Jeff Bryant writes in Alternet about the renewed strength of the voucher forces, which have been energized by Republican gains in the states in the 2020 elections. They aim to defund the public schools that enroll most children and send public money to private and religious schools, even to home schoolers and entrepreneurs.
He begins:
Supporters of public education and school teachers were relieved to see Betsy DeVos leave her job as head of the Department of Education, knowing full well the education policies she and former President Trump supported would go nowhere in a President Biden administration. But they should remain incensed over how her efforts to privatize public schools are being rolled out in state legislatures across the country.
In states as politically diverse as Washington, Arizona, Georgia, Virginia, and New Hampshire, state legislators are introducing bills to increase the number of charter schools and create new school voucher programs or greatly expand current ones. According to the Educational Freedom Institute (EFI), a think tank that advocates for vouchers, charter schools, and other forms of “school choice,” there are at least 14 states actively considering legislation to pour greater sums of taxpayer dollars intended for public education into privately operated schools. Many of the bills have been introduced since the November 2020 elections, which ousted Trump and DeVos but resulted in big gains for Republicans down-ticket.
These proposals to privatize public schools are taking on new forms that are less transparent, would be easier to pass through legislation, and take larger sums of money from public schools, which educate between 80 and 90 percent of American children. Further, the bills are surfacing when public education is highly vulnerable due to the pandemic and the ensuing economic havoc it is wreaking.
Supporters of public education and the common good must mobilize and push back against efforts to weaken and/or destroy the public schools. Republican legislators are ignoring their own state constitutions, and the historic American tradition of separation of church and state by pushing public money to religious schools. Their obvious goal is to cut funding to education, and they don’t care if it reduces the quality of education in their states, as it surely will. Religious schools and the other private schools that take vouchers hire uncertified teachers, are free of state oversight, and teach prejudice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m glad the huge voucher expansion campaign is getting some media coverage.
I think it explains the lack of effort and interest we’ve seen from politicians towards assisting or supporting public schools. Once again public school students and families are an afterthought- addressed only reluctantly and only AFTER the ed reform lobbies demands on private school vouchers are met.
Ohio still hasn’t gotten around to doing anything for public schools, but they did a huge voucher expansion. I think it’s clear to public school families and students our schools and students come SECOND to the ed reform ideological agenda.
Oh, well. Maybe next year someone in government will get around to doing some work on behalf of the public schools that educate the vast majority of students. Maybe next year.
The huge voucher push is happening because Republicans won so many statehouses in the 2020 election.
If the election was “rigged,” the Democrats forgot to rig the elections for the Senate, the House, and state legislatures.
Interesting how there’s no debate at all in ed reform on this huge national campaign to expand vouchers. This is really radical. It’s voucherizing the whole system.
When public schools are gone and all families are issued a low value voucher instead of a school we’ll know who to blame- the ed reform “movement”- who backed this every step of the way.
They own privatization now. It’s their one and only issue. I hope the Grand Plans work as well as they did when they were dreamed up in the billionaire think tanks and university department.
If abolishing public schools ends up as a disaster we’ll know who to blame.
Will the public feel cheated when they find out that when ed reformers said “the money follows the child” they meant “you’ll get a low value voucher that represents a 50% cut in public education funding to replace your public school”?
Did people really sign on to a complete privatization and fragmentation of the public education into every family gets a voucher and list of private contractors? Is that what ed reform sold the public to get hired and elected?
Is this what they meant by “improving public schools”? I don’t think the public understood they were being hijacked into this far Right ideological agenda.
It’s a rip off for the vast majority of families. What happens when the public figures that out? They will.
If people in my town find they can’t replace their comprehensive public education system with a 5000 dollar voucher per child, to whom should we address our complaints?
Should I send a letter to the Walton Foundation requesting our public schools back? Look up whatever Right wing org is pushing this and petition for a public school system to replace the one they dismantled and threw in the trash?
What if this huge experiment in far Right economic theory doesn’t work as intended? Can we get public schools back or are they just gone?
Reckless, arrogant people dismantling the schools they didn’t and don’t attend and replacing them with a cheap, shoddy, poorly thought out unregulated “market”. Where have we heard this story before?
We know how this reckless experiment in schools privatization will end.
We need only look at Chile or Sweden: more stratification by race, class, religion.
Rich kids get a supplement for their elite schools.
Poorest kids go to under-resourced low-quality public schools, even poorer than before the vouchers.
yes — poorer and with computers for teachers
Rebecca Klein supplements Jeff’s lucid article:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/betsy-devos-school-voucher_n_6019bb29c5b668b8db3c89d9
Thanks Diane. These voucher bills pose an existential threat to local public school systems, and everyone needs to raise the alarm and tell their state representatives to oppose these “school choice” initiatives.
Thank you.
You are a rare bird among journalists covering education, exposing the lies and sleights of hand.
As you know, time and time again, voters have gone to the polls and voted down voucher referendums, but the Repugs and DINO deformers keep coming back with new versions, new attempts to subvert the people’s will. We must be equally determined to keep up the fight
DeVos is gone, but DeVouchers live on!
This is the song
Deformers play on
If the Feds are really interested in collecting information on students, they should keep young people in public schools. It is the only agency that will keep legitimate information on students, not just testing data. Private companies send students behind an opaque wall of private enterprise.
