Last year, the Florida legislature, acting on Governor DeSantis’ behalf, dissolved the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special arrangement created by the legislature in 1967 that allowed the Disney Corporation to take responsibility for all public services. It was punishment for Disney speaking out against DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. Disney was acting at the behest of its employees. The dissolution of the special district meant that the counties where Disney World is located would be saddled with $1 billion or more of new taxes to pay for services and bond debts. That was politically unacceptable.
One of the five commissioners, Ron Peri, is a Christian pastor who leads a group called The Gathering. He is known for his hostility to homosexuality. He recently warned that drinking tap water might turn you gay. This is very alarming because most Americans drink tap water. Is he shilling for the bottled water industry?
Another appointee to the new board is Bridget Ziegler, founder of Moms for Liberty and wife of the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, the same guy who advocates eliminating the Democratic Party in the state.
Will the DeSantis board act as morality police? Will they scrutinize and sanitize every exhibit, show, and performer at Disney World? Will gender-neutral bathrooms be eliminated? Will tourists be required to display their birth certificates on entering a bathroom to ensure that they are using the gender assigned at birth? We will see.
Where did COVID-19 start? Was there a lab leak in Wuhan in China, where deadly pathogens are studied? Did it originate in an animal market in Wuhan, then jump from animals to humans? Was there a different cause?
Federal agencies do not agree. Scientists do not agree.
The story begins:
Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.
The Wall Street Journal added to that debate this week when they reported that the U.S. Department of Energy has shifted its stance on the origin of COVID. It now concludes, with “low confidence,” that the pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.
The agency based their conclusion on classified evidence that isn’t available to the public. According to the federal government, “low confidence” means “the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”
And at this point, the U.S. intelligence community still has no consensus about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Four of the eight intelligence agencies lean toward a natural origin for the virus, with “low confidence,” while two of them – the DOE and the Federal Bureau of Information – support a lab origin, with the latter having “moderate confidence” about their conclusion.
But at the end of the day, the origin of the pandemic is also a scientific question. Virologists, who study pandemic origins, are much less divided than the U.S. intelligence community. They say there is “very convincing” data and “overwhelming evidence” pointing to an animal origin.
In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.
Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE’s “low confident” conclusion doesn’t “negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin.”
“Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis,” Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, “and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either.”
So just what is the scientific evidence that the pandemic began at the seafood market?
Neither of the Science papers provide the smoking gun — that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.
But they come close. They provide photographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. What’s more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market.
Please open the link to read the rest of the story.
Stephen J. Klees is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of International Education Policy at the University of Maryland. Klees recently gave a talk at the Comparative and International Education Society’s (CIES) annual meeting in Washington D.C.. He considers the privatization of education to be a juggernaut of patriarchal racial neoliberal capitalism. Dr. Klees shared his talk with me.
Privatization is a scourge. Basic services should be public, publicly owned and run. It is not a question of effectiveness or costs. Privatized basic services are inequitable and violate human rights.
In education, the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s drastically changed the narrative. Before neoliberalism, it was generally believed that basic education (primary and secondary) should usually be provided by governments, with private schooling mostly the preserve of the wealthy and religious schools. The changed narrative brought by neoliberalism no longer asked whether privatization was necessary; instead, it asked when and how should we privatize? This assault on public sector motivations, competence, and budgets happened almost overnight – due completely to ideology, there was no evidence for this shift.
This shift has led to the massive expansion of private schooling around the world, most especially in developing countries, with critics fighting a rear-guard action against this juggernaut. The fight has given us efforts like the work of PEHRCand others that led to the Abidjan Principles, Education International’s Global Response campaign, high-level reports by UN Special Rapporteurs, as well as groups in most countries challenging the privatization of education. Have all these efforts slowed the juggernaut? Perhaps, but not noticeably. Have they changed the narrative? Perhaps some, but certainly not enough.
Critical researchers have responded to the slew of studies by privatization advocates pointing out their ideological biases and methodological flaws and pointing to contrary evidence. While we critics must respond to the advocates, to me, all this research is in many ways a waste of time and money. In terms of the narrow measurement of “learning,” embodied in test scores in a few subjects, the conclusion is what we all know – with similar students, sometimes private schools perform a little better, sometimes public schools do, and often there are no important differences. The other conclusion, hardly challenged by the right, is that privatization, even with low-cost private schools, further stratifies the system exacerbating inequality. But has this critical research changed the narrative or slowed the juggernaut? Perhaps a little, but far from enough.
