Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker and the state legislature expanded the voucher program despite its failure in Milwaukee. To zealots, evidence doesn’t matter. In some small communities, the voucher money is subtracted from the local public school to subsidize students already enrolled in religious schools. The many will see their education impoverished to subsidize those who never attended public schools. Others are fearful that the fabric of community life will be injured by this diversion of public dollars and civic support to private schools. Walker is a favorite of the Koch brothers, which may explain his eagerness to destroy public schools. The Koch’s backed him as a candidate for president in 2016, but he didn’t last long. His love of vouchers is destabilizing communities across the state.
“When Superintendent Sue Kaphingst moved to Chilton less than a year ago, she marveled at how the northeastern Wisconsin community rallied around its local school district.
“Nestled to the east of Lake Winnebago about 75 miles north of Milwaukee, Chilton and its 3,900 residents felt cohesive. Football stars acted in the high school musical. Parents, students and school board members created a yarn art installation on the Chilton Middle School lawn to demonstrate that they were all connected. The high school theater was built with millions from a local family who owned pet supplies company Kaytee Products.
“But there’s a new development here and in other communities across Wisconsin that will test those ties: school vouchers. Four years after the GOP-led Legislature approved a statewide voucher program, the number of private schools registered to receive taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies has sharply increased. Together with the longstanding Milwaukee voucher program and the more recent Racine voucher program, close to 300 private, predominantly religious schools from Lake Superior to the Illinois border are poised to receive taxpayer funding for an estimated 33,750 students this fall, according to Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget.“For the first time, the Chilton School District could face either an enrollment drop because children will use a voucher to attend the local Catholic school they couldn’t otherwise afford, or more likely, the district will have to raise taxes to fund vouchers for children who already attend the private school.
“Together, the state’s voucher programs are expected to cost about $263 million in 2017-’18, according to Walker’s budget proposal.
“While President Donald Trump is pitching to boost federal spending on school choice programs by $1.4 billion — a down payment on his promise of $20 billion — Wisconsin is already demonstrating the complexities of expanding private-school choice to exurban America. Now that private schools outside of densely populated Milwaukee and Racine can tap into voucher funding, new tensions are bubbling up between religious conservatives eager to offer more students a religious-based education and district advocates who fear losing resources to private schools now competing for the same pot of public dollars.
“There’s only so much money,” said Kaphingst, the Chilton superintendent. “You’re taking from one for the other.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
STAGECOACH/HIGHWAY ROBBERY!
This country is going to have to face this awfulness at some point and it won’t be pretty.
Americans are facing a HUGE HEIST by the top .01%ers in every area of endeavor.
Buyer/User BEWARE!
LikeLike
scott walker terd in plain english he sold himself out to the koch bros who are just as miserable as one can get as the kock bros are in their late 80s now i believe so they just want to wreck havoc on the rest of us before they depart.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Robbing Peter to pay Paul has never been a good financial strategy.
LikeLike
Taxpayers are finding that they will be paying more to subsidize the education of those that are already wealthy enough to send their children to private school while the public schools operate in a diminished capacity. All this “choice,” for which there is no evidence of academic value, costs more. The working class pays more to subsidize those with more money.
LikeLike
Because no one cared what happened to the public school kids and families.
Wisconsin ed reformers eradicated teachers unions so public schools probably didn’t have a single advocate speak on their behalf at the statehouse. The charter lobbyists were there. The voucher lobbyists were there. No pro-public school representatives at the table means public schools get screwed.
Maybe Wisconsin public school families will wake up- ed reform offers nothing of value to families who use the unfashionable public schools and sometimes harms them.
Our schools are simply not valued in this “movement”. Lawmakers take us for granted.
LikeLike
Wisconsin will drop in national rankings like Michigan and Ohio have.
Ed reform doesn’t improve public schools. It either replaces public schools or harms public schools but “improve” isn’t even on the menu.
Read any of their website or listen to any of their gatherings and forums and meetings. If public schools are mentioned at all it’s to compare them unfavorably to charter schools or private schools. They simply don’t support existing public schools. They don’t even pretend to.
