Doug Ducey, the Governor of Arizona, has been funded by the Koch machine. One of his goals is to destroy public schools. Arizona voted vouchers down, by 65-35%. No matter. Kathryn Joyce wrote in Salon about Ducey’s latest effort to eliminate public schools, disregarding the referendum.
She writes:
Last Friday, while the country reeled from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Arizona made history of a different sort. Legislators in the Grand Canyon State passed a universal school voucher bill that, once signed by Gov. Doug Ducey, will become the most wide-reaching school privatization plan in the country.
In his January State of the State address, Ducey called on Arizona lawmakers to send him bills that would “expand school choice any way we can,” and the Republican-dominated legislature obliged, delivering last Friday’s bill, which will open a preexisting program for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) up to the entire state. In practice, the law will now give parents who opt out of public schools a debit card for roughly $7,000 per child that can be used to pay for private school tuition, but also for much more: for religious schools, homeschool expenses, tutoring, online classes, education supplies and fees associated with “microschools,” in which small groups of parents pool resources to hire teachers.
Ducey said the law had “set the gold standard in educational freedom” in the country, and right-wing politicians and education activists quickly agreed. Corey DeAngelis, the research director of Betsy DeVos’ school privatization lobby group American Federation for Children, declared on Twitter that Arizona “just took first place” when it comes to school choice. Anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo — the Manhattan Institute fellow who this spring called for fostering “universal public school distrust” in order to build support for “universal school choice” — tweeted, “Every red state in the country should follow [Ducey’s] lead,” since the law “gives every family a right to exit any public school that fails to educate their children or reflect their values.”
RELATED: Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College
From the American Enterprise Institute, education researcher Max Eden happily concluded that “Arizona now funds students, not systems,” deploying a formulation that has become common among conservative education activists, as when last week the Moms for Liberty network chastised Arizona public school advocates who opposed the bill as “system advocates” rather than “education advocates.” From Rhode Island, anti-CRT activist Nicole Solas, a fellow with the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum, tweeted, “You know what happens when you abuse people? People leave you. Bye, public school.”
And back in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank founded in honor of former senator and right-wing icon Barry Goldwater, celebrated the law it had done much to create as a “major victory for families wary of a one-size-fits-all approach to education,” plus a cost-saving measure to boot, since the total funding parents would receive through ESA vouchers is $4,000 less than Arizona’s already paltry per-pupil funding for public schools.
By contrast, Democratic politicians and public education advocates described the law as the potential “nail in the coffin” for public schools in Arizona, as Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona (SOS Arizona) put it.
“The Republican universal voucher system is designed to kill public education,” tweeted former Arizona House Rep. Diego Rodriguez. “OUR nation’s greatness is built on free Public schools. The GOP goal is to recreate segregation, expand the opportunity gap, and destroy the foundation of our democracy.”
“I think it’s a very serious mistake and the result will be that, within a decade, Arizona will have a very, very poorly educated adult population,” added Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. “Maybe that’s the game…”
“It’s very easy to set up a one-room shop in a strip mall, give every kid a Chromebook and a plaid skirt, tell parents they’re on an accelerated curriculum and take that $7,000,” said Lewis. But it’s equally easy for those schools to “close up shop whenever they want,” as numerous low-quality voucher schools have been known to do, leaving students stranded partway through the school year. When that happens, said Lewis, “There’s no recourse to claw those funds back.”
Unfortunately, said Carol Corbett Burris, ESA programs have already demonstrated problems with that approach, through numerous cases of fraud, in which parents used the funds for things other than their children’s education.
“It’s like an insurance company giving parents of a sick child $7,000 and saying, ‘We don’t care if you go to a physician or a dentist — take that money and do what you believe is best,” Burris continued. “Parents may know best about many things, but they’re not professional educators any more than they are doctors, dentists or nurses.”
