Dr. Yohuru Williams, scholar and dean of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, writes in The Progressive about the sleight of hand played by advocates of school choice.
The choice they offer is actually a “Hobson’s Choice,” meaning no choice at all. If you leave your public school, you defund it, harming the education of those who remain. You won’t get a voucher large enough for the best private schools. You may get into a charter school but there is no assurance they will keep you.
It is a hoax. It is backed by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, evil ALEC, and others who long to destroy the public sector.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Crossposted at: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/National-School-Choice-We-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Alec_Choice_Education_Fraud-180124-774.html
with this comment:
Go. Read the truth about what is happening under your nose as the Trump circus diverts our attention from what America needs. Read Diane Ravitch ” Commonweal Magazine’s” essay — https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/reform-reform
is a discussion about ‘the politics of education’ in today’s world, and the book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools “How Not to Fix Our Public Schools.”
It begins by reminding us of what the corporate reformers don’t talk about: “the catastrophic impact of budget cuts, child poverty, racial segregation, bloated budgets for testing, increased class size, scripted curricula, teachers’ loss of professional autonomy, the absence of special-needs children and nonnative English speakers from charter schools, and the diversion of public funds to pay dividends to charter-school investors. As in health care and the prison system, what is called privatization is really a euphemism for crony capitalism–plutocrats supping at the public trough. ”
“But RAVITCH KNOWS that in order to take on the privatizers, argument alone is not enough. She first has to challenge them on their own ground: numbers.”
Go! Learn! before an ignorant citizenry allows our democracy to be utterly destroyed.
Yohuru williams.
Have a Good Day Norm Scott
>
School Choice is a FRAUD.
Medical and Dental Care in this country is a travesty, too.
BUT! In the environment created, if you DON’T use your voucher to move your child to a charter that can (and will) punt out kids who cause trouble and use up more than the minimal amount of resources, you condemn your child to schooling in the “dumping ground” of public school, where all the charter castoffs and “problem children” have to go. So you’re left being almost obligated to participate in the system that turns public schools into dumping grounds, unless you feel so strongly about it that you are willing to sacrifice your own children. And the parents willing to sacrifice their own kids for the good of public schools will be few and far between…
You describe a sadly truer and truer world in an increasing number of inner cities: kids who don’t do well in school for a variety of reasons end up lumped together inside their low-income neighborhoods’ fewer and fewer all-student-inclusive truly public schools. Ironically, although perhpas very strategically, these are the very children which NCLB initially set out to “help.”
Not sure that it sells better, but I often call charter schools, “vampire education.”
Charters suck money out of public schools.
If they worked well, why can’t they raise their own money, as other parochial schools do?