As you might have noticed, the mainstream media has not paid much attention to the reckless privatization of America’s public schools. This “movement” is a response to billionaire dollars, not to public demand. The beneficiaries are students who were already enrolled in private schools, whose parents can afford the tuition, not poor students.

It’s rare when a major TV show or newspaper features a story on the billionaire funded effort to destroy our nation’s public schools.

CNN recently aired a segment showing how Arizona was sending millions of dollars to voucher schools that discriminate against certain groups of students, while underfunding the public schools that most children attend and that accept everyone.

The feature story aired on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program. Even Ja’han Jones, who writes the blog for Joy Reid’s show, noticed the story.

CNN pointed out that rightwing evangelical churches are expanding as nearby public schools are drained of resources.

CNN reported:

Near the edge of the Phoenix metro’s urban sprawl, surrounded by a wide expanse of saguaro-studded scrubland, Dream City Christian School is in the midst of a major expansion.

The private school, which is affiliated with a local megachurch where former President Donald Trump held a campaign rally this month, recently broke ground on a new wing that will feature modern, airy classrooms and a pickleball court. It’s a sign of growth at a school that has partnered with a Trump-aligned advocacy group, and advertises to parents by vowing to fight “liberal ideology” such as “evolutionism” and “gender identification.”

Just a few miles away, the public Paradise Valley Unified School District is shrinking, not expanding. The district shuttered three of its schools last month amid falling enrollment, a cost-saving measure that has disrupted life for hundreds of families.

One of the factors behind Dream City’s success and Paradise Valley’s struggles: In Arizona, taxpayer dollars that previously went to public schools like the ones that closed are increasingly flowing to private schools – including those that adopt a right-wing philosophy.

Arizona was the first state in the country to enact a universal “education savings account” program – a form of voucher that allows any family to take tax dollars that would have gone to their child’s public education and spend the money instead on private schooling.

A CNN investigation found that the program has cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than anticipated, disproportionately benefited richer areas, and funneled taxpayer funds to unregulated private schools that don’t face the same educational standards and antidiscrimination protections that public schools do. Since Arizona’s expanded program took effect in 2022, according to state data, it has sent nearly $2 million to Dream City and likely sapped millions of dollars from Paradise Valley’s budget.

And Arizona is hardly alone: universal voucher programs are sweeping Republican-led states, making it one of the right’s most successful efforts to rewrite state policy after decades of setbacks.

This expansion of vouchers in red states was facilitated by millions of dollars spent to fund far-right legislators in state races by Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children and other billionaires, like Jeff Yass, a Trump supporter and the richest man in Pennsylvania. Yass said to CNN: “School choice is the civil rights issue of our time,” an oft-cited but phony claim.

In fact, school choice benefits the haves, not the have-nots, and it encourages segregation. Schools choose, not students or families.

In an internal presentation obtained by the progressive watchdog group Documented and provided to CNN, AFC boasted that it had “deployed” $250 million “to advance school choice over the last 13 years,” and that that spending had led to “$25+ billion in government funding directed towards student choice.” 

In 2018, nearly 2/3 of Arizonavoters rejected universal vouchers. Koch-funded Governor Doug Ducey kept pushing them, ignoring the will of the voters, and they were adopted in 2022. Now every student in the state can get a voucher, and most who take them come from families that can afford to pay their own tuition bills.

But unlike some other states that have adopted voucher programs, Arizona has no standardsrequiring private schools to be accredited or licensed by the state, or follow all but the most basic curriculum standards. That means there is no way to compare test scores in public schools to students in the ESA program.

“There’s zero accreditation, there’s zero accountability, and there’s zero transparency,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who leads an Arizona nonprofit that advocates against school privatization.

Arizona’s voucher program is busting the state’s budget. The state is facing a $1 billion deficit, caused largely by funding private schools that are discriminatory and whose academic progress is unknown.

On the other side of the Phoenix metro area, the private Valley Christian Schools received nearly $1.1 million in ESA funding last year despite facing allegations of LGBTQ discrimination in federal court. Valley Christian fired high school English teacher Adam McDorman after he voiced support for a student who came out as pansexual, McDorman alleged in a 2022 lawsuit. In an email that McDorman provided to CNN, the school’s then-principal argued that the idea that it was possible to be both “homosexual or otherwise sexually deviant and also a Christian” was a “hideous lie.”

Public schools are barred from discriminating against students because of characteristics like their religion or sexuality, but no such rules cover private schools. In court documents, Valley Christian lawyers have argued that the school had the religious liberty to fire McDorman. The school declined to comment because the case is pending.

In an interview, McDorman said his former school taught creationism as a scientific fact, and “whitewashed” American history to downplay the harms of slavery. He was surprised to learn about the level of public funding it was receiving.

Will the defunding of public schools be an issue in the Presidential election? Trump will surely boast about the progress of.school choice. Will Biden speak up against this nefarious effort to destroy public schools?