Yesterday I ran a post about Florida’s tax credit program, which accepts contributions from corporations for vouchers; the corporations get tax credits. The Florida program has raised over $1 billion to provide vouchers for religious and private schools. This is money that the state did not spend on public schools. Call it a rightwing “starve the beast” strategy.
Alabama has a similar program, called the Alabama Opportunity Scholarship Fund. The Fund has a board of seven people. Curiously, four of the seven board members live in Florida.
One of them, John Kirtley, is chairman and founder of Florida’s Step Up for Children program. He is also vice-president of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.
Do you think any of these people have read the research showing that children in voucher programs do worse in school than their peers in public schools?
One thing has become clear in recent years: Ideologues don’t care about evidence.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane: NO–idealogues are idealogues precisely because presented evidence hits the “idea-wall” in their heads. That internal wall not only ignores but also actively rejects anything that conflicts with that set of idea, issuing often in emotions like contempt, before they even have time to think about it (it’s called a scotoma in some of the psychological literature). The better the evidence, the harder the rejection. That evidence falls to the ground (so to speak) without getting even a “hearing.” It’s also called dogmatism (as you probably know) and is extremely hard to break through–breakthrough commonly takes an existential crisis of some kind. And the wall gets higher and harder the more we are invested in the set of “ideas” behind it.
I ran into a Ted Talk (posted to a Huffington Post) that shows a long-term religious zealot talking about her change of heart (link below). She really did break through her dogmatism, but the video shows just how hard it was to do so. Also, I heard the metaphor “they pulled up the ladder” yesterday, referring to many Republicans who have forgotten that they work for “the people.” But Betsy was never even there, where she would have climbed a ladder to pull up. Rather, there are no ladders–she was born already there.
TED TALK Example of Breakthrough
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“One thing has become clear in recent years: Ideologues don’t care about evidence.”
Exactly. That explains why Trump has a draft budget that guts the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This agency operates “moderate orbit” satellites with imaging and data systems needed for analyses of conditions of earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Republicans hate this agency because it is the source of so much climate science. It is also a vital source of information about weather.
NOAA technologies are a legacy from federal investments dating to 1969. I know this because my brother worked on the optical systems for the first Earth Resources Satellites (Landsat program). Some members of Congress want to see the work of NOAA privatized. Steps in that direction have been made, so far on a small scale. Data from private satellites would be proprietary, possibly available for public use for a fee.
This article offers an overview of the work of NOAA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/03/white-house-proposes-steep-budget-cut-to-leading-climate-science-agency/?utm_term=.338cd2107c89
This website has a lot of historical and technical information about Landsat.
http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/baumanpr/geosat2/rs%20landsat/rs-landsat.htm
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So what will happen when the states heavily impacted by hurricanes can’t get sufficient warnings ahead of time any more because of budget cuts at NOAA? I’m kind of thinking that the governors and voters in those states will be screaming.
And ironically, almost all of those states, at least those along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Coast in the South, are very red states.
In these cases, they will get what they voted for.
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Zorba, not related to this at all, but in case you missed it:
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Hahahaha! Thanks, Greg, I missed this one.
Ζητω η Ελλαδα!
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I used to work a telecommunications project at NOAA in Silver Spring, MD. The images used to collect weather and hurricane data are obtained from the GOES (Geo-Stationary Operational Environmental Satellite). see http://www.goes-r.gov/
This program is not impacted by medium orbit satellites.
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We should scrutinize these friendly arrangements in these tax credit “scholarships.” They sound like a bait and switch to get poor students off their rolls. We need to look at the administration of these programs, conflicts of interest as in Arizona’s voucher, and any fishy management company deals. Always follow the money to see who is manipulating and getting paid. Like charters without accountability and oversight, there is opportunity for double dealing and corruption.
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