Fire them and hire some people who support your schools. Do it quick or you’ll end up like Ohio and Michigan.
LikeLiked by 1 person
EXACTLY STATED and worth repeating: “Ed reform doesn’t improve public schools. It either replaces public schools or harms public schools but “improve” isn’t even on the menu.”
LikeLike
Politicians in DC and statehouses are confident that public school families can be taken for granted. After all, THEY’RE not interested in your schools so they assume you aren’t.
THEY don’t value your schools so they assume you don’t, either. THEY never give a thought to the unfashionable public school sector and no one they talk to or interact with does either, so they don’t know you support your local school.
Show them they made a political miscalculation and that 90% of families can’t be ignored without political ramifications, like throwing the bums out. You’re the majority- BY FAR. Show them at the voting booth. They’ll miraculously discover a burning interest in public schools- you watch.
LikeLike
None of the tens of ed reform groups even considered this:
“A new study puts a price tag on this.
In one North Carolina district, officials had $500 to $700 less to spend on each of its remaining students because 15 percent of local students attended charter schools in the 2013-14 school year, according to the research. That burden falls on the district because some costs, like building maintenance, don’t immediately drop even when there are fewer students to teach”
They didn’t consider this because public school families simply aren’t considered AT ALL in all these grand privatization plans.
They forgot about the effects of their laser-like focus on privatization re: 90% of kids in the country. That goes beyond “echo chamber” and “capture”. It’s nuts.
Are current public school students just the designated losers in this scheme? Sort of an unlucky group who happened to attend public schools when the decision makers in government decided to abandon them? Maybe they should have told people this when they were all running for office? Would they have been elected had they told people the plan was to “phase out” public schools ? No. They would not have. So they decided to not mention it and hope public school families were too dumb or disconnected to notice.
They take us for granted.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/01/09/the-cost-of-charter-growth-new-research-estimates-the-price-tag-for-districts/
LikeLike
Wisconsin ed reformers disregard public school families but Illinois ed reformers really win the award for this year.
They held up funding for every public school student in the state until they got vouchers.
It was if those families didn’t exist: “they’ll wait! We’re focusing on private schools this session!”
Unbelievable. Complete and utter disregard for 90% of families. 90% of families in that state have somehow ended up without a single effective advocate in the state legislature. It is GROSSLY unfair. It’s malpractice. They ALL should lose their jobs.
LikeLike
Divided We Fall (though a few will profit handsomely in the meantime).
LikeLike
In my area (Buffalo) the public schools provide some services for the parochial schools such as PT, OT, Speech and some transportation. If public money goes to these schools, perhaps these services should come out of that pot of money.
LikeLike
First, gated communities; now, gated schools. We’re witnessing what happens when national cohesion disintegrates. Public schools used to be the engines of national cohesion, but they’ve abdicated that role. Instead of teaching about our shared American heritage (warts can be part of that story, but not the whole story), they’ve narrowed their focus to skills such as teaching how to find supporting details in a text. I blame the benighted ed schools, along with NCLB, for gutting the nation-building content from the curriculum. All that unites us now is Disney and Amazon. Psycho ministers and hate radio are able to build a mutant “American” tribe because schools leave a vacuum in kids’ souls (Christianist voucher schools will buttress this warped version of Americanness). Americans are not a natural tribe like the French or Japanese; we don’t have ethnicity to unite us; our nation must be artificially cultivated and unified through public education –through an internalized appreciation of our Founding Fathers’ achievement, knowledge of US geography and history, appreciation of American literature and art…. We’re neglecting this mission and substituting a debased version of education –one that promises fungible “skills” that graduates can hawk to Google or Amazon when they enter the job market, but nothing else. E.D. Hirsch “gets” this; no one else in the bankrupt education school establishment seems to.
