A story today in the New York Times gives an overview of the rapid advance of voucher programs, now found in various forms in 17 states.
What is missing from the article is context. The defenders of unlicensed education quoted are the heads of the unions and spokesmen for LLC school boards. The advocates for vouchers are referred to as “nonpartisan,” like the far-right American Federation for Children. AFS was created by the wealthy DeVos family in Michigan and has been pushing the demolition of public education for many years.
Also unmentioned is the power behind the scenes: ALEC, the far-right organization that has drafted model legislation for the voucher and tax-credit laws, using their 2,000 state legislators to promote them.
Nor does the article raise the obvious questions: where is President Obama? Where is Arne Duncan? Did Race to the Top, with its promotion of choice to “escape failing public schools” (and go to privately managed charters) aid and abet the voucher movement?
Who will be held accountable for these assaults on a basic institution of our democracy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Move to the hills. I did that for my kids, and I was initially sorry for the lack of options they had with their rural school. Now, since our school is still stuck in the 1950’s, change comes so slowly that by the time anything happens here of consequence, the whole charter school thing will have imploded. Hopefully. We are just struggling to keep it funded.
Where??? I’ll join in.
More on vouchers go here: http://cloakinginequity.com/tag/vouchers/
Yes! Also misleading is the shifting notion of accountability. If expertise equates to parental choice, why doesn’t the same principle apply in Chicago?
Diane – Surely you are speaking directly to the NYT editors about the unbalanced reporting in this article. I have not read it yet. But complain to the public editor at least!
Why would the corporate-owned media tell the truth about the corporate war on public education?
My explanation is a bit different that Mr. Awbrey’s. My speculation is that liberal NYTimes reader/parents want the vouchers to help pay for their private schools in NYC.
I laughed out loud a little bit on that one.
Me too. Don’t know much about the average intelligence of the mythical neo-lib, but all the paleo-libs and all the folks of ornery common sense I know are way too smart not to see down the road on that game. Michiganders voted down vouchers twice already, which is why the Gerrymandering Oligarch Party keeps trying to pull every end-run it can around the voters.
The article quotes Richard Komer from the Institute of justice saying that parent choice is equivalent to accountability. Many parents choose to live in neighborhoods based on how the schools perform. Would we argue that that constitutes as choice and therefore suburban schools should be exempt from accountability? Isn’t accountability what allows the public to make good choices? I’m afraid now that our arguments will have to shift away from no charter schools to accountability in charter schools.
People generally are going to have to wake up to the fact that we live in a society. That we have to check some of our notions of individuality and choice in service of how we will coexist in our community. Do you want to live in a society that has absolutely no standard of education? Where every school building is run like a separate district? Are we abandoning the purpose of education as a means of making American citizens? Some of these policy makers need to go back to kindergarten and learn how to get along with others.
What kills me the most is that after Occupy Wall Street, Affordable Care Act, the Dream Act, and now the dismantling of DOMA America is waking up to the idea of living in a democracy. It just hasn’t transferred over to education. Why?
Diane’s last sentence should more appropriately read: “Who will be held accountable for these assaults on a basic institution of our [socialist] democracy?” The common school was a marvelous thing back in the day when it respected capitalism, but since the 1950’s progressivism in its social democrat and even marxist forms has become the mantra of the public schools. At the University of Michigan School of Education some years ago in a class I was invited to address, the motivation of the students for going into teaching was “social change” and “social justice” not transmitting the intellectual heritage of humankind. Tax payers finally have gotten fed up with utopian statism and where they have the votes are devolving the public school systems because they cannot purge them. I personally would rather have education offered by a common school system open to all, but those systems became irresponsible. What happens when a business becomes irresponsible? It folds up. Likewise public school systems that don’t respect the contribution of individual virtue to life but see everything in terms of the economic environment of student. Pity though.
Public education was never a business and should not be run like one. This kind of thinking is what has caused public education to unravel like it is.
Re: “What happens when a business becomes irresponsible? It folds up.”
Now that’s funny …
I keep asking, “Where’s Obama?” Answer: “His actions show that he is not a supporter of public schools.”
This article led my dad (who knows very little about education matters) to think vouchers must great. We got into a heated discussion about it.