What can slow or stop the juggernaut and change the story? I see more hope in increased mobilization across sectors. In 2019, there was a conference in Amsterdam that brought together public service advocates and this past December an even bigger one in Santiago, Chile that had over a thousand representatives from over one hundred countries fighting for public services in education, health, water, energy, housing, food, transportation, social protection, and care sectors. The Global Manifesto produced prior to the meeting and the Santiago Declaration produced after are marvelous documents with excellent analyses of the problem and principles for universal quality public services that will hopefully serve as a rallying cry for cross-sector mobilization by civil society and social movements around the world. The argument that there is not enough money to fund needed public services is simply a refusal to change priorities and tax those who are well-off.
However, the underlying reason we don’t have essential basic public services – the big picture – are the structures of patriarchal racial neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism exalts the market, but what does this mean? The market is a euphemism. It means the private sector should basically run the world. Critics of capitalism are accused of believing in a conspiracy by the rich and powerful; the critics response is there is no need for conspiracy. The reproduction of poverty and inequality, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and more are built into the very structures that surround us.
Yet let’s not dismiss conspiracies too soon. What is the World Economic Forum but the rich and powerful getting together to set an agenda for the world? How many have heard of the Trilateral Commission? It’s the same people as the WEF getting together without much publicity each year to do the same. The WEF has been pushing its 2010 Global Redesign Initiative which essentially wants to turn the UN itself into a giant PPP – with quite a bit of success. These patriarchal racial capitalist institutions, run essentially by rich white men, may not have bad intentions but they are deluded into the self-interest of believing that all we need are win-win solutions to reform current polices, supposedly for everyone – without, of course, changing any of the structures that maintain their wealth and power.
We will not stop or reverse the privatization of education juggernaut without system change. Under patriarchal racial capitalism, especially the neoliberal version, privatization is the solution to most of our ills. But business leaders are singularly unqualified to deal with education or other social problems that have no simple bottom line (like profits) and whose real solution may threaten their dominance and power. While system change is very difficult, there are many groups, organizations, and movements around the world working on exactly that. The Santiago Declaration explicitly recognizes that the battle for public services means we need to “move away from the racial, patriarchal, and colonial patterns of capitalism and towards socio-economic justice, ecological sustainability, human rights, and public services.”
In what kind of world is it considered legitimate to charge the poorest for basic services? The answer is in a patriarchal, racist, capitalist world. I hope and believe that future generations will look back in horror at the fundamentally uncivilized nature of today’s world.
“The Villages” is a huge retirement community in Florida that votes Republican. The family that started it controls the community newspaper and pipes in FOX News to all public facilities. It plans to expand, and it raised property taxes by 25% to finance the expansion. This made many residents unhappy. A slate of elderly rebels ran to join the board that makes decisions. The rebels won. The developers (aka “The Family”) had to put down the rebellion. The developers are big contributors to Governor DeSantis.
By the end of the story, one of the rebels was in jail, and two were removed from office by the Governor. The tax hike went into effect, peace was restored, and the new development went forward.
Read it.
It begins:
THE TROUBLE BEGAN in 2019 when residents of The Villages were suddenly hit with a 25 percent hike in their property taxes. In the master-planned retirement community of 130,000 across Sumter, Lake, and Marion counties in central Florida, many are on fixed incomes. The math they had done in plotting out their golden years had not accounted for a massive jump in taxes.
The state board of education in Massachettts approved a new charter for Worcester that plans to siphon state funds to subsidize a museum, Old Sturbridge Village.
Local officials, including the mayor, opposed the new charter. It was supported by officials from other charter schools and from Old Sturbridge Village.
Concerns included nearly $7 million that would be taken from the Worcester Public School district’s budget; that the school would act as a revenue stream for Old Sturbridge Village; and that it would not provide anything new that the Worcester Public School district does not already offer to its students.
Ties to Diocese of Worcester
Mailman [a school committee member] raised concerns over the school’s ties to the Diocese of Worcester, with which it has a lease agreement at 81 Plantation St., where the school would be located upon opening, and how that could impact things like sex education curriculum and treatment of LGBTQ+ students.
Concerns had been raised previously about the lease agreement and that it would not allow the school to teach material that is “inconsistent with the doctrines or teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, ” in the building.
Louise Burrell, a parent from Worcester who said she was speaking on behalf of other parents, said she was concerned that the organization behind the proposed school has not had any contact with families in the district.
She also had concerns about how the budget drain would exacerbate increased class sizes and staffing shortages, and have a negative impact on vulnerable students, particularly those who are Black, Indigenous or other persons of color.
Who benefits? Not the vast majority of children in Worcester. They will have larger classes so that a charter can choose the 350 students it wants.
