Liz Meitl is a public school teacher in Kansas. She usually testifies against vouchers and other forms of privatization, but she suddenly realized what she could do if the Kansas legislature passes a voucher bill. She would open a completely unregulated school to do what the rightwingers fear most!
She wrote in The Kansas Reflector:
Liz Meitl testifies Feb. 6, 2023, before the House K-12 Education Budget Committee regarding legislation that would create vouchers for unregulated, unaccreddited private schools. GOP education proposals could allow for schools to turn into indoctrination mills, Meitl writes. (Kansas Reflector screen capture from Kansas Legislature YouTube channel)
Two years ago I wrote an opinion piece for the Kansas Reflector in which I argued that the Legislature should be celebrating Kansas public schools, rather than trying to tear them apart through voucher plans.
In the two years since, the fight has been ongoing, with no break in the Legislature’s efforts to destroy public education. This year’s session has brought us a tidal wave of proposed legislation that would divert hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools to private schools.
The legislation has shifted, though. Now it’s not just for low-income students, or for already established private schools.
The new legislation allows any kid to access the funds, and it allows anybody to set up a school. And so I have had an entirely serious change of heart. I am in no way taking a ridiculous idea to its logical extreme, so just put that out of your mind right now.
Let me explain.
Bills in the House and Senate that would allow families to use state money to send their kids to private schools — specifically House Bill 2218 — represent an enormous opportunity for Kansas educators. This legislation will allow Kansas to be a beacon to the rest of the country. Just as the world watched on Aug. 2nd as Kansans defeated the anti-choice agenda, the world can now watch as our liberal, woke educators are freed from the bonds of bureaucratic oversight and local, state and federal regulations.
Other educators, like me, will jump at the chance to open our own micro-schools and enact our own curricular agendas. We will be able to recruit the students we want to teach. We will no longer be asked to serve all students equitably, but instead we can create small, insular communities of learners, focused on the topics we feel are most valuable.
This is an enormous opportunity for all Kansas teachers who are tired of being subject to democratically elected school boards’ rules and out-of-touch federal lawmakers’ regulations.
When I think about opening my own school, I can’t help but be thrilled at the potential freedom. I will have the opportunity to teach English classes rooted in critical race theory. I know many legislators think we teach CRT now, but really there is so much oversight and collaboration that I am hamstrung and forced to teach lessons based on “pedagogical research” and “student data.”
This legislation will allow me to teach what many of the conservatives assumed I most want to teach: a leftist agenda focused on my Marxist, atheist ideology.
I can create a social studies class anchored in the history of white people as oppressors and colonizers. I can develop a rich, interdisciplinary course of study in which we study the benefits of recreational marijuana and psilocybin, and we can take scientific field trips to grow houses and dispensaries. My math classes will focus on the benefits of a socialist economy, and I will do my best to cultivate highly educated, intrinsically motivated radicals.
Further, work with my students will be based on a feelings-first curriculum. Their social and emotional well-being will drive instruction. I recognize legislators’ intent, that parents need to choose educational environments, so I will invite parents to provide tokens of comfort from home and I will use them to decorate our classroom.
Without the burden of state-mandated assessments weighing me down, and free from any governmental oversight, I will have the bandwidth to focus on supporting students’ identities. That will be especially rewarding for me and my LGBTQIA students.
In addition to the curricular and practical freedoms offered, this legislation creates an enormous financial opportunity. I know, without a doubt, that I can recruit 21 students to attend my little school. I have a big basement, and the materials will come from my own head (and heart), so I will have almost no overhead.
This means that I will make somewhere around $100,000 annually, based on current base state aid per student. This is substantially more than I earn now, and I will be responsible for many fewer students. It is clearly a financial windfall for any motivated adult.
In conclusion, these bills are a giant win for Kansas educators and youths. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.
The total lack of oversight and regulation, combined with the financial incentives, create an almost irresistible opportunity for those of us with an agenda for our state’s future. Teachers’ dedication to Kansas’s public schools and serving every student will certainly mean almost nothing when we consider the possibilities offered via this legislation.
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Liz Meitl is a public school teacher in USD 500, and her two children attend Kansas public schools. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What A Great Think Piece!
Once you get someone to thinking.
No telling where they will stop.
Reflecting on the unregulated.
Rolling on the floor, here! Great piece!
😂 ❤️
Reductio ad absurdum, excellent.
Brilliant!
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education and commented:
I hope she follows through on this.
Oh Ms. Ravitch, what on earth would we do without you? Where on earth would we be? From the bottom of my heart, Thank you for posting this piece. Is the pedulum beginning to swing the other way? Dont want to get my hopes of too much. But when I put my ear to the ground, I hear tiny squeaks of change. This article is one of these squeaks.
Thank you, Brenda. I wish I could say that the pendulum is swinging in the right direction, but the red states are hell-bent on enacting their privatization programs, disregarding facts, reason, public opinion, and evidence. If they put their proposals to a public vote, they would be overwhelmingly defeated.
Liz Meitl has provided a road map for screwing with the voucher crowd wherever they crawl.
OMG, sign me up!
If BizWits in the Ripofflicon Party insist on turning Education into a Consumer Market then no one without school age children should be taxed to pay for other people’s market choices.
That Would Be Choice !!!
