I was delighted to see that the very popular Heather Cox Richardson invited Josh Cowen to talk about the ominous spread of vouchers. HCR made clear that public schools are an essential element in building a society that is educated to sustain democracy.
The voucher movenent, on the other side, has turned into a means of building a society that sustains the white Christian nationalism of its funders.
It’s a valuable discussion, and I hope you will watch and listen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Vouchers are designed to be a means to weaken public education and by extension democracy itself. They are intended to weaken community cohesion. When adopted on national level, they will disperse people into ideological camps and make people easier to control. Vouchers are designed to have the potential to promote social control through mind control, whether religious, political, or both. Even without vouchers we have even seen Texas insert Christianity into its public school curriculum. Vouchers create ample opportunity for charlatans to game the system. It is no coincidence that private equity is jumping on the voucher bandwagon with “micro-schools” as they see another opportunity to commodify our young people and indoctrinate them into right wing beliefs.
People that support public dollars for public schools must become more politically engaged in order to defend their right to a fully funded and supported public system of education. They should challenge the concept of “money following the student” as it deliberately shortchanges public education. They should demand that private schools paid for with public dollars be held accountable both economically and academically. If states refuse to hold publicly funded private schools to account, defenders of the common good should demand that the state pay for their unaccountable schools from a separate budget and not co-mingle funding with public education.
Thanks for this interesting discussion.
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Wow, the talk between HCR and Josh Cowen demonstrates how important open discussions are to maintaining our freedom of speech! This is especially important now, because fascist leaders like Putin are threatening to shut down the Internet today. And if he can do that, then others with that agenda will find the power to do it as well, and democracy will be completely without a voice, in these very troubled times!!! (OMG: Shudder the thought of it all!)
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