Kathleen Oropeza, parent activist in Florida, explains in The Progressive how Republicans intend to destroy public schools and turn the state into a publicly-funded voucher haven. Governor Ron DeSantis is accomplishing Betsy DeVos’s dream while tossing aside the future of the state’s children. In Florida, public schools are held accountable for students and teachers but in private and religious schools, no accountability or standards are required.
Oropeza writes:
In what state Senator Perry Thurston calls a “death knell,” the 2021 Florida House and Senate are fast-tracking the passage of SB 48. This bill will convert the state’s five vouchers into two Education Savings Account/Debit Cards paid, for the first time, with public school tax dollars and a spending flexibility so wide that parents are not even required to pay for teachers or tuition.
Vouchers provide parents with public money to pay for private, often religious schools, with little accountability or guarantee of quality, in eighteen states. Florida leads the way, ahead of other states like Arizona, in how to “choice” parents out of public education and into private school voucher programs. Today, Florida operates two Exceptional Student Educationvouchers, the McKay and Gardiner, plus the Corporate Tax Credit, Hope and Family Empowerment, for a total of five vouchers. The goal has always been to significantly expand the base of students giving up their right to a free public education in exchange for granting parents the freedom to spend their child’s money as they see fit.
To accelerate the growth of vouchers, Florida seeks to convert all five programs into Education Savings Account/Debit Cards, funded directly by state general revenues. This money will not be spent on public schools. Instead, “parents can use the funds to pay for a variety of educational services, including private school tuition, tutoring, online education, home education, curriculum, therapy, postsecondary educational institutions in Florida and other defined educational services.
The bill, modeled after legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, represents the unfinished business of former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the late libertarian economist Milton Friedman, and a host of rightwing philanthropists from the Waltons to the Kochs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
rePUG-nicans hate educated people … so … they destroy public education.
Guess they only spout that ….
America is the land of equal opportunity …
which means opportunity for them to cheat, lie, and steal.
This is such a tragic situation and bodes ill for the states other than Florida. Thanks for updates on Arkansas and Kentucky as well. They really know how to use the opportunity the pandemic has present them.
SB 48 is the ultimate “Peter to pay Paul” bill. With a high socioeconomic threshold, many more families would be eligible for vouchers. SB48 is also a tax avoidance strategy for wealthy individuals that do not care about public education. This bill is not about “empowering” students. The main goal is to move as much money as possible out of public schools and into private hands. Frankly, if I had school age children, I would not live in Florida as it is a model for ALEC policies and a total disinvestment in the common good.
There will likely be little oversight of this voucher program. I predict that there will lots of waste and misuse of funds in this reckless plan. Many more young people will get a subpar education, and incidence of child abuse will increase as there will be fewer educators interacting with children. I foresee lots of opportunities to game the system with this proposal, and young people and public schools will pay dearly for this irresponsible bill.
“In a just society, there wouldn’t be a need for these expensive schools, or for private wealth to subsidize something as fundamental as an education. We wouldn’t give rich kids and a tiny number of lottery winners an outstanding education while so many poor kids attend failing schools. In a just society, an education wouldn’t be a luxury item.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/
I don’t think conservatives in Florida care about public education. Most blue states generally invest in young people in order to have an educated populace. Florida can easily recruit skilled labor from northern states. The wealthy will continue to get a quality education. The working class and poor children are the ones that will be shortchanged by these vouchers.
yes: vouchers by any name simply open up massive public ed. money to already wealthy people — more for the rich, less for the poor
Diane FYI: I reposted this note to the National Literacy Association’s site with the following introduction: (AAACE-NLA)
“This post is informational for all educators. The note below from Diane Ravitch’s blog and written by a parent activist in Florida, is self-explanatory and well-documented.
“Please note the link to the ALEC website where they write templates for bills: for Republican state legislators to use in their policymaking. ALEC, a decades-old “conservative” organization, stands for American Legislative Exchange Council. Under the auspices of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ this well-funded group is but one group behind the movement to take the ‘public’ out of ‘public schools’ and to disconnect the root of education in and for a democracy from its ground in democratic principles.
“Though the Ravitch blog focuses on what’s going on in pre-K-12, and NLA’s focus is adult education, I doubt we want to be blind-sided about what’s going on in apparent efforts to “eviscerate” all things public in the U.S., including education.” CBK
CBK, thank you.
Diane . . . I’m making “good trouble” there. CBK
Diane The below is from an article in Teachers College Record. Though some of their articles and book reviews are behind paywalls, some are free . . . as this one is. I thought it might be relevant to this discussion, and I love the term “micro-aggression.”
