Education

School Vouchers? Kochs Effort to Destroy Public Education. Kids can’t pick their parents.

School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget.

“Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.”

“Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North CarolinaArkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.”

Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers

Most Tennessee charter schools show lower ‘success rate’ than districts they serve, analysis shows

“The data also raises questions about how well the privately operated charter schools are meeting the needs of children with disabilities, with two-thirds reporting that they had so few students that they were not required to report success rates for those children.”

Koch Network Infiltration of Public Schools ‘Harms Students, Teachers, and Our Democracy’: Report

The Koch network has made no secret about the critical role that public education plays as an ideal arena for influencing U.S. policy and culture,” the group says in an introduction to the report. “Through a variety of tactics–charter schools, vouchers, curriculum, textbooks, trainings, using state politicians to engage in culture war against progressive ideas, and more–the Koch network is able to ensure the spread of their ideas, including climate disinformation and free market-favoring economics philosophy.”

According to the report, the Koch network’s tactics include:

  • Supporting the seating of state legislators who intentionally defund public education;
  • Destabilizing state funding in schools to promote policies that divert funds away from traditional public schools to charter schools, private schools, and online education under the guise of “school choice”;
  • Funding higher education centers that create the curriculum and textbooks being used in some K-12 programs; and
  • Astroturfing moral panic about ideologies that critique their idea production and theory of change as regressive and racist (Critical Race Theory, or CRT).

“At the moment, there is a coordinated effort in states across the country to pass bills attempting to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools,” the report notes. “The Koch-funded Heritage Foundation is leading the push… Both the Heritage Foundation and another Koch-funded organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have held webinars in opposition to the teaching of CRT. ALEC has frequently produced model bills for various right-wing causes, causing concern over their involvement when it comes to anti-CRT state bills.”

Schools are still segregated, and black children are paying a price

65 years after Brown v. Board of Education, school segregation is getting worse

“The report, released Friday by UCLA and Penn State, looked at federal student enrollment data and other research on school segregation. It found that students across America are increasingly attending racially isolated schools, with black and Latino students in particular attending schools that are predominantly nonwhite.

White students, meanwhile, are attending schools that are less white than they were in the 1950s and 1960s, but these schools still have far more white students than their share of the student of the actual student population.”

Billionaires v teachers: the Koch brothers’ plan to starve public education

A small group of women have succeeded in putting a state law promoted by Betsy DeVos and billionaire donors which they see as an attack on public education on the ballot in November

Arizona has become the hotbed for an experiment rightwing activists hope will redefine America’s schools – an experiment that has pitched the conservative billionaires the Koch brothers and Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary, Betsy DeVos, against teachers’ unions, teachers and parents. Neither side is giving up without a fight.

With groups funded by the Koch brothers and DeVos nudging things along, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s broadest school vouchers law, state-funded vouchers that are supposed to give parents more school choice and can be spent on private or religiously affiliated schools. For opponents, the system is not about choice but about further weakening the public school system. A half-dozen women who had battled for months against the legislation were angry as hell.

Convinced that the law would drain money from Arizona’s underfunded public schools, these women complained that Arizona’s lawmakers had ignored the public will and instead heeded the wishes of billionaires seeking to build up private schools at the expense of public schools.”

“Guardian US teacher takeover

Teachers are guest-editing Guardian US to highlight underfunded schools, falling pay and a new wave of activism

Learn more

Want to See How the Kochs Are Ending Public Education?

The Koch brothers have more than $42 billion to make public policy out of their anti-government ideology, and their assault against public education epitomizes their tactics to remake our nation. The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity and have contributed more than $5 million to its political coffers. Americans for Prosperity, in turn, contributed to organizations that financially influenced a community school board election. Watch the Video: Why Do The Koch Brothers Want to End Public Education? That’s right: the Koch brothers are involving themselves, through their wealth-backed political apparatus, in local schools.

ALEC’s Attack on Public Education: A Report from the Frontlines

“Fittingly, the keynote speaker at ALEC’s July 19-21 conference was school privatization czarina Betsy DeVos. DeVos has spent most of her life using her billions to push privatizing public education through charter and voucher school schemes.

The issue of the moment for ALEC is public education—that is, undermining it. ALEC members are foaming at the mouth for the now-endless opportunities to further privatize public schools. 

After bashing ALEC convention protesters, along with George Soros and the “radical left,” DeVos lauded the twenty states that have expanded privatization efforts this year. She encouraged more action to privatize public education, remarking that “no one has ever lost a seat because of choice,” a refrain I heard repeatedly (perhaps because of the millions of dollars the school privatization industry “invests” in supportive candidates).”

David Limbaugh

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