Andy Spears, publisher of the Tennessee Education Report, explains how voucher forces finally passed a bill in Tennessee.
The FBI is investigating how one vote flipped at the last minute.
But no matter the outcome of these investigations, backers of school privatization can claim public policy victory. It took a new governor, an unscrupulous house speaker, and untold dark money dollars, but after six attempts, Tennessee now has a school voucher plan—one that could shift more than $300 million away from public schools in the state.
The lesson from Tennessee is clear: Advocates for public education face privatization forces with vast resources and patience. The fight is going to be a long one.
Funny thing about these FBI investigations. Years ago, the FBI swooped into Gulen offices in Ohio, carted away many boxes, and nothing more was heard from them.
And then there’s Ben Chavis of the Oakland (CA) American Indian Model Schools, the darling of conservatives, the guy who replaced all the American Indian students with Asians and got the state’s highest scores. He was arrested after a state audit found that he had diverted nearly $4 million to his and his wife’s bank account, much of it federal money. He recently got off with one year of probation, no punishment for his theft, because he had done such good work in education. Vielka MacFarlane, head of the Celerity charter chain in California, admitted embezzling $3.2 million and was sentenced to 30 months in jail. She dealt with state authorities, not federal ones. Maybe she was sentenced, and Chavis got off with only probation because his schools had higher test scores?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THANK YOU, Diane. Another day, another HORROR re: Charter Schools.
“The ads included text that listed the lawmaker’s name and said they “failed to stand with Donald Trump and Gov. Bill Lee, siding against Tennessee families and their right to access a high-quality public education.””
This add is typical. The sales pitch, all that there is is sales pitch to these people, is that choice is freedom, and to oppose choice is to oppose freedom. Except, of course, if that choice happens to be in conference with your doctor. In that case you must be restricted lest you rob a fetus of its right to grow up and be deprived of its civil liberties by a zelotinas mass.
I will tell my conservative friends to throw the bums out, but they will continue to vote these corrupt bargainers into office (with apologies to Anfrew Jackson’s famous words).
Funny how we never see this kind of extraordinary effort on behalf of public school students.
Did anyone bother to get anything done for the other 97% of students in the state this year, or were they ignored again?
Public school families should review the work of their state legislature and see what they accomplished on behalf of public school students in a given session.
If your state government is dominated by ed reformers you’ll find little or nothing that benefits public school students or is even relevant to them, other than programs having to do with gun violence or drug abuse.
Ask yourself what this says about how ed reformers view your children- gun violence and drug abuse- and ask why this “movement” is so relentlessly negative towards public school students? Is it an ideological bias against their schools? If so, is it fair to public school families that we’re paying thousands of public employees who do absolutely nothing on behalf of 90% of students?
we not only pay them, they use our tax money for full coverage healthcare
Yes, the fight is going to be a very LONG one, because these power-hungry, totally corrupt in every way extremist billionaires die and leave their brainwashed and programed children to continue the war again the U.S. Constitution, the public sector, labor unions, and public education to the next generation.
For instance, Charles Koch’s son is already stepping up and taking over the Koch family business of destroying a Constitutional Republic called the United States with an agenda of power and greed.
Robert Mercer has already passed his burn-everything-to-the-ground-and-start-over agenda to his daughter to continue rebuilding the world he wants.
Will Bill Gates children continue his war to destroy civilization, too?
The Wal-Mart Walton family is already into its second generation. Will the third generation of Waltons continue the legacy or wreck-and-ruin started by their grandfather?
Did you know that ancient imperial China had the perfect solution to corrupt oligarchs like those listed above and all the others that are crawling around out there?
When a new dynasty swept into power to replace the former dynasty that had become corrupt, the families of the previous corrupt dynasty’s leaders were eradicated like they were a viral disease. It was the only way to get rid of them so they wouldn’t return to infect the culture again.
Sam Walton was a graduate of public schools. Some of his children also went to public schools.
Why do they hate them?
Why do they hate them?
I think the Waltons hate public schools because of the long extremist conservative war to demonize alleged “liberals” until “liberal” became a hated, dirty word, and during that long, never-ending war of misinformation, false conspiracy theories and lies, public school teachers were painted by extremist conservatives as liberals … that had to go.
To get rid of the influence of all those alleged “liberal” public school teachers on the nation’s children, the Waltons decided they had to get rid of the public schools.
And here is one piece published by The American Consevative that proves my theory.
“Liberal Bias STarts Long BEfore College”
… “In my own experience, during my years at a public high school, I had a teacher who aired his left-leaning political views on a daily basis, during class hours, when we were supposed to be learning biology. I can remember sitting in the back of the class with my fists clenched asking myself, “What are we learning right now besides what he thinks about politics?” …
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/liberal-bias-starts-long-before-college/
Except, I never had an experience like the one that American Conservative piece alleges exists. I never had any experience similar to the one in that piece when I was a K-12 student, a college student, or as a public school teacher for thirty years.
Question: Gov Lee came to my university to give his state of the union where he annmounced hius voucher program. In the back stood a guy who started clapping when Lee talked about vouchers. This induced the whole room (about 3-400 people) clapping. How do you effectively react to this?
The guy was clearly placed their on purpose, maybe he was even payed to do what he was doing. Should he be called out?
Here is the John Oliver piece mentioned in the article. I guess this describes TN politicians well.
The $300 million that is supposed to be taken away from public schools in TN is not well specified in the article. What is known is that at least $120 million a year will be the cost of the voucher program (for now), and we can easily guess, where the money will be coming from.
My guess is that the cost of vouchers in TN will be deducted from the public school budget.
That’s the way it usually works.
Yes, they always try to say “it’s coming from a different pile of money”, but then it ends up coming from the public school budget. As it has to be, btw, because that’s the purpose of privatization: use public money to fund private programs.