, which builds confidence and understanding. The world could use more of this. It begins with freedom, and rejection of compelled conformity.

[Health Freedom Defense Fund @theHFDF]

NEW:

Clarence Thomas just declared that “consent of the governed” is the only legitimate source of government power.

“We The People can never legitimately consent to the violation of our God-given equality.”

“The Declaration made it clear.”

“The purpose of government is to protect our God-given unalienable rights.”

“It can be easy to forget 250 years later the courage it took for those 56 men to sign the Declaration.”

“Those men committed treason against the king, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the newborn United States.”

“The ideas of the Declaration are so powerful that our nation could not coexist with the contradiction… of slavery.”

“Those ideas have been so powerful that they convinced our nation to finally end segregation.”

“They continue to be so powerful today that they have inspired people throughout the world to throw off the shackles of their own oppressors.”

“And it all began with our founders declaring in 1776… that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”

“That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“We should also not forget the important sentence that follows.”

“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

@UTAustin