CBK
“Why You Throwing Subs?”: An Exploration of Community College Students’ Immediate Responses to Microaggressions
by Saskias Casanova, Keon M. McGuire & Margary Martin
“This paper provides findings from a study that examined students’ immediate responses to microaggressions observed in three community colleges. Our findings show how microaggressions and student responses contribute to and undermine students’ learning experiences.”
Background/Context: Current research within four-year university settings reveals the daily encounters students of color and faculty have with microaggressions—brief, intentional or unintentional comments and behaviors communicating covert biases toward individuals based on their social group membership. The majority of all undergraduate students of color currently attend community colleges, but the occurrence of microaggressions in the community college classroom has been overlooked. We situate our study of microaggressions within the racial microaggressions model framework, which addresses how microaggressive events are mediated by institutional racism through systematic policies, practices, and processes that (re)produce inequitable stratification in higher education. Further, we analyze the immediate effects of and students’ responses to classroom microaggressions.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of the study: *The present study explores students’ immediate responses to 51 microaggressions observed in three community colleges. We examine microaggressions in community colleges with the objective to provide a lens into the immediate effects and responses students display to observed classroom microaggressions. In exploring both the effects on students and their responses to microaggressions experienced in 17 classrooms, we gain insight on how these events contribute to or undermine students’ in-the-moment learning experiences, as well as target their academic identities. To this end, we examine the following research questions . . . * Whole article: TCR@TCRecord.org
Spend their “child’s” money? Doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to all of us and it’s just one more example of opening up that valve and letting the tax dollars flow down the drain.
I have a different title for your consideration.
Republicans Plan to Eviscerate Florida
Diane and ALL Here is another article from Teachers College Record that ALL TEACHERS HERE should read . . . it’s about the effects of neo-liberalism on their classroom and profession . . . it collects a bunch of “I quit” letters from teachers that they made public.
One important thing to me is that these letters go way back 15-20 years. The downloadable full text is free this week at their site: tcr@tcrecord.org.
Here is the beginning of the article: ALL QUOTED BELOW
“Leaving a Profession After It’s Left You: Teachers’ Public Resignation Letters as Resistance Amidst Neoliberalism by Alyssa Hadley Dunn – 2018″
“Context: Though there is a growing field of research on what makes teachers leave, little research includes an analysis of narratives written directly by teachers. Yet, amidst a growing body of teacher writing and a surge in digital media, there has emerged a new genre of teachers’ public resignation letters, many of which go “viral” when posted online. This research is contextualized by literature on teacher attrition and neoliberalism and framed within theories of teacher agency and teacher resistance.
“Purpose: Within a context where the letters themselves are becoming more popular and the rates of teacher attrition continue to rise in troubling ways, this study explores a new genre by investigating the content and strategies employed in public resignation letters from teachers around the United States.
“Research Design: This research employed a qualitative design, drawing on methods of content analysis, to analyze 23 publicly available resignation letters.
“Conclusions: I argue that these letters represent a new form of public discourse. This discourse allows teachers to exercise their personal and professional agency in the form of resistance to dominant narratives about what public education is and should be and what current neoliberal reforms are doing to teachers and students. These among other reasons I uncovered through thematic coding are linked to contextual factors rather than individual ones, pointing to the limits of retention in a climate that does not support teachers’ agency. Further, the majority of reasons for leaving are explicitly or implicitly tied to current neoliberal educational policies. According to their letters, teachers left the profession because (1) neoliberal reforms and policies threatened learning conditions and (2) these reforms had negative consequences for teachers’ working conditions and beliefs. Specific neoliberal reforms and policies that were mentioned in the letters include: increased standardized testing and restrictions on curriculum, which teachers argued reflected a lack of care for students’ socioemotional needs; decreasing pay/benefits; and punitive teacher evaluation systems. In addition, the consequences of these reforms meant that teachers felt: a lack of time, a mismatch between their beliefs and the reality of teaching in today’s educational climate, and a lack of trust and respect for their profession, and a lack of control over their working conditions.
“I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered. (Conti, 2013)”
“INTRODUCTION
“When Gerald Conti (2013) of Syracuse, New York was in his 40th year of teaching, he decided to resign from his position for a variety of reasons, including low morale, a frustration with the amount of time spent on high-stakes testing, a lack of administrative support and commitment, and a general sense of feeling disrespected and devalued as a professional. Hundreds of miles away, James Weldon (2013) was feeling similarly: “After 22 years of teaching middle school … I am quitting the North Carolina public schools. More accurately, the public schools quit me.” And out in the Midwest, Illinois teacher Ellie Rubenstein (2013) delivered an emotional resignation via YouTube: “Over the past 15 years, I’ve experienced the depressing, gradual downfall and misdirection of education that has slowly eaten away at my love of teaching.” Though states apart, these teachers left their positions for many of the same reasons, and the world knew it.” END QUOTE