Peter Greene warns us not to let down our guard. DeVos, with the help of the loathsome Ted Cruz, wants to use the pandemic to sneak in $5 billion for vouchers.
Remember that DeVos has not had a new idea for at least thirty years and she is obsessed with taking money away from public schools and giving it to private and religious schools.
Greene writes:
Betsy DeVos has been pitching “Education Freedom” as long as she’s been in office. It’s a tax credit scholarship scheme, which is to say, a voucher program that would blow a $5 billion hole in the federal budget, but would be a real treat for rich folks who A) like private schools better than public ones and B) would rather not pay taxes to the feds.
The Education Freedom pitch has landed with a thud every time. But more recently what has been new about it is that, somehow, DeVos got Senator Ted “Least Loved Man In The Senate” Cruz to pitch it. And right this moment, Cruz is doing what he does best– being an absolute pain in everyone’s ass–and he’s doing it over DeVos’s pet project.
Yesterday, CNN reported that the Senate’s new stimulus bill (which has been a the focus of a spectacular display of GOP dysfunction for months) may be hung up over Cruz’s insistence that the DeVos Voucher Bill be included in the stimulus package.
Peter reminds us of the fact that voters have always overwhelmingly rejected vouchers.
Even in states where vouchers are freely available, tiny numbers of students use them, but the loss of revenue damages public schools that accept all students.
Watch out!
The Network for Public Education will be all over this sneak attack.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The vouchers are the affirmative effect of having ed reformers running public education, but the passive effect is probably larger- along with running political campaigns to expand vouchers, they have done nothing to support or assist the 90% of students and families who use public schools.
It’s a double whammy for public school students- the entire public payroll spends all their time promoting private schools, and also performs no work at all to benefit public school students.
Go look for some kind of positive national plan or effort directed to public school students in ed reform. There are none. Yet they managed to run a political campaign to put in a national voucher program.
Public school students and families are the dead last priority. Always.
They’ll hold up pandemic funding for public school students until their ideological demands on private school funding are met. They do it in every state they operate. Public school students come SECOND to whatever privatization mechanism they’re promoting. Our kids and students have no value in their own right and merit no effort at all except in service to the broader ideological goals.
Twenty years of hiring exclusively out of an ed reform echo chamber means no one lifts a finger on behalf of students in public schools.
In the news this morning, half a million kids in the U.S. have tested positive for the Coronavirus, though only a small percentage of them have been tested. The actual number of kids who are positive is probably MUCH higher.
And in this situation, we are reopening schools across the country as directed by Trump and DeVos.
Insane
There has been, nationwide, a 16 percent increase in diagnosed cases in children in the past two weeks. This was, of course, entirely predictable, and it’s going to get a lot worse.
Funding for public school students and families will be held up until the ed reform demands on vouchers are met.
They did it in Illinois, they did it Florida, and they’ll do it here.
If public school students happen to get anything out of these thousands of public employees it will only be because they used our students as bargaining chips to get their first priority funded- private school students.
In fact, this will be the second round of funding where ed reformers supported the schools they prefer ideologically over public schools- they lobbied for and got PPP funding for charter and private schools. They offered nothing to public school students and have done nothing for them.
The largest beneficiary of such universal vouchers would be the wealthy that already send their children to private schools. These vouchers would mostly be used to fund the education of all the little Donald Trumps of the world, and they would use the money to supplement tuition payments that they can already well afford. Once again, this is a scheme to get the working class to underwrite a benefit to the wealthy.
Poor and working class students would only be able to use these vouchers at cheap religious schools and other schools of dubious quality. This proposal is another tactic that would contribute to mass divisiveness in our already divided country. It would undermine public schools as well as public unions, but, of course, this is exactly what the right wing’s goal is.
Increased funding for vouchers and school choice was a major theme of the recent Repugnican Convention and Trump Fascist Lovefest 2020. By my count, 18 speakers addressed this topic, including Trump, Melania, and ALL of the Trump spawn: Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Tiffany. I went through the transcripts of the four nights and made a list of all of these comments. Trump promised that in a second administration, he would make “school choice” available “to all parents” in the U.S. and that he would ensure that all K-12 student in the U.S. receive instruction in “patriotism” and “American exceptionalism.”
All of the adult Trump spawn, that is, if one uses the term “adult” very loosely
Not sure if this instruction in patriotism will include calling U.S. troops who were maimed or who died serving their country “loosers” and “suckers.” Or maybe only Trump and other enemies of the United States can do that.
cx: losers, ofc
I have to say, I don’t think I’ve seen a better example of the ed reform “movements” complete and utter irrelevance to the 90% of students who attend public schools than this- every public school in the country closed in an unprecedented disaster affecting 50 million families and students and what did this “movement” direct all their energy to?
Funding private schools.
Perfect. That’s the echo chamber in action.
When public schools get through this, and public schools will get through this, with or without the help of ed reformers, let’s make sure and remember who helped. None of the leading lights of the ed reform movement. They were busy penning op eds on whether or not “pandemic pods” indicate that people secretly want all public schools privatized. There isn’t a single public school student or family in this country who would notice if Betsy DeVos and her staff simply stopped coming to work. Utterly useless to 90% of students.
Trump cares only about Trump. DeVos cares only about her Christian fundamentalist agenda.
DeVos has some nerve complaining that public schools are obsolete when she prefers fundamentalist X-tian schools that are stuck in the 17th century. She herself has learned nothing new in 40 years.
precisely
People can look for themselves to see the amount of effort expended on public school students:
http://www.ed.gov/
There’s your federal education agency. A whole page promoting vouchers, nothing for the ideologically incorrect public schools and students.
That’s what “public education” under ed reformers looks like- your kids and schools magically disappear. They didn’t just redefine the word “public”- they disappeared the students and schools. The echo chamber priorities are strictly enforced. Mentioning a public school or public school student in a productive or positive light is forbidden.
Well put, Chiara!
Waiting for Mike Pence to announce that he is withdrawing from the debate with Harris because it would be inappropriate for him, as a married man, to be alone onstage with a woman.
Maybe Mother will sit with Pence onstage and hold his hand
I almost feels sorry for the guy.