Steve Berch is a member of the Idaho House of Representatives, one of only 11 Democrats in a body with 70 members. He is serving his third term. His analysis of the attack on public education in Idaho and other states is brilliantly cogent. He understands that privatization is all about the money. This article appeared in the nonprofit IdahoEdNews.org.
Berch describes the playbook of the privatization movement.
Berch writes:
Idaho will spend $2.3 billion on K-12 public education in 2024. There are powerful out-of-state forces who want to get their hands on that money. Some are driven by profit, others by political ideology, religious beliefs, or a combination of interests. They all share one common goal: shift your public schools dollars to the private sector. Here are some of the dots to connect in the “privatizing public education” playbook:
- Make public schools look worse than other school choices. The legislature does this by continually underfunding public education. Schools can’t meet parental expectations, accommodate growth, or hire/retain experienced teachers when salaries are not competitive and buildings are falling apart. Idaho has a backlog of over $1 billion in K-12 school building maintenance and we’re still at or near the bottom in per-student investment, even after having a $2.1 billion surplus and a recent budget increase. This makes other school choices look more attractive by comparison.
- Undermine confidence in public schools. Propaganda campaigns incite fear and anger against local schools. Parents are bombarded with false claims about porn in libraries, groomers in classrooms, and student indoctrination. Non-stop postings on social media perpetuate these inflammatory accusations. Self-proclaimed “think tanks” funded by third-parties produce official looking reports that create a false perception of legitimacy to these manufactured fears.
- Hide the facts. Legislative leaders tried to kill the Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) – which provides factual, in-depth, unbiased research and analysis to the legislature. The public wouldn’t know about the billion dollar backlog in school building maintenance if OPE didn’t exist. The OPE report that revealed this new information angered political leaders trying to tell a different story. Without facts, false narratives go unchallenged.
- Legislative intimidation. New laws are making classrooms a hostile workplace. This includes bills that threaten to sue educators, imprison librarians, fine school districts, muzzle teachers, and empower the Attorney General to aggressively prosecute the targets of these punitive laws. No wonder teachers are leaving Idaho.
- Promote “school choice” and “education freedom.” This is clever rhetoric, but it is meaningless since Idahoans already have a myriad of education choices – none of which are going away. It’s not about having choice, but rather having you pay for someone else’s choice. A recent in-depth investigationrevealed a vast network of powerful forces funneling money into Idaho to promote and sell their alternative education choices to the public.
- Kill public education with vouchers (deceptively called Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs). An attempt was made earlier this year to convert most of the $2.3 billion public education budget into checks sent to parents to spend however they want – without accountability. This would starve Idaho public schools into oblivion.
The 2023 bill tried to hit a home run and failed. However, the lobbyists behind privatizing public education will be back, fronted by their legislative allies. Expect to see legislation next year that allows public tax dollars to pay for private and religious school tuition in limited amounts and isolated situations.
This is fool’s gold – there is no room for compromise. If the legislature allows just a small amount of public tax dollars to be spent on tuition for any private school, your tax dollars must be made available to all types of private schools and religious schools. Once one bill passes, the flood gates open up to flow your public education dollars to the bottom line profits of private sector businesses.
Your public education tax dollars belong in your public schools, not in their pockets.
Privatization is always about transferring public money into private pockets. It transfers wealth from those in the middle and bottom socioeconomic tiers to the affluent and wealthy. It is a way to monetize public services and vulnerable private enterprises and generally it costs the public more and results in a worse service. Public schools, hospitals, medical practices, housing, pensions, the VA, Social Security and Medicare are all targets of Wall St. This trend will continue as long as politicians are for sale and willing to promote these privatization schemes.
“This trend will continue as long as politicians are for sale. . . ”
How long is forever?
Berch is right on the mark. Hire that guy to help Democrats run the national party.
Religion is the mind control death of civilization.
Good one!
Gary, I like your quote and Jefferson’s, in every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
In the US, White religion certainly disadvantaged the progress of women, Black people and people who are gay. Right wing religion did it while furthering the misperception that it benefitted heterosexual men.
AMEN! TRUE, so true.
Thank you Dr. Ratvich for posting this interesting article. It certainly took my imagination on a trip. Mr. Berch’s analysis seems like a strategy where the light is turned off in the room and let all fall on their own feet and then send a convenience savior to rescue them by placing it in a different location. Does that make sense?
No.
🤣
Thank you!
I don’t have a clue to what you are trying to say.
It is like a metaphor. Thanks
Thank you for sharing my op-ed. I’ve written a few on education funding. This one (from 2021) ties tax breaks to property tax increases (via continuous school bonds and levies): https://www.idahoednews.org/voices/the-2-billion-bamboozle/
Thank you, Steve Berch, for your excellent article. It’s being spread across Twitter. Clear and cogent.
It is sad what can happen when a state is controlled by Republicans. I graduated from Borah High in Boise and went to Boise Junior College. [It is now called Boise State University.]
Idaho is at the bottom of states that fund public schools.
I have no idea of how Idaho compared with other states when I was going to public schools in Boise. I went to McKinley grade school for grades 3-5. West Junior High for grades 6-7 and South Junior High for grades 8-9. [McKinley was torn down and a different school was built on that site.]
I felt that I received a good education.
Boise schools certainly don’t give the level of resources that were available when I taught beginning band and elementary classroom music at the International School of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. It was a privately funded school that had an art department with tons of resources. We had a large pool in which children were taught how to swim. There were two labs for computers. There were large grounds for all sorts of sports to be played. The library was enormous and had new books added each year. [Parents didn’t think of coming to the library and banning books. YUCK on Idaho.] Classrooms were considered overcrowded if more than 16 students were in a room. Classroom teachers had planning time together so they could collaborate. Classroom teachers had an aide for each grade level.
Preschool students were limited to 10 in a room and each had an aide.
The music, P.E. and art departments each had an aide who would assist in things like running off papers in the office.
The teachers’ lunch room was, in my mind, luxurious compared to the bare bones rusty stuff that is now in teachers’ lounges.
Once I had lunch in a cafeteria that was for executives in a bank in downtown Chicago. My friend worked at this bank and invited me to lunch. I looked at the luxury and the great food and thought that teachers, when they are really appreciated, will be treated the same. [It will NEVER happen.]