Democrats were in a state of fury in Alabama as the legislature swiftly passed a bill to give tax credits to corporations and individuals so that students in “failing schools” can attend private schools with public money.
“Republicans heralded it as a historic day for education and life-altering for children stuck in poorly performing schools. But tempers boiled over as Democrats called the maneuver “sleaziness” and a “bait and switch.””
On the other side of the aisle:
Rep. Mary Moore, D-Birmingham, as she was leaving the House chamber threw her hands over her head and shouted, “Welcome to the new confederacy where a bunch of white men are now going to take over black schools.”
Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst of Alabama–preserving its reputation as a reliable ally of the most rightwing Republicans across the South– wasted no time in hailing the legislation:
As Alabama moves toward providing districts with increased flexibility and parents with more school choice, we hope policymakers implement strong performance standards to ensure that schools are being held accountable for student success.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I come from ALECbama with my banjo on my knee …
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…and a voucher in my pocket!
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I’d laugh, but I come from ALECnois, so I think I’ll cry instead.
Good one, though.
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It’s also bad in Con-electorate!
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Very good, you 3 above!
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This issue has been discussed to death. Any more comments require knowledge of the specific details such as how much the money doled out will be, and what options the students have. As far as I know, a “best case” scenario will still be pretty bad. Did the Republicans respond to the objections presented? And if they did, how? In Pennsylvania the outcome of much discussion is that it will simply be a financial support of Catholic schools, which will simply jack up tuition almost equal to the tax benefit and everything will be the same for anyone else, only less money for the already strapped public schools. The motivation is simply to get rid of public schools in accordance with right wing ideology
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If the right wing’s contention is that public schools and pensions cost too much, then they should realize or accept the fact that costs would be acceptably affordable and even begin to better stabilize if we were not spending so much money giving off shore tax havens to people like Mitt Romey, if we were not democratizing other nations, like Afghanistan and Iraq, if we could buy our drugs for medicare from an other-than-American-company, and if the uber rich were paying even two thirds of the average rich man’s tax rate levied between 1950 and 1980.
The Alabaman legislature’s move was never about us being so adversely impacted by globalization or a “bad” economy as much as it’s been about political will, and deliberate shifts in power and wealth.
What happened in Alabama is merely a reflection of the gestalt of our federal and state governements, but it is the polar opposite of the will and needs of constitutents and the average citizen.
Could there be any more of a dichotomy?
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I’d wager that affluent districts in Alabama won’t be opening their doors to voucher students from neighboring districts with failing schools… and so, the caste system in place is reinforced… poor kids get to choose from McSchool or SchoolMart while affluent kids go to ivied academies…
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I live in ALECbama and the news this morning quoted our governor as saying that they slipped the tax-credit language into the bill without consulting their Democratic co-sponsors because they knew they would never go for it. How’s that for bait-and-switch?
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I know what it’s like to be stuck in a poor performing school. And not just poor performing, but so small that is unable to offer any courses outside of the very basic courses. 15 miles down the road, I could not attend the school in the next district because I wasn’t a resident, although they offered several different language courses and AP classes which my school didn’t offer. I had to move in with my aunt my senior year in able to attend scool there. You see, small rural schools cannot afford to pay a teacher to teach 2 kids French or any other subject for that matter. What’s wrong with the money following the student?
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Because it is not your money Vicky.
If it was just your money for your kid then childless and elderly would pay no school tax. And people with 5 kids would pay more school tax than folks with one child.
But none of that is the case.
The child less, 1 kid and 5 kid households all chip in at the same rate.
Perhaps some of the child’s sponsors would like to see their money stay in their community.
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Vicky. you point has a lot of merit, but the situation you cite is not the usual one. the usual situation is that you would not be able to go to that other school because it would not have room for you. When schools around me were rebuilt, expanded, or modernized, they were deliberately made to NOT hold enough students so that students from failing schools nearby would not be able to transfer there.
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One word I don’t want to read or hear spoken again in 2013 is ‘flexibility’.
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Any choice is better than none.
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Unless, for example, you have only one public school option and it’s a good school, compared to a situation where you have multiple options and they’re all bad.
I don’t mean to be an ass, but choice isn’t necessarily or inherently good.
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Schools choose, not families.
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I respectfully disagree.
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The governor and the legislature have apparently been planning this move for a long time. The governor has admitted to knowing about the bill for a few days prior to this “surprise” from the conference committee. The Republicans on the conference committee called a recess and returned with a 27-page bill that included the tax credit for students in failing schools to attend non-failing public and private schools. No 27-page bill just gets written during a coffee/potty break. It must have been sitting in a drawer waiting for this opportunity to slide it in at the last minute.
The original bill was to give schools the ability to tailor graduation and accountability requirements for their own communities’ needs (to create what our state super calls “Innovation Systems”), and this new bill still allows for that. But now the bill also allows for essentially a voucher system. There is no requirement that non-failing public or private schools must take in students from failing schools, but you can get a tax credit if you do get into these schools. Interestingly, it specifically bans charter schools and does not provide the same tax credit for homeschooling.
But, really, the big deal of this bill that no one is talking about is that corporations can get a tax break for contributing to a newly created fund that gives scholarships to students from these failing schools to transfer out. So now, nonfailing public and private schools can get paid by this fund to take in students from failing schools. So, I wonder what type of students will be allowed in to these fortunate schools – athletes? whiz kids? What about the special education kid who can’t read? I think the only kids this gives choice to are those who have parents who will fight for them and those who can benefit their new school in some way. Essentially, these kids will be used for someone else’s benefit.
Why not give a tax break to corporations to give money to struggling public schools to buy computers or to pay for their teachers to have professional learning time? Why not fund courses in high-need areas like engineering or medicine in these failing schools? Instead of creating some slush fund, why not let corporations form partnerships with their local schools to raise up the quality of instruction and the integrity/safety of the learning environment? I think if this bill set up a program like that, the public schools would end up being better, which would bring more corporations to Alabama, which would bring more jobs and more opportunity. This bill will do nothing to make that happen.
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What you describe is the hallmark of an ALEC-orchestrated Shock-&-Awe Sneak Attack. If your students handed in papers printed off Wikipedia so slap-dashedly that the WP logo is still on the pages, then you’d have no qualms about putting a big red “F” on top of them, if not initiating more extreme disciplinary action — but our State legislators have gotten so addicted to Legislative Hamburger Helper™ right off the shelves from ALEC that they don’t even bother to read the bills anymore before passing them.
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