Public Education… HA!

The Republicans don’t want you educated. Period.

They don’t want an educated electorate because they can’t control an educated electorate.

Do you know who changed the outcome of the 2022 election? The college students, they saw through the Republican lies.

Public Schools:

• They must take everyone, cannot cherry pick the best students for academics or sports.
• They cannot not teach religion and must accept all religions.
• They must take LGBTQ and racial minorities.
• They must take special needs students.
• They are accountable all state and federal laws.

Private schools are the exact opposite.

Private Schools:

• They can only take students with a high GPA.
• They can only take student athletes are at the tops of their field.
• They can refuse members of other religions.
• They can refuse members of other races.
• They can refuse LGBTQ students.
• They can refuse special needs students.
• They are exempt from many laws like the non-discrimination laws.

Now if you are a rich, white, evangelical Christian where would you want to send you children? And would you want to finance public schools?

Now if you are a low-income minority where can you send your children?

Call it vouchers or savings accounts, but shifting money from schools is a bad idea | Opinion
Fort Worth Star-Telegram via Yahoo News
By Sara Stevenson
March 1, 2023


Every two years, some Texas legislators file bills to push for private-school vouchers, rebranded recently as educational savings accounts, or ESAs. Their purpose is to funnel taxpayer dollars from public schools to private and religious schools. Thanks to a coalition of urban Democrats and rural Republicans, who cherish their community public schools, these initiatives fail each legislative session. But with Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick prioritizing the issue, will this time be different?

ESAs are indeed repurposed vouchers. The only difference is that with ESAs, taxpayer dollars will go directly to parents to use toward a private school, individual tutoring or other education services.

Just another way to perpetuate racial, religious, and LGBTQ+ discrimination. Just a fancy Jim Crow law.

Most voucher bills, including Senate Bill 176 filed this year, state that children who qualify for special education services must waive their rights to accommodations and supplemental services, rights which are guaranteed under federal law. How does this benefit special education students?

The Council for Exceptional Children, which advocates for both disabled and gifted children, opposes voucher-type programs for all youth. It argues that if children with disabilities are “off the books,” they will return to the shadows and not receive the deserved support they need to succeed.

That means that public schools will be saddle with the extra cost of teaching special needs students.

While advocates stress the idea of parental choice, it is the private schools that do the choosing. The proposed $10,000 account would go directly to the parent and could be used toward many forms of education with little or no accountability. But private schools can still accept or reject any student for any reason. A local private school admissions director once told me, for instance, that the school did not accept children with discipline records.

In contrast, public schools are required to serve every child who comes through the door. Furthermore, most highly-rated private schools charge far more than $10,000 per year at the secondary level. Who will make up the difference?

The dumbing down of public schools! Tell me do you think that the rich, white, evangelical Christian  voter would vote for increasing the public school budget?

*****

The Florida Policy Institute wrote…

The Cost of Universal Vouchers: Three Factors to Consider in Analyzing Fiscal Impacts of CS/HB 1

The Florida House PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee offered a proposed committee substitute (PCS) to HB1 that included a fiscal analysis estimating the universal private education voucher bill will cost $209.6 million in year one for Florida Empowerment Scholarship (FES) vouchers. As of February 24, the PCS is now the new version of HB1, CS/HB1.

Why is the fiscal analysis price tag so much smaller than the $4 billion estimate provided by Florida Policy Institute (FPI) and Education Law Center (ELC)? Because the FPI/ELC estimates follow a set of key assumptions that were not considered in the House’s fiscal analysis.

[…]

1. State aid rerouted from public schools to FES vouchers has a fiscal impact.

House fiscal analysis: $0.

FPI/ELC estimate for year one of universal voucher implementation: $2 billion for current FES voucher participants and for current public school students who would move to FES vouchers due to income restrictions being removed (details on how these numbers were calculated can be found here).

When students leave public schools and take their public dollars with them, that wreaks havoc on a school district’s budget, whether or not student enrollment drops, too, as documented here. The local fiscal impact arises as communities need to address budget deficits from the loss of state aid.

They also write that the state has to take in to account that…

2. A substantial and increasing number of families of private school students will use state money to cover an expense they were already paying themselves.

3. A substantial and increasing number of families of home education students will use state money to cover an expense they were already paying for.

What is that saying that numbers don’t lie but liars can figure?

They wanted the numbers to look good for the governor.

Then there is the question how do voucher affect public education?

OPINION: After two decades of studying voucher programs, I’m now firmly opposed to them
Here’s why public money should not be funding private tuition
The Hechinger Report
By Joshua A Cowen
July 20, 2022


In recent years, nearly half of all states have created publicly funded private K-12 tuition plans, collectively known as school vouchers.

This summer, advocates of these plans are pushing to expand their reach, boosted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carson v. Makinthat states permitting vouchers may not exclude religious schools.

Arizona just expanded its already large voucher program; in Michigan, former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and allies have proposed a voucher scheme modeled on plans elsewhere. In June, GOP supporters in Congress reintroduced legislation to create federal funding for voucher programs.

Vouchers are dangerous to American education. They promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety. In small doses, years ago, vouchers seemed like they might work, but as more states have created more and larger voucher programs, experts like me have learned enough to say that these programs on balance can severely hinder academic growth — especially for vulnerable kids.

[…]

There’s also a moral case to be made against voucher programs. They promise low-income families solutions to academic inequality, but what they deliver is often little more than religious indoctrination to go alongside academic outcomes that are worse than before.

[…]

Vouchers fail to deliver for the kids who are often most in need.

The end of the Milwaukee evaluation coincided almost exactly with the circulation of a report showing shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.

Over time, those poor test score results for vouchers held up, and were replicated by other studies.

Vouchers are dangerous to American education. They promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety.

Too coincidently, a group of advocates known previously for supporting test scores in standards and accountability started pushing parental satisfaction, school safety, character and “grit” — seemingly anything to move the goalposts away from academic outcomes, which had had been disastrous under the voucher program in Louisiana.

The voucher program is designed to strip public education. The voucher program is designed to bring back segregation but this time it is not just the Blacks but also those of other religions and LGBTQ+ students.

Today those voucher funders are also funding conservative state legislative races and promotion of the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

[…]

The stakes are too high, and we already know too much to believe them.

The Republicans want to go back in time, to a time where only rich white plantation owners would educate the children.

*****

As an example…

These parents publicly took a stand for LGBTQ rights. Now they say their kids' Christian school retaliated.
Yahoo News
By David Artavia
March 1, 2023


A Southern California husband and wife say that the church they’ve belonged to since childhood, as well as the affiliated school their elemntary-age kids attend, retaliated against them after they made a public stance supporting LGBTQ rights.

[…]

“I STAND WITH YOU,” he wrote. “I stand with those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. You are family. I love you and affirm you and Jesus does not hate you but loves you; wholeheartedly for who you are. I am sorry for how I have hurt you. I am sorry for how the church has hurt you.” He also advises religious leaders to “pray first” before judging people: “Pray for me, sure, but I also ask that you truly ask God to soften your heart for His people, everyone.”

[…]

“When we first started sending our kids to the school, that's really what we had been raised to believe was the right way,” she says. “But over the past few years, I haven’t felt comfortable with that. And so, when we started publicly posting that we are affirming of the LGBTQ community, the school really just changed their viewpoint towards us. And the parents at the school started complaining that we were at the school.”

And if this is the only school around, then what? Suppose a public school is a forty minute bus trip each way? As long as private schools can discriminate vouchers should not be allowed to be used at those schools.