What’s more, SOS Arizona pointed out, the ESA funds could also be used to send taxpayer funding to the sort of private school being established by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who recently announced plans to start a network of anti-“woke” Turning Point Academies, first in Arizona, then around the country. The first such school, with more than 600 students, is set to open in Glendale this fall, as the result of a partnership between Kirk and Phoenix megachurch Dream City. According to Newsweek, the academy will ban CRT, the New York Times’ “1619 Project” and what it calls “radical LGBT agendas.” Those 600-plus students, Lewis notes, will add up to some “4 million taxpayer dollars that go straight into Kirk’s academy.”
On a larger level, the new law also speeds up the same sort of death spiral that has afflicted public schools across the country, by steadily draining funds away from public education. While the immediate cost of ESA expansion — for students already outside the public school system — will draw on Arizona’s general funds, the money to cover children who leave public schools in coming years will be deducted from public school budgets. ..
“I think we’re witnessing the dismantling of public education in our state,” said Lewis. “Will it happen overnight? No. But the effects will be felt quickly and the blow to public schools will be unsustainable.” If even a few kids leave a neighborhood school, the difference in funding is noticeable. If six or seven do, “that’s a whole teacher [salary] down.” In her own school, where Lewis teaches third grade, that sort of downsizing would mean the immediate increase of her class size of 27 students to more than 40. “Or do you make the cuts elsewhere? Do you cut special education, which has already been cut to the bone? Or music, arts and after-school programs, which have already been cut to the bone? Do you not have an assistant principal? Then how many students don’t get what they need?”
“We are going to stop this by any means necessary,” Lewis said, including electoral work, public education, and possibly another ballot initiative, even if that means risking the “poison pill” cancellation of the state’s newly increased public school funds. “All options are on the table.”
Read more on the right’s systematic assault on public education:
- A new age of fascist politics brings a war on youth — but young people are ready to resist
- Betsy DeVos and Ron DeSantis: GOP dynamic duo team up to defund public schools
- The guy who brought us CRT panic offers a new far-right agenda: Destroy public education
Kathryn Joyce is an investigative reporter at Salon, and the author of two books: “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption” and “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.”MORE FROM KATHRYN JOYCE
Libertarian extremists have taken over Arizona. The young people of the state will suffer the most as the market is not magic. It is generally cruel and profit driven. Who will protect students from charlatans and perverts? Who will ensure that young people are treated fairly and the education meets students’ needs? Who will ensure that young people are safe from fire hazards and other forms of neglect? Responsible citizens must push back against this reckless plan.
FORWARDED to AAACE-NLA (Adult Education/National Literacy Association) CBK
Forwarded to Letters to the Editor at Commonweal:
Hello Editors of Commonweal:
I am researching here, but am wondering if you are aware of the influence of the attack on public schools going on presently in Arizona and as slated, throughout the Country. See the below “forward” from Salon via Diane Ravitch’s blogsite.
My concern is the present UNHOLY-ALLIANCE between neo-liberalism and the Catholic Church as concerns the drawing-off of public funding FROM public schools TO private and Catholic Schools. Though I understand how attractive such funding is to the Catholic hierarchy, that movement puts the Catholic religion in direct conflict with democracy and the secular state (not with “secularism”).
Not the first time in world history, and though exceptions abound, American Catholicism is presently running interference for oligarchy, neo-liberalism and, ultimately, for fascism.
The support of such funding movements of the Church is dangerous on many levels which I hope you understand already. If the Catholic hierarchy know it, then they are complicit in the slow but aimed demise of democracy. If they don’t know it, then they need to get up to speed about the right relationship between American democracy and the religions that enrich it, but DO NOT TAKE IT OVER as a totalitarian enterprise.
Briefly, there is no such thing as “government schools.” Public anything, but especially public schools, is on a circular movement: TAXES fund elected representatives, who are sworn by oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution which, in turn, is FOR/BY/OF The People; and where the tax money is drawn for the good of the whole . . . namely: The Public.
While frugality is a civic virtue, there is no profit motive or condition where public interest and service are concerned. In brief, the foundational playing field is totally different from what Devos and so-called educational reformers, et al, refer to as “government schools.” Under that label, public schools are falsely portrayed as having the same foundations as a capitalist outfit: competitive with charters, etc., and regardless of whether they are for- or non-profit, or some sort of public/private partnership model (aka: fox in the chicken house).
