Arizona Republicans hate public schools. Even though 85% of the children in the state attend public schools, the Republican legislators seize every opportunity to pay for alternatives to public schools.
Now they want students who enroll in out-of-state private schools to have vouchers paid for by the taxpayers of Arizona.
Last year, the Legislature tried to make vouchers available to every student in the state, but a grassroots coalition demanded a referendum, and the voucher plan was overwhelmingly defeated by 65%-35%.
That should be a loud signal to the GOP that controls the state. But they don’t care what the voters think. They listen only to Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers. That is who they truly serve. They are the puppet-masters. The Republican members of the Arizona legislature are the puppets. They don’t give a hoot about the voters.
Since the defeat of vouchers last November, the Republicans have introduced three bills to expand the voucher program.
They take their orders from ALEC, DeVos, her American Federation for Children, and Charles Koch and his Americans for Prosperity. Not the public. Not the voters.
For their hatred of public schools, for their contempt for democracy, I place the Republican majority of the Arizona Legislature on the Wall ofShame.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The main requirement for receiving Ripofflicken graft is guarantees of kickbacks, often in advance.
Vouchers are Job One in ed reform now. They don’t work on anything else. If they only work on behalf of 5% of students one would think we could hire far, far fewer of them. How many adults does it take to send state funding to private entities? We could replace all of them with a competent bookkeeper.
Excellent riddle which should be repeatedly asked far and wide: “How many adults does it take to send state funding to private entities?”
At least in Arizona the public vote can check the legislature and governor. In Florida Governor DeSantis violates the state constitution without allowing the public to have any say in the matter. Every manipulative change comes from the top without any way to check DeSantis.
I wonder what type of out of state education these vouchers can buy. I didn’t see any mention of the dollar amounts of these vouchers, just the groups eligible to use them. Unless they are for large amounts, I doubt anyone is going to purchase much education with these ESA vouchers.
The narrowness of the ed reform echo chamber approach to education is really harming students in public schools, who are utterly ignored.
I’m reading the ed reform responses to Bernie Sanders education proposal, and there is NO analysis of what it means for students in public schools. The entire ed reform focus is on what it means for charters and vouchers. Once again, public school students do not exist.
Why are we paying so many people to supposedly work on “education policy” when they contribute absolutely no value to public school students and work exclusively on behalf of charter and private school students? Shouldn’t it be 90% public school student advocates and 10% charter and voucher advocates, to reflect reality?
Instead they spend 90% of their time on charter and private school students and 10% of their time on public school students. This is a bad government. It isn’t at all representative of US students and families.
If you follow the money, in both directions, you can bet the main thing guiding Ripofflickan funding decisions is the percentage of payout coming back to the campaign coffers of the funders. That is why the treat public schools as a funding sinkhole — no institution with a modicum of accountability can play their payola game and get away with it. They don’t really hate public schools, they just don’t count them as players at all.
Some hate public schools on principle–that principle being that any public good that does not line their pockets is criminal. Others see some value in public schools as dumping grounds for the the barely educable rabble not destined to be good little corporate do-bee Proles.
Follow the money. Education Week bills itself as the “Education News Site of Record,” but it has become little more than an Ed Deform PR firm. It reminds me of the Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics and Trumpeteering, which is what that paper has become since it was purchased by Morloch Murdoch. EW serves up vast amounts of Ed Deform propaganda in support of charters, depersonalized learning, standardized testing, VAM, school grading, “data-driven” numerology, the “America’s public schools have failed” myth, and so on and, like Faux News, throws a weak quotation from someone on the opposite side, somewhere three-quarters of the way down the article to give the appearance of “balance.” But the truth is that EW if ALL IN with Ed Deform. It ASSUMES that the high-stakes standardized testing is valid and reliable (it’s not). It can be counted on to refer, completely uncritically, to the puerile, backward Gates/Coleman bullet list as “higher standards.” It’s the “Vichy Education News Site of Record.”
Gates is now setting his sights on higher education. He and his hand picked minions are going to determine the “value” of a college degree. We all know how this ends! https://www.chronicle.com/article/Everyone-Wants-to-Measure-the/246301
What is the “value” of the fact that I had a professor in college who turned me on to William Butler Yeats and another who turned me on to Wallace Stevens and have spent many delightful hours, since, reading their work? What is the value of the fact that my own writing styles owe debts to theirs? What is the value of the fact that I had a hippie English teacher in 9th grade who turned me on to Herman Hesse and that I learned from him about noncontingency and so, when I read Sartre, years later, whose work is notoriously difficult, I understood him, mostly, and have become something of a Sartre scholar? What is the value of the fact that much of my own philosophical perspective has been formed in an agon, CONTRA Sartre? What is the value of the fact that these folks, and a hundred others, taught me, via the passion they had for their subjects, for their peculiar enthusiasms, to love learning? Is that going to be on the Gates/Coleman/Pearson standardized test to tell me and others whether I am worthy to receive crumbs from the tables of the oligarchs? My reaction there is not printable on Diane’s blog.
The hubris of these men!!!