Paul Bonner is a retired teacher and principal. He consistently posts wise insights about teaching and schools.
We spend a significant amount of time bemoaning the existence of charters, vouchers, and privatization, and deservedly so. However, what we don’t challenge is the the misguided culture that drives much of the leadership within public school bureaucracy. I have read untold articles, attended conferences, and sat through meetings with my superiors where the validity of school boards is questioned. I have watched politically tone deaf school board members, politicians, and citizens question the role of superintendents. I have heard little from elected or appointed leadership that shows real concern for the needs of individual schools. The circular firing squad comes to mind. Superintendents across the country along with School Boards should take some blame for the rise of privatized initiatives. Citizens get frustrated because the district apparatus too often comes off as aloof and disengaged from the issues facing communities. The disjointed efforts of school policy makers has given an opening to corporate interests who see the chance to make a buck through lobbying district leaders and various politicians because, too often, school districts seem incapable of carrying out their mission to serve children. Where are parents to turn? Finland famously turned their schools around by focusing on preparing and providing for teachers. We in the US continue to organize through top down bureaucratic models that contribute to the profound inequality of student opportunity while perpetually searching for the Superintendent who can fix it. The wasted resources spent on the ongoing dance in large city districts with failed superintendents, as evidenced by an average service time of 3.76 years (k12insight.com), will only continue if policy makers focus on “the one best system” over investment in the foundation of teacher driven instruction. Data clearly reveals that superintendents have almost no impact on individual student achievement, whereas teachers given the tools to establish relationships with students and their parents have a life long impact.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson describes the sharp contrast between the two parties: the Democrats are looking to the future, building platforms for innovation, new industries, and economic growth, while the Republicans are mired in stale culture war issues—campaigning for more restrictions on abortion, despite public opinion, and relitigating the 2020 election.
She writes:
At Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service today, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spoke on “The CHIPS Act and a Long-term Vision for America’s Technological Leadership.” She outlined what she sees as a historic opportunity to solidify the nation’s global leadership in technology and innovation and at the same time rebuild the country’s manufacturing sector and protect national security.
Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022 by a bipartisan vote, directing more than $52 billion into research and manufacturing of semiconductor chips as well as additional scientific research. Scientists in the U.S. developed chips, and they are now in cars, appliances, and so on. But they are now manufactured primarily in East Asia. The U.S. produces only about 10% of the world’s supply and makes none of the most advanced chips.
That dependence on overseas production hit supply chains hard during the pandemic while also weakening our national security. The hope behind the CHIPS and Science Act was that a significant government investment in the industry would jump-start private investment in bringing chip manufacturing back to the U.S., enabling the U.S. to compete more effectively with China. In the short term, at least, the plan has worked: by the end of 2022, private investors had pledged at least $200 billion to build U.S. chip manufacturing facilities.
Today, Raimondo framed the CHIPS and Science Act as an “incredible opportunity” to enable the U.S. to lead the world in technology, “securing our economic and national security future for the coming decades.” In the modern technological world, “it’s the countries who invest in research, innovation, and their workforces that will lead in the 21st century,” she said.
Raimondo described the major investment in semiconductor technology and its manufacture as a public investment in the economy that rivals some of the great investments in our history. She talked of Abraham Lincoln’s investment in agriculture in the 1860s to cement the position of the U.S. as a leader in world grain production, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman’s investment in scientific innovation to develop nuclear technology, and John F. Kennedy’s investment in putting a man on the moon.
Each of those massive investments sparked scientific innovation and economic growth. Raimondo suggested that “the CHIPS and Science Act presents us with an opportunity to make investments that are similarly consequential for our nation’s future.”
The vision Raimondo advanced was not one of top-down creativity. Instead, she described the extraordinary innovation of the silicon industry in the 1960s as a product of collaboration between university scientists, government purchasing power, and manufacturing. Rather than dismissing manufacturing as a repetitive mechanical task, she put it at the heart of innovation as the rapid production of millions and millions of chips prompted engineers to tweak manufacturing processes a little at a time, constantly making improvements.
“This relentless pace of lab-to-fab[rication] and fab-to-lab innovation became synonymous with America’s tech leadership,” she said, “doubling our computing capacity every two years.” As the U.S. shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, it lost this creative system. At the same time, inability to get chips during the pandemic hamstrung the U.S. economy and left our national security dependent for chips on other countries, especially China.
Reestablishing manufacturing in the U.S. will spark innovation and protect national security. It will also create new well-paying jobs for people without a college degree both in construction and in the operations of the new factories. With labor scarce, Raimondo called for hiring and training a million women in construction over the next decade, as well as bringing people from underserved communities into the skilled workforce to create “the most diverse, productive, and talented workers in the world.”