Yes! “DeVos is gone, but DeVouchers live on!”
LOL!!!! Now that’s funny!
Devouchers devilishly demand deformers deceptions.
Privatization is a slippery slope. Charters spawned vouchers, even though all the evidence shows that vouchers get worse results than public or charter schools. Some red states are adopting reckless vouchers policies to off load the state’s responsibility to educate its young people. Florida intend to allow parents to use education funds for almost anything that could be considered education. These “unbundled” vouchers are a slippery slope that will send poor students adrift without guidance and support. Child abuse will increase, and some parents will try to figure out ways to turn these debit type cards into cash. Unless we regulate privatization with the intention of protecting the health and well-being of students, Gates and others will be very happy to start issuing “digital badges” to a lost generation of students.
Vouchers are the last step in the effort to remove accountability.
Charters are the intermediate step.
Dire Straights sang about vouchers: Money for nothing and your checks for free.
Charters set the stage for education as a consumer good rather than a civic responsibility.
Vouchers enter, fulfilling the promise of consumerism with a choice that drains money from public schools and offers no taste, less filling garbage schools.
The new voucher bill in Flor-uh-duh, which Diane recently posted about, will siphon vast amounts of money from the public school system here. The goals are clear: to privatize education and to create publicly funded, private fundamentalist Christian madrasas in their place,
private Republican fundamentalist evangelical Christian madrasas
Worth a read- “What the Ahmari-French dispute was really about”, Intelligencer, 9-7-2019
Wikipedia has a brief summary of the dispute in its entry for David French. Both men, one Catholic and the other, Christian evangelical, oppose gay marriage and abortion. One of the two thinks government should be used to impose culturally conservative values in society and he talked about, “religion for the elite elect in a degenerate society”.
The author of the Intelligencer article disagrees with both men. He believes in good faith and shared values, not a Manichean zero sum vision of politics.
Conservative “intellectuals” say the cutest things, the dumb little darlings.
Thank you, Mr. Bryant, for this outstanding piece!!!
Please please PLEASE post the comments from Florida State Senator Thurston in opposition to the latest voucher bill on your blog for the masses to see. It is golden in describing what is happening and the state constitutional duty to provide an adequate PUBLIC education for students.
The Republicans had families from the Democrats’ legislative districts to come and testify about how great they’ve been since using the vouchers.
Here’s some of it:
“You see when the parents say they’re in Senator Thurston’s district, I welcome you to Tallahassee, I welcome you to call me office, I welcome you to come see me anytime, because I’m working for the 95% of the students who are in the public school system, who will be there when we divert money from the public school system.
“You see, I want your child to strive and be successful, but I want ALL the children in my district to strive and be successful. Had we pumped the type of money we’ve been putting in to these programs into the public school system, I can tell you, I would have a better outcome from the students in my district. I know that.”
https://accountabaloney.com/index.php/2021/02/04/senator-thurston-and-the-death-knell-of-public-education/
I will.
On Jan. 27, 2021, the South Dakota House passed a “bill to outlaw sexual identity changes”. The S.D. Catholic Conference testified in support of the bill which was introduced by Rep. Fred Deutsche (R- Catholic). Rep. Phil Jensen, one of those who signed the bill is in the news today. His critics say Jensen wants the version of the events that are covered as part of of Black History Month to conform to his opinions which critics claim minimize slavery.
Forcing taxpayers to pay for conservative religious schools is a travesty against Christianity and against the nation. The Espinosa decision is a verdict that shames SCOTUS and America.
agreed
They might as well pass a bill outlawing the right of grass to grow. What maroons!
If the Senate passes the bill it’s expected to fail in the courts. But, who knows, with Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society judges on the bench.
“here are at least 14 states actively considering legislation to pour greater sums of taxpayer dollars intended for public education into privately operated schools.”
I was happy to see that TN was not on the list. So I guess even this think tank considers the TN voucher program a lost cause. It looked like a sure thing, after the fraudulent manipulation in the TN legislation. The lawsuits hence worked!
I’m surprised.
I figured you would be disappointed that your state was not on the list — and not at the top..
When corruption is exposed it makes selling the associated product more difficult.
There’s also the possibility that in the Bible Belt, the religious don’t like to fund other people’s religion. Media reports that the Catholic church received more than $1 bil. in the government’s Covid funds intended for small business.
This is not the case. A voucher bill was passed a year ago using crazy legislative manipulations. For example, a Knoxville rep voted for the bill after he was promised that vouchers won’t be introduced in his district. So then there were couple of lawsuits against the bill, claiming the bill was unconstitutional (meaning, against the state constitution). The lawsuits won, was appealed, and the appeal was thrown out.
Not having TN on the list means, they do not see hope for a voucher bill to pass in TN in the near future.
Thanks to Diane, these events were reported here too. For example
https://dianeravitch.net/2020/10/01/tennessee-why-the-courts-rejected-vouchers/
The point is that there are people in the Bible belt who work incredibly hard and, apparently, effectively to save public education.
My first paragraph was in reference to the FBI’s investigation of Casada and others.
Capitol insurrection news-
Media report a Pennsylvania mother of 8 who homeschools her children, turned herself
into authorities. The New Yorker describes the conspiracy theories that the mother began to believe leading up to Jan. 6.
She’s a libertarian. We could speculate about the need for a public defender provided by the government. Irony.