Jersey Jazzman, aka New Jersey teacher Mark Weber, analyzes the false promises of choice advocates.
He demonstrates their repeated claims that charters and vouchers will give poor kids “the same choices” as rich kids.
This is nonsense.
Wealthy Right-wingers have been trying to destroy public education for decades. This is their latest hoax.
The private schools where rich families send their children cost between $35,000-$60,000. A voucher is seldom equal to the cost of public school tuition. Its promoters tout vouchers as a money-saver. In North Carolina, for example, a voucher is worth less than $5,000. What kind of schooling does that pay for? A school with uncertified teachers, and a Bible Belt curriculum.
That’s not the same schooling that rich kids get.
Charter schools? The day-lilies of American education. The big corporate chains administer tough discipline. Kids are punished if their shirt tail isn’t tucked in. They get demerits if they talk in the hall. Kids sit in front of computers for half the day. This is not what rich kids get.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Every nation that has jumped on the choice bandwagon has regretted the decision. Choice creates more problems than it solves. Choice systems create tiered options for students based on race, class and academic talent. It also enhances segregation.
Choice under funds the public schools and leaves them with the most problematic and expensive to educate. Choice really allows the private companies to cherry pick the cheapest and most capable students to educate, and they exclude the expensive and problematic.
As Jersey Jazzman notes all choices are not equal. So-called choice does not provide a “choice” that is equivalent to an expensive private school. So-called choice also provides lots of opportunities for private companies to game the choice system to the detriment of the public schools.
Yes: all choices are not equal, and some choices exist simply to keep things very unequal
If yew live in Florida an want to spend yore voucher wise-like, remember that yew kin enrol yore kids in Bob’s Real Good Florida School, whar they will git a genuwine Bible-based educashun and wont be tawt by Socialists trying to make em transgendered. Use yore Florida voucher, and its abso-bloomin-lutely FREE!!! Bob’s girlfriend Darlene has whipt up some mighty fine curriculums coverin English (the langwidge the Bible was wrote in) and werld HIStory from Creation to the Rapture! So, bring yore kids on down to Bob’s Real Good Florida Skool, conveniently located in the old K-Mart shoping center between Bob’s Gun and Pawn and Wild Wuornoses Adult Novelties. An yore kids will be safe with us, because all are teachers is locked and loaded.
I know that many of yew has been wonderin how thangs is going with the new skool! Wayul, thangs is jist grate. We got seven stoodents an git about $7,500K per from the State vowchurs, so that’s pretty good. It shore does beet tryin to live own Darlene’s disability!
I like this of JJ’s many misleading blurbs as pigeonholing the disingenuity of school-choice promoters: “charter schools are making it possible to do what affluent families have long been able to to do: rescue their children from failing schools.'”
While this may ring true in some places, it’s absolute nonsense in my district, & I would argue, nationally. Excepting only wealthy families in newly-gentrified urban areas, affluent families do not even live in areas with “failing [public] schools”. Their children are zoned for good, & often excellent public schools. Their “choice” for privates is often just about family tradition. For those thinking about it more deeply &/ or stretching a barely-upper-midclass income, it’s about factors such as small classes, surrounding their kids w/high-achieving peers, networking the Old Boys Club, et al. This is in no way parallel to choosing a so-so charter/ voucher school over a terrible zoned public. And a widespread option to do so simply guarantees steadily worse zoned publics.