Please read the below from Diane Ravitch and Salon.
Catherine Blanche King
Thanks, CBK.
Thank you, CBK!
Abandoning public schools is abandoning civic responsibility and the common good.
retired teacher Yes, it’s to give up our hard-won political base. Add to that ANYTHING PUBLICLY supported and funded, like the Post Office and the FDA.
To put it in concrete terms, do we really want the FDA to approve or disapprove drugs and chemicals according to the highest bidder, or worse, the official’s best buddy? rather than according to what (they find in our different fields of study) REALLY IS for the well-being of us all, not to mention the planet?
We all know how imperfect such a structure can be; but the alternative is much worse. Good scientists and public servants are heroic every day. CBK
all for the huge, greedy profits of the few: what will they have once they plunder all of society and it can no longer produce pennies for them?
All I don’t know what John Roberts is smoking, but it’s not good for the Country: CBK
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/carson-makin-supreme-court-maine-religious-education.html?sid=62b7219151d2ff807e02079c&email=a9a4d70d1021bdf0283f26899059e21de723cc7c00ec898bb4786d73acde8c4b&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=plus&utm_source=blast&utm_content=July_Letter_2022
This is horrific. The model for creation of fundamentalist Christian nationalist madrasas throughout the country.
Bob The appeal is apparently to parents’ pocketbooks. Though it includes and is driven by the various versions of “Christian nationalism,” it goes far beyond them. “Christian nationalism” is loud and obtrusive to many more than speak up presently; and does not refer the whole of the American public, parents, or polity. (And you’re welcome.) CBK
That’s a pretty big incentive to a poor family to try the home schooling thing. And for edupreneurs to rent a space in a strip mall; buy some used computer terminals in bulk from China; rent some virtual school software; bill themselves as a Personalized, Digital School of the Future; and pocket the difference between what that costs and the $7K per kid.
Bob Poor people, self-dealers, grifters, and con artists. CBK
YUP. It’s like a massive jobs program for con artists.
There is so much potential for waste, fraud and abuse it is sickening. If we think the charter industry has taken taxpayers for a ride, “we ain’t seen nothing yet.” Cue up Michael Milken, his brother and all their fellow grifters.
Arizona consistently ranks in the bottom five of public schools. Seem like the status quo isn’t working.
Arizona also ranks in the bottom five of school funding and teacher compensation.
I know a few people who taught briefly in Arizona. Briefly. They all explained why they didn’t teach for very long.
I’m not sure where Arizona thinks all of these teachers will magically appear to work in a very unstable system.
The status quo in Arizona is underfunded public schools, underpaid teachers, a booming charter school sector, and many different voucher programs. The status quo isn’t working.
If right wing Ducey was Catholic and the almost 50 state Catholic Conferences were promoting privatization, American democracy would really be facing a strong threat.
As it is, we know that privatization is a project of billionaires and politicking, exclusively at the hands of evangelical protestants- the same who are exclusively promoting an end to separation of church and state. Mainstream media and influencers tell us so. It pushes credibility a bit because among religions, the Catholic church has the most schools (and, the Koch network likes them the best).
I haven’t read Karen Joyce’s book, Quiverfull, which is linked in the post but, the blurbs about the book appear to suggest the recent advent of womanhood’s virtues like self-sacrifice, wifely submission and birthing lots of babies is divorced from a long Catholic Church tradition.
History’s repeating itself as told in Wikipedia’s entry for Persecution of Jews (the paragraphs titled, Western and Christian antisemitism) and by Kertzer’s new book about history’s sanitization of the protected sect’s complicity in the Fascism of WWII.
Vice’s article about the marriage of religious iconography and White nationalism on Tik Tok is interesting.
Doug Ducey actions as governor of Arizona to defy the will of the people, prove he is a dangerous fascist.
The idea that anyone can get an education and become something is very, very frightening to people for whom the game has always been rigged. That’s why they work so hard to make sure it stays that way.
Nailed it. These people are, with good reason, extremely insecure about maintaining their turf.