Investigative journalist Jennifer Berkshire visited Texas to find out how the Trump-DeVos agenda of vouchers is being received. Not well, she found. In rural and suburban areas, parents are not eager to abandon their public schools.
She writes:
Keller, Texas—On the same night that President Trump invoked the specter of “failing government schools” in his State of the Union address, Texas Republican Giovanni Capriglione was working hard to establish his public school bona fides. Elected to the Texas House as part of the 2012 Tea Party wave, Capriglione reminded voters here in Keller, an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, that he was a product of public schools, his wife is too, and that his children attend them now. Grade by grade, he named his favorite teachers.
While Trump used his pulpit to make clear his administration’s contempt for public schools, Capriglione wooed the voters he hopes will send him back to the state legislature with calls for more generous school funding, less standardized testing, and more rigorous oversight of charter schools.
Why such disparate messaging?
In a word: elections. In 2018 Texas Democrats flipped 12 formerly Republican legislative seats, half in the fast-growing region around Dallas and Fort Worth known as the Metroplex. While the Texas version of the blue wave was fueled in part by enthusiasm for the Senate candidacy of Beto O’Rourke, Democrats also ran hard against what they characterized as the GOP’s antipathy toward public education. Voters ejected several school voucher advocates, while candidates who ran as supporters of public schools were rewarded. And while Trump is beloved among rural Texans, they are not fans of his signature education issue, “education freedom,” aka sending taxpayer funds to private and religious schools.
“Our rural communities are knit together by their public schools,” says Pastor Charles Johnson, head of the public education advocacy group Pastors for Texas Children. “It’s why they tend to oppose privatization, no matter who is pushing it.”
A similar dynamic is playing out in other key 2020 states. Even as Trump tries to lure back disaffected suburban moderates and hold on to his loyal rural supporters, his administration is peddling an education agenda that is increasingly under fire in states that are essential to his reelection bid. The deep divide between what such voters want for their schools and what Trump and state-level Republicans are offering presents an opportunity for Democrats to build on their 2018 gains, and perhaps even deny Trump a second term
Trouble may also be brewing in Ohio, she writes, where overzealous Republican legislators extended vouchers into suburban districts and are feeling a strong pushback.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yesterday, Ohio Gov. Dewine acknowledged that communities don’t want to pay for vouchers so, he plans to tap the same taxpayers at the state level.
But, no business owner making less than $200,000 (3 times the median income) will have to pay because Republican politicians voted to shelter them from state taxes.
Gov. Dewine and the Senate president are Catholic. The Catholic religion is the one that benefits most from the forced taxation on Ohioans.
Jefferson- “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own”.
Republicans have an iron lock on education policies in Ohio and those policies are unfriendly to public schools and especially teacher unions. It is true that the criteria for making a school eligible for edChoice vouchers has reached into the suburban school districts where parents have some political clout but that is far from being enough to stop the Republican policy makers who want to starve public schools while claiming to save children from failing schools. Among other purposes EdChoice vouchers are intended to shore up some Catholic schools and divert attention from the persistent headlines exposing sexual molestation charges against priests.
Agree. Adding, evidently, the Catholic church is teflon coated.
There’s no reason to expect that the highly political USCCB, state Catholic Conferences and, the 60% of white Catholic Trump supporters won’t destroy democracy.
The “many factions”of the church is an excuse to deflect from the power structure that covered-up of child abuse and attacks the common good..
There is a coalition of young idealists in Houston that is pushing back against the Trump agenda. This group supports progressive policies and anything for maintaining the common good. On a recent podcast I heard the chief organizer of the group, a young man named Daniel Cohen, mention that his group has been involved in protests against the state takeover of the Houston schools.https://www.indivisiblehouston.org/about-us/
The students associated with UnKochMyCampus. org also deserve a shout-out.
I think there are two issues- there’s the promotion and marketing of private schools and charter schools over public schools, but there’s also a growing recognition that ed reformers don’t ADD any value to public schools.
There is no positive ed reform agenda for public schools.Nothing.
They’re a double whammy for public schools- they bash public schools and promote their preferred schools, but they ALSO don’t do any work on behalf of students in existing public schools. At some point people start to wonder “why are we paying these people?”
in most cases districts are paying more and more administrative employees simply because public money has been aggressively compromised: the people hired and paid are not needed and do nothing to add value, but the financial floodgates have been opened and the rest is just “result”
I don’t think DeVos,or Trump,or Arne Duncan for that matter, understand public school families. No one thinks public schools are perfect. There’s a LOT of criticism in public school circles and some of it is justified. People actually expect lawmakers and others to work to improve public schools, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable demand to make of state employees.
It’s not just the public school bashing and promotion of private schools in ed reform- it’s the fact that they don’t get anything accomplished re: the public schools most children attend. If we wanted to hire and pay thousands of professional public school critics we could do that- that isn’t why we’re hiring lawmakers and state education employees.
Trump has a decision to make: flip on DeVos and support public schools and give Betsy back the millions she probably bribed him with (wired from one offshore account to another) or support Besty, keep the money and hopefully, for America, lose the 2020 election big time.