This is one of the best newspaper articles I have read about the damaging impact of vouchers and tax credits on small-town and rural America.
The big question is why so many conservatives want to destroy one of our nation’s most enduring and central institutions: our public schools. There is little or no evidence that “school choice” produces better academic results. It does, however, privatize education.
Since when do conservatives go around blowing up traditional institutions?
The tax credit program in Georgia isn’t supposed to help “poor kids in failing schools.” It is designed to provide money for any child in the state to go to private school. In short, it’s a voucher.
The article’s writer, Leon Galis, says:
“Meanwhile, there’s panic in the one- and no-stoplight towns below the gnat line. In Harry Crews country, small, isolated school districts serving only a few hundred students each, with so few teachers that it’s common for one teacher to cover several grades, face the prospect of somehow having to get along with even fewer teachers.
Superintendents in these districts don’t know how they’ll go from absolute bare bones to less than absolute bare bones and still offer anything remotely resembling education.
Another thing I don’t understand is why self-styled conservatives have so little interest in conserving anything. For many of these map-dot communities, the schools and the churches are the center of community life, the glue that holds these hardscrabble places together.
As Beverly Grant, a retired Quitman County teacher, told the Journal-Constitution, the school system is “the foundation of the community. Basically, it’s the only thing the community really has … .”
Anybody who’s ever been to Quitman County will know exactly what she’s talking about. Starve the schools and you fast-track these towns toward extinction. Why don’t conservatives get that?
And why don’t they get this?: If strewing vouchers around to give people more school choices makes any sense at all, it makes sense only in urban and suburban areas, like Cobb County where Ehrhart is from. In places like that, you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a school.
But in the sparsely populated areas of the state where schools are too far apart even to consolidate, the urban and suburban fascination with “school choice” is a cruel joke. For a voucher to be worth anything, people have to have options, which the residents of the “sparsity” grant districts don’t, unless you count moving away.
To a more jaundiced eye, though, maybe this situation isn’t a case of the right hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Maybe the right hand knows exactly what it’s doing. Because enough people in the “sparsity” districts are reliable Republican voters, the Republicans under the Gold Dome know they can jerk those constituencies around with impunity. And for exactly the same reason, Democrats ignore them. Both parties fish where the votes are. And they’re not in Harry Crews country.
This is all starting to make sense to me now.