So much depends upon
A Bob Sheperd rant
Glazed with apoplexy
Directed at the white chickens
Too many of these Proles are getting educations when most of them are not of our kind and rightly should be serving lattes to Mr. Gates on the verandah, and educating them beyond their station is very costly. So, we need an accountability system to ensure that those who will be useful to Microsoft get from college what will be useful to Microsoft and only what will be useful to Microsoft. Having played so large a role in the Coring of American K-12 education, Pearson has a great role to play, there, in the future. Via depersonalized education, we can command and control what’s taught and who gets advancement. Just as it should be in an oligarchy. All your base are belong to us.
Oh my, Roy. That is BEAUTIFUL. LMAO! I am honored.
Young people coming out of these elite schools are getting a heavy dose of “disruption” strategies. I’ve read it in my husband’s Wharton magazines. The come out planning to to blow up the current system or practice. Most of the time it is an on-line plan to make money exploiting those working at the bottom of their scheme like Uber or something similar, ie the “gig economy.”
I have not done research, but I will bet that most of the beneficiaries of these vouchers are on-line institutions. The model I see for higher education is on-line. I figure that the money goes to profit-seeking institutions that enroll students from an office somewhere.
Why would the vouchers (I assume this is about high school vouchers) not follow the same path that today leads many people to get their degree on line. I have a friend who graduated this spring from the University of Tennessee, having only been on campus three times. I am sure she earned her way, knowing her, but how much did she miss by this process?
Of course, the aforementioned group of Kochs, Gates, et. al. grasp the significance of saving tons of tax money by not having brick and mortar (that is all a school is, right?). I am sure they also envision an AI component of education wherein student attitudes may be assessed for danger to their personal utopia.
It’s been twenty years or so since I read a speech by Gates, which I wish I could find now, in which he commented that the cost of education as done in the US now was almost all in a) facilities and b) teacher payrolls. Prophet and profiteer, he was foreseeing a time when these costs could be dramatically reduced via depersonalized education for the Proles. The children of the oligarchical class will get teachers. The children of the rabble will get CURATED bits and bytes. The CURATED part is key. Here’s the thing about having people in charge of educating the young: they have their own ideas. Can’t have that.
Roy. I loved your tribute to Bob based on a poem I love.
This has a special meaning for me, Laura, because many, many years ago, when I was a middle-schooler, a young teacher told my class to close our eyes and SEE what she was going to read to us. Then she read aloud William Carlos William’s exquisite little poem. This struck me with the force of revelation. It was an epiphany, like what Helen Keller experienced when she learned that W.A.T.E.R. stood for water: You could use words to perform magic–to bring a little world into being, a world that could be experienced in the imagination. This is what another great poet, Dereck Walcott, teaches at the beginning of his magnificent lyric “Map of the New World: Archipelagoes:
“At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.”
Abracadabra. Rain.
cx: Derek Walcott, ofc
I think I was an adult when I first encountered the poem, perhaps in a little book called How Does a Poem Mean?
The major point of Ciardi’s book gets to one of the central problems with Ed Deform: you can get a lot of “data” and miss, entirely, the value (or lack thereof) of the experience.
One of my daughter’s first excitements was over Helen Keller, back before she could read. We read to her out of a little children’s book of biographies about Keller, and she got real excited about her. My wife, who organizes all the good things that happen in our family, organized a trip to Tuscumbia, AL to see Miracle Worker, about the interaction Bob describes above. It is an outdoor drama at the Keller House. We got to see the pump where the water splashed on her hands and caused a light to come on. What surprised me was the crowd of young girls who came out for the show. Half the crowd was there because of some girl between the age of 3 and 10. If there is anyone who believes that role models are not important for kids, give them my address.
Amen!
Roy, BTW, has a daughter who, at the age of–what is it? twelve? thirteen?–is already a fine, fine poet. Much promise. I suspect that she has learned a lot from the old man.
And her mom. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up with the family for dinner and we spent quite a number of hours discussing many things. Great folk, yes Roy even with that wonderful Southern accent! 😉 !
That’s awesome, Duane!!! I am envious and extraordinarily pleased to hear that.
Accent?
The linked article points out that the children are being used as pawns to increate support for Devos’ choice programs. I would not be surprised if this mischief is cultivated in other states.
Malarial mosquitoes never tire in their murderous quest to suck blood from every creature they can attack and infect them with malaria and other viral diseases.
The analogy is pretty good. They have this one drive. In the case of the oligarchs, it’s money and the power that money brings. And the infectious disease? That’s not a matter of intention on the part of the mosquito or the Ed Deformer–the champion of “higher standards” (pardon me while I laugh) and high-stakes-testing and school grading and VAM and other such nonese. In the cases of both the mosquito and the Ed Deformer, the diseases are unintended consequencse of which they are utterly oblivious. The Ed Deformers are oblivious of how the Powerpointing of US K-12 education via the puerile, regressive Gates/Coleman bullet list has narrowed and distorted US pedagogy and curricula and robbed an entire generation of humane education in the English language arts. It’s a dramatic and demonstrable consequence, but the Deformers aren’t in classrooms, and they aren’t in educational publishing houses (except at the very top), so they don’t see the devastation that they have wrought. They do see the rivers of green rolling in from sales of computers and depersonalized education software and online charters and high-stakes tests. The high-stakes tests have kept US educational publishers afloat, barely, over the past 20 years when K-12 budgets have been cut so much. The publishers KNOW that they are pulling off a scam, but it’s the only thing keeping them above water.