LikeLike
I believe that you will find that when white communities have white neighborhood schools, that the citizens prefer publicly-operated schools. When the predominately white neighborhoods have schools that are predominately minority in character, then the white residents prefer school choice. See this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/12/progressives-are-undermining-public-schools/548084/
LikeLike
You may be right, and this may be a symptom of schools’ failure to cultivate a robust, non-racial American identity. Schools are alma maters –soul mothers –and they need to take that role more seriously.
LikeLike
The best solution is truly integrated schools full of diversity but they are becoming an endangered species. Its back to segregation and separate but equal disguised as choices for the public good.
LikeLike
I find myself in agreement with most of the points set forth in that article. (Please, though I did not write it, so don’t say that I am right). Although I am 1000% in favor of fully integrated, non-racial schools, I do not necessarily feel that it is the job of a school to be an engine for social manipulation.
The function of education is to instill knowledge into the students. Period. If the school does not reflect some sociologist’s vision of ethnic diversity, that really does not matter. (Keep in mind, that I am a veteran of an inter-racial marriage).
The sad fact, is that K-12 schools in our nation, are getting more segregated. There are many reasons for this, that have nothing to do with race. One thing is the de-industrialization of our cities. With the collapse of jobs for lower-educated (minority) people, the cities decay. The schools go down the tubes. Why should well-educated whites remain in a blighted area? Then the cities “gentrify”, and low-income poorly-educated minorities are unable to afford to live there. This is what is happening in St.Louis, Chicago, and Alexandria VA (where I live).
LikeLike
What happened to the progressive traditions of Robert LaFollette in Wisconsin?
LikeLike
Like most liberal/progressive ideas and traditions, they ran up against the real world. Our nation tried to create a “utopia” with LBJs Great Society, and other government programs. Most failed. Some, like welfare and AFDC produced a permanent “underclass”, and decimated the black family.
The road to hell, is paved with good intentions.
LikeLike
In NH, SB 193’s earlier versions would have provided public funds for students already enrolled in private and parochial schools… and that is the end game in all these voucher programs. The “watered down” version of the bill is poised to pass, but based on what I read here it will set the stage for the ultimate “choice” bill that provides revenues to families who have opted out of public schools. I implore NH readers to stay on top of this bill and continue reaching out to your legislators as the financial impact of they bill is determined in the coming weeks.
As this post indicates, once a legislature passes a “watered down” choice bill, passing a more comprehensive bill in the future is easier and worse, once such a bill is passed it guarantees the GOP an expanded base of voters. Here’s how:
If a family with three children in parochial school is on the fence politically, it gets off the fence pretty quickly if they learn that one party (the GOP), is willing to pass laws that give them a check to help pay for their child’s education in the name of “choice”… and once they’ve received that check, the other party who wants to repeal that law is perceived as wanting to “take something away”. The GOP is gambling that their de facto giveaway to private school parents will assure them of a voting bloc for generations to come. The fact that the bloc comes at the expense of the unity of communities doesn’t seem to matter. The GOP has shown us at the national level that they favor the billionaires over everyone else. They are showing us at the state level how they will sustain support of middle class voters who prefer religious schools over public education at the expense of those who cannot afford to use the “vouchers” to “escape” the underfunded public schools that will remain in place. At both levels, compassion is taking a back seat to the maintenance of political power.
LikeLike
You say Q . In some small communities, the voucher money is subtracted from the local public school to subsidize students already enrolled in religious school END Q
Isn’t that the way a voucher program is supposed to work? Parents either remove their children from the publicly-operated school system, or do not enroll their children there in the first place. Then the parents enroll the children in the school of their choice (religious or secular). Then the public money (which was extracted from the public, in form of taxes) is sent to the parents in the form of a voucher. The voucher is then redeemed at the religious/secular school. (much the way that a food stamp voucher, is redeemed at a food pantry).
The public(tax) money that was formerly going to the (public) school that the child attended, is now going to the non-public school, that the child is attending.
You make this sound like something evil or sinister, when in fact, it is the entire meaning and purpose of the school choice program.
The fact that some children were attending a non-public school, prior to the enactment of the voucher program, is irrelevant.
LikeLike