Raimondo warned that the vision she laid out would be hard to accomplish, but “if we—as a nation—unite behind a shared objective…and think boldly,” we can create a new generation of innovators and engineers, develop the manufacturing sector and the jobs that go with it, rebuild our economy, and protect our national security.
Just “think about what’s possible 10 years from now if we are bold,” she said.
Later, Raimondo told David Ignatius of the Washington Post: “This is more than just an investment to subsidize a few new chip factories…. We need to unite America around a common goal of enhancing America’s global competitiveness and leading in this incredibly crucial technology.… Money isn’t enough. We all need to get in the same boat as a nation.”
Part of the impetus for the bipartisan drive to jump-start the semiconductor industry is lawmakers’ determination to counter the rise of China, which has invested heavily in its own economy. As the U.S. seeks to swing the Indo-Pacific away from its orientation toward China, Raimondo will travel to India next month to talk about closer economic ties between the U.S. and India, including collaboration in chip manufacturing as India, Japan, and Australia are launching their own joint semiconductor initiative.
For the Biden administration, the investment in chips and all the growth and innovation it promises to spark, especially among those without college degrees, is also an attempt to unite the nation to move forward. Theirs is a heady vision of a nation that works together in a shared task, as Lincoln’s United States did, or FDR’s, or JFK’s.
Their orientation toward the future, growth, and prosperity is a striking contrast to the vision of today’s Republicans, who look backward resolutely and angrily to an imagined past. In the short term, many of them continue to relitigate the 2020 presidential election, long after the Big Lie that Trump won has been debunked and the rest of the country has moved on.
In the New York Times yesterday, Luke Broadwater and Jonathan Swan reported that one of the reasons House speaker Kevin McCarthy handed access to more than 40,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol from January 6, 2021, to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson was that McCarthy had promised the far right that he would revisit that event but did not want to have the Republican Congress tied to the effort. His political advisors say swing voters want to move forward.
In the longer term, today’s Republicans are out of step with the majority of Americans on issues like LGBTQ rights, climate change, gun safety, and abortion. Although Republicans are pushing draconian laws to end all abortion access, today Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, released a report showing that 64% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 25% say it should be illegal in most cases and only 9% say it should be illegal in all cases. Less than half the residents in every state and in Washington, D.C., supported overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, as the Supreme Court did with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of last June.
In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) echoed Trump’s “American Carnage” inaugural address with his description of today’s America as one full of misery and hopelessness. Florida governor Ron DeSantis traveled this week to New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago to insist those Democratic-led cities were crime-ridden, although as human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid pointed out, Florida has a 19% higher rape rate, 66% higher murder rate, and 280% higher burglary rate than New York.
Another study released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League, which specializes in civil rights law, noted that domestic extremist mass killings have increased “greatly” in the past 12 years. But while murders by Islamic extremists, for example, have been falling, all the extremist killings in 2022 were committed by right-wing adherents, with 21 of 25 murders linked to white supremacists.
President Biden’s poll numbers are up to 46% in general and 49% with registered voters. Perhaps more to the point is that in Tuesday’s four special elections, Democrats outperformed expectations by significant margins.
There are many reasons for these Democratic gains—abortion rights key among them—but it is possible that voters like the Democrats’ vision of a hopeful future and a realistic means to get there rather than Republicans’ condemnation of the present and vow to claw back a mythological past.
Cassandra Ulbrich is the former president of the Michigan State Board of Education. She is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education. In this post, which appeared in Bridge Michigan, she describes the failure of for-profit charters, whose top goal is making money, not educating students.
She writes:
When it comes to education, Michigan’s number one. Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing.
Once again, Michigan has the dubious distinction of being the state with the highest percentage of charter schools run by for-profit corporations in the nation. Eighty-one percent of Michigan’s nearly 300 charter schools contract with private management companies, often referred to as Charter Management Organizations (CMO).
Casandra Ulbrich is the former president of the State Board of Education.
What do we get in exchange? Mediocre results and a lack of financial transparency.
As the former president of the Michigan State Board of Education, I was often told by charter choice advocates that charters report the same information as every other traditional public school. As an educational administrator and researcher, I knew from experience this was false. And in my last year in office, I led a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exercise that proved it.
As the recently released report, Chartered for Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering, published by the Network for Public Education (NPE) — of which I am a board member — explains, the charter industry downplays the prevalence of charter schools being run for profit. The report explains how by using webs of related corporations, for-profit charters take ownership of school buildings and real estate, sometimes charging their own schools excessive leasing rates. Then, when the building is paid off, the property is flipped — at times to another entity they created, forcing taxpayers to re-pay off real estate that the public does not own.
