The Three “Rs”... "Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic"

 That is all the education that you need according to the Republicans. Stop and think for a minute what are the long range goals of the Republican party?

A Betsy DeVos-backed group helps fuel a rapid expansion of public money for private schools
The American Federation for Children has found success amid a 20-year low in support for K-12 education and protests over lessons involving race and identity.
NBC News
By Tyler Kingkade
March 30, 2023

A conservative nonprofit group founded by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said it poured about $9 million into state elections last year, backing nearly 200 candidates. Now, some of those candidates are pushing a wave of legislation boosting DeVos’ longtime goal: subsidizing private schools with public dollars.

Using at least $2.5 million from DeVos and her husband, the American Federation for Children has played a pivotal role in getting what supporters call “school choice” policies passed into law in at least three states and introduced in several more, according to current and former GOP legislators, lobbyists for teachers unions and academics.

The nonprofit group has found success amid a 20-year low in approval for the K-12 education system and after two years of protests over lessons involving race and LGBTQ identity. It is now on the verge of ushering in a transformation in how large swaths of the country fund schools.

“They’ve been quite strategic,” Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas, said of the group. “They’ve particularly targeted rural Republicans who are opposed to school choice. They just had to take out a few marginal incumbents, and thereby put the fear of God into the rest of them.”

Ask yourself why all this about WOKE? Why all this about “Parental Rights”? What do they want?

It’s difficult to determine whether the laws would have been enacted without the American Federation for Children’s involvement; other groups supporting the same “school choice” policies also targeted lawmakers with campaign ads last year. Each state’s political landscape is unique and subject to myriad factors. But the federation’s spending preceded a marked increase in both the scale of private school subsidies on the table at the state level and the rate at which the laws have been enacted. 

Why?

What are they building their base for? They spent 50 years plotting to do away with Roe v Wade, what are their long range goals for education?

Republican lawmakers in over a dozen states have recently cited complaints about liberal ideology in public schools as a reason to support helping parents pay for private education. That shift in strategy has been hailed by organizations like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that helped spur parent protests over lessons about racism. And it has helped cement funding for private schooling as a benchmark of Republican governance.

The Des Moines Register said this in their article Fact check: As Iowa Republicans, Democrats clash on 'school choice' studies, here's what the research says there have been a number of studies done with mixed results...

Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, told the Register he believes people often "talk past each other" regarding school voucher research because of which studies they look at.

[…]

Christopher Lubienski and T. Jameson Brewer, a duo of education policy researchers from the University of Illinois, examined the EdChoice document in a 2016 article in the Peabody Journal of Education and wrote, “misrepresentation of empirical findings by advocates appears to be a key element of their advocacy agenda.” 

“Although voucher advocates indicate that the research is conclusive, consistent, and thus generalizable, and essentially beyond reproach, closer examination of the studies put forth by advocates suggests little consensus or consistency across the reported findings,” their analysis said.

While EdWeek reported that,

A 2013 study of Milwaukee’s program—the oldest in the nation—found that using a voucher to attend a private school increased the likelihood that students would graduate from high school, enroll in college, and stay in college.

Notice that it say private schools and nothing about public schools.

But in Louisiana, researchers more recently found that participation in that state’s voucher program “substantially reduces academic achievement.” In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in 2015, researchers posited that the poor academic outcomes for voucher students may be due to low-quality private schools opting into the program.

Two separate reviews of existing research have found that, overall, voucher programs have little meaningful impact on student academic achievement either way.

So it cannot be because of better education, so why are the Republicans pushing voucher?

Also consider: private schools can kick out low achievers who bring down their average, they can refuse LGBTQ+ students or children of LGBTQ+ parents, they can refuse minority students, they can refuse students who don’t share their religious values. How do you think middle income and upper income levels would vote to build a new school?

Think about why the Republicans don't want to pay off the student debts? Could it be because the Republicans want to discourage college education?

My guess, it that the Republicans want education only for the elite, the upper class. All the others peons only get "reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic" just like in the 1600s, 1700s and the 1800s.