This sounds like the educator’s version of ‘The Onion.’ What it points out is that unregulated schools, not operated by an actual teacher, could be so much worse. While some parents are having apoplexy over a few library books, they should consider the health and safety issues in an unaccountable, pseudo-school. Parents could be exposing their child to a lot worse than looking at a book about a couple of gay penguins.
How do you tell when penguins are gay?
Vouchers create many business opportunities: Here are a couple that occur to me:
Business Plan 1 (We Put the Duh in Flor-uh-duh):
Come on down to our “Race to the Top of Mount Zion Enrollment Jubilee” in the old K-Mart parking lot this Saturday and sign yore kids up for Bob Shepherd’s Real Good Floruhduh School. You can use yore Florida State Scholarships to pay for it, and so its absolutely FREE!!!! No longer due you havta send yore children to them gobbermint schools run by Socialists whar they will be taut to be transgendered! We offer compleet curriculems, wrote by Bob’s girlfriend Darlene herself, including
World HIS-story (from Creation to the United States of Dimocrat Babylon to the Rapshure)
Political Science (We thank you, Lord, for Donald Trump; the Second Amendmint; and protecting our Borders from invading hoardes of rapists and murderers)
English (the offishul langwidge of the United States, and the langwidge the Bible was wrote in)
Science (the six days of creation; how to make yore own buckshot; and how Cain and Abel survived among the dinosaurs)
Economics (when rich people get tax brakes, that makes you richer)
And much, much more!!! Plus, you don’t havta worry yore hed about safety, cause all are teachers is locked and loaded!
Bob’s Real Good Florurduh Skool, located across from Bob’s Gun and Pawn right next to Wild Wuornos’s Adult Novelties.
It’s been real good runnin’ this here skool. Free innerprize! So much better then tryin to live on Darlene’s disability! Make America Grate Agin!
Business Plan 2 (Akashic Kakistonics, or Opening Heaven’s Gate to Every Child):
Tired of those failing public schools? Want to send your child a true Akashic Academy where he/she/they can receive nourishment for the mind AND the soul?
Then enroll him/her/them in Enlightened Master Bob’s AYAHUASCA SCHOOL FOR LITTLE COSMIC VOYAGERS.
Here at Enlightened Master Bob’s, your child will learn how he or she can skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner and draw nourishment directly from Father Sun in our Solar Temple.
We offer complete holistic health training, using our proprietary textbooks on the Ethereal Body, including uncapping and aligning children’s Chakras so they can download DIRECTLY from the Mother Ship the Cosmic Light necessary for the coming Transformation from Earth-bound Homo sapiens to Interdimensional Beings.
In our history classes, students will learn all about Atlantis, Lemuria, Camelot and Glastonbury, the Black Rock Desert, and other Places of Power throughout the Ages.
Students will also learn how to protect themselves against the forces of the Evil Galactic Emperor Xenu and his band of sometimes invisible, shape-shifting reptilian aliens from Alpha Draconis.
But don’t delay! Soon, as our galaxy moves into proximity to the Pleiades, the vibrational tone of the entire planet will rise to such a pitch that we will either undergo Ascension or explode, and everything—the FATE OF THE PLANET– depends on how many young Lightworkers we can bring into Alignment and Cosmic Consciousness before then!
Of course, all this is absolutely FREE because you can use your State Scholarship Voucher to pay for it.
And best yet, all classes are taught by the Spiritual Wives of Enlightened Master Bob himself!!!!!
Seems like a fun “gotcha,” but ignores what will really happen once the state offloads all responsibility for educating children. Inevitably, the budget will be slashed each year (Kansas is already enacting a flat tax that will decimate the State’s ability to raise revenue – people remember Koch Industries is based in Kansas, right?) until the public schools are forced to fold and Kansas parents will be lucky to get any crumbs from their masters to be used toward the education of their kids. This was Milton Freidman’s fantasy, and we are close to seeing it realized in Kansas, Florida and other states, as parents sit by and let their children’s future be stolen from them.
But what happens when the Kansas legislature passes bills as in FL where by it determines curriculum and texts/books allowed in the classroom? That could jinx this beautiful effort of educators.
Much harder to mess with private enterprise. The state can’t tell private schools what to teach.
Yeah, we can use vouchers to have the public take over their schools: with their vouchers they simply buy their public schools, privatize them, hire back their teachers and the state cannot mess with them anymore, since they are private.
I now really do not understand why we have been resisting vouchers? We just have to tell state legislators that we want absolutely no oversight in private schools, which they will happily put in the voucher bill and pass it expeditiously. And voilá, we have our public schools back in our private hands.
Sounds like I should try that in Utah…
Generalizing the idea, all public school kids should apply for vouchers and then pay their school and their teachers directly, so that the teachers will decide what will be taught in their school, how their work is evaluated, not the governor appointed board.
However radical these ideas sound, wasn’t this the original way public schools were supposed to work?
I have been a retired educator for several years, but this Kansas opportunity makes me think of relocating to a state where an education free of government regulation and useless mandated testing requirements is possible!
I’m halfway there now in FL. It’s what the voters keep voting for, so let’s give it to them. Privatized education with vouchers picking up the tab. The disruptive students with asshole parents unable to get a spot in a good school. Give the people what they (think they) want!