Has any of this resulted in increased student achievement? The answer is a resounding no. Nationally, charters run as for-profit graduate students at lower rates and with more adverse academic outcomes as the number of charter services managed by for-profit operators increases. That comes from a report published by the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Here in Michigan, student achievement relative to national averages has declined since charters were introduced.
The vast wealth created by the industry has allowed it to influence policymakers and keep regulations lax. But taxpayers are calling for better laws that create a level field for all. That is why the recent Biden Administration regulations put the brakes on giving for-profit-run schools Charter School Programs funding. It’s time for Michigan to do the same.
The NPE report outlines six simple policy changes that could be made to close many legal loopholes and ensure public funds end up serving students, not profiteers. In addition, at the end of 2022, the State Board of Education issued a common-sense resolution calling for increased charter school transparency in our state. The resolution calls on the Legislature to strengthen charter school laws, including:
Requiring CMO contracts to include annual audited financial statement provisions
Requiring CMOs to produce annual audited financial statements for authorizers to account for any fees collected to oversee charters
Requiring all schools to post annual student recruitment costs
Subject CMOs to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
It’s time to ensure our most dedicated charter schools prosper and bad actors are weeded out.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City, gives away a lot of money. In education, he has generously funded his alma mater Johns Hopkins University, where the medical school is named for him. As Mayor for three terms—twelve years—despite a two-term limit, he had sole control of the city’s public schools. He hired a non-educator to reorganize the public schools, and he reorganized them again and again. Testing, data, small schools, closing schools, and charter schools were the hallmarks of his twelve years in charge. Test scores were treasured above all else.
Since leaving office in 2013, Bloomberg has shown no interest in public schools. He disregards them or views them with contempt. He has donated more than $1 billion to supporting and expanding charter schools. He has given lavishly to political candidates who promise more charter schools. He recently gave money for summer school, but the gift was limited only to students in charter schools. This is puzzling. Are charter school students more deserving than those in public schools? Are they needier?
This story appeared in the New York Daily News.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg is renewing a multimillion-dollar summer program to target charter school students with significant learning gaps exacerbated by the pandemic. Charter schools can apply for up to $2,000 in funding per student through “Summer Boost” based on the length of their school days and programs. Programs run for at least four weeks and focus on English and math at the first- through ninth-grade levels.
“The best opportunity we have to help them catch up is during the summer months,” said Bloomberg in a statement.
The city’s Department of Education operates its own program for students in district and charter schools, while the Bloomberg initiative is only available to charter students.
Last summer, 16,383 students from 224 charter schools participated in the initiative — 34.5% fewer children than officials had expected to enroll. Kids learned in classrooms with a maximum of 25 students, and as low as four students in some schools.
“We found that not every school felt it was adequately staffed or prepared to create a summer program, and some schools already had programming planned,” said Jamila Reeves, a spokesperson for Bloomberg Philanthropies. “Some schools were understandably conservative about the number of students they could serve given burnout from COVID.” Still, more than 70% of NYC charter schools ran programs, according to the organization. Bloomberg touted the summer lessons as helping thousands of local children “get back on track last year.” The percentage of students who met grade-level standards doubled last year in English and math, based on third-party exams administered before and after the summer. The program is expanding to seven additional cities — Baltimore, Birmingham, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, San Antonio and Washington D.C. — and expects to serve tens of thousands of students across all locations. The spokesperson did not know how many students would enroll in NYC.
Josh Cowen is the voucher lobby’s worst nightmare. He was a participant in voucher research from its beginnings. He knows the research as well as anyone in the country. He knows that vouchers have failed. And unlike many others in this tight-knit world, he declined to climb aboard the gravy train funded by billionaires. He determined to tell the truth: vouchers hurt kids.
In this article, as in many others that he has written, he explains that there is no upside to vouchers. They subsidize kids already in private school. They harm the kids who leave public schools. They defund the public schools that the vast majority of children attend.
He begins:
What if I told you there is a policy idea in education that, when implemented to its full extent, caused some of the largest academic drops ever measured in the research record?
What if I told you that 40 percent of schools funded under that policy closed their doors afterward, and that kids in those schools fled them at about a rate of 20 percent per year?
What if I told you that some the largest financial backers of that idea also put their money behind election denial and voter suppression—groups still claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Would you believe what those groups told you about their ideas for improving schools?
What if I told you that idea exists, that it’s called school vouchers, and despite all of the evidence against it the idea persists and is even expanding?
Diane Ravitch's blog 