Private school vouchers are shaping up to be huge part of the 2024 election as GOP candidates work t

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

to 'one up' each other on the issue

The Republican Party is accelerating its push to remake public education, and it's already becoming a key piece of the 2024 presidential nomination contest.

While battles over how classrooms should teach about race and LGBTQ topics have fired up the GOP base, the expansion of school vouchers is taking hold in red states. The vouchers use public dollars to move K-12 students out of public schools and into private, charter, and magnet schools — and sometimes even offset homeschooling costs.

Iowa, Utah, West Virginia, Florida, and Arkansas have moved to make vouchers widely available. North Dakota, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee could be next.

Democrats and teacher's unions view the vouchers as a devastating attack on underfunded public schools, and as yet another issue broadening the differences between red and blue states.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/private-school-vouchers-are-shaping-up-to-be-huge-part-of-the-2024-election-as-gop-candidates-work-to-one-up-each-other-on-the-issue/ar-AA19TBpa

[kimbutgar]

1. These private voucher schools are not required to have credentialed teachers

I would not send my child to a school that didn’t have credentialed teachers nor ones that didn’t have background checks.

[piddyprints]

2. I went to a private school in VA.

6th grade, my dad had just returned to Vietnam and was newly stationed at Ft. Lee. He decided to send the younger kids to a private Christian school nearby. I lasted about 3 weeks before I just couldn't take it. Besides the syrupy sickness of all the religious bullshit, my history teacher accused me of cheating on a test when I was daydreaming and blankly staring ahead. I wouldn't have gotten a good grade, but it would have been better than the 0 he gave me.

I went home that day and told my dad that I refused to go back. Period. He wasn't in the mood to argue, so he pulled me out and enrolled me in public school immediately, where I went on to get an A in history as well as all my other subjects. The kids and teachers were nicer, too, and we didn't have to do the religious crap. The icing on the cake for me was that we got to go on a field trip to Williamsburg and Jamestown.

That was back in the 60s and I think I'd be safe to assume that private schools, especially the religious ones, have gotten worse. Taking funding away from public schools so that these alternatives can run off our tax dollars is just a way to starve a free public school education out of existence.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

11. My mother opted for a religious school

Because she deemed the local public schools sub-par, at best. Or that's what she said, but much of it was that she didn't like us going to a school that had so many brown people in it.

Her decision got jump-started when the school asked for a parent-teacher conference to say I was so far ahead of my peers that, even if they had moved me to another (whiter) school within a comfortable distance from home, they would still need to move me up around 2 grades, putting me, at 10, outside of the primary schools, and into the equivalent of middle schools. A lot of debate about whether I was up to being around kids that age.

Rather than thrashing through that problem, mom transferred all of us to the religious school closest to our home. It was a terrible mistake. Maybe even fatal, because my outright hatred of school started there. Not education--I was always hungry for that. But school? I loathed it, especially after attending that one.

The social studies education was so slanted to promote their religious worldview that it was little more than outright lies. Even though I was only 10-12 while I was a student there, I knew they were lying. After all, I'd read enough biographies and history books and books about foreign countries at the public library to know better. I trusted the books. The religious school? Not so much.

The mathematics was behind what I'd learned at the "sub-par" school. I know, because my teacher in it there had given me assignments from the successive year textbooks, to keep me occupied while the normies struggled with that week's content. It was one of those reasons why they wanted to promote me to higher grades. Anyway, kids in the equivalent grades at the old school would have been learning the same concepts as what's called pre-algebra now. The religious school was behind what I'd done at the other school--and stayed behind them with the next grade.

Worst of all, but not surprising: The religious school taught close to zero science. It was so bad that the ancient (and as it turned out quite valuable) National Geographic collection from the first half of the 20th century on our classroom shelves had more (and more accurate) science education in it than what little got covered in our classes. I know. I read all of those old NGs because the subject matter at school was so mindless that it was infantile. Better to get in some decent reading, rather than dying of boredom.

Thanks to that bottom of the barrel science experience, I would forever be behind with that subject in subsequent school levels. Even at uni, I struggled with some of the science for dummies courses because those two years of religious school left me so bereft of foundational knowledge that I constantly had to play catch up with the basics to understand what came so easily to my classmates.

I did get a decent education at the religious school in art and English. One thing they offered that I wouldn't get anywhere else was a system for improving reading speed while sustaining comprehension levels, and it actually worked well.

Oh, and reading that NG collection fostered a lifelong interest in geography, anthropology, world cultures, and etc.

Those were the only positives of the religious school experience. But overall?

Complete waste of money. The only reason we stopped attending that awful place was because we moved to a town with better (whiter) schools. I wasn't sorry to quit the place.

[walkingman]

3. It does look like Texas might be next but not for sure. A lot of the rural school

districts have voiced complaints because it could be devastating to them but the Rethugs have proposed a monetary work around for them

Personally, I do not want one red cent of my tax dollars going to religious education. It is wrong on so many levels.

Abbott and Company suck.

[JCMach1]

8. Rural R's and Dems have formed a coalition to stop it in TX

It won't go through most likely.

Besides Abbott is too busy trying to push through a pardon for the straight up racist murderer of a BLM protester.

[Rstrstx]

12. They tried it a few years ago

And rural Repubs teamed up with Dems to sink it. It’s not particularly popular here, with a lot of questions about how much money would go out of local school coffers and where it would go and who (if anyone) would be accountable for the money that flowed to private schools or home schoolers. Lots of moving parts are making it a hard sell among pretty much all Dems and a surprising number of Repubs.

[JCMach1]

14. It is uphill also because Public Schools tend to be very good in Texas

Another reason it has me spitting nails.

[OrlandoDem2]

4. I think what we Democrats have to understand about the GOP in 2024 is this.

They are using vouchers, LGBTQ issues, CRT, and other culture war bull shit to gin up the base because the GOP leadership knows that abortion is a losing issue by a wide margin.

Even some moderate or right leaning women who may be inclined to vote Democrat due to the abortion issue can be brought back to the Republicans due to the other culture wars.

We are winning on the abortion issue hands down. I’m not sure, but I think we are losing on the other culture issues unfortunately. Negate them and we win a ton of seats next year and keep the White House.

[senseandsensibility]

5. There is money to be made through privatizing public schools

Their rightwing donors are salivating to profit off of running schools on the cheap with non credentialed, non unionized teachers. They've been open about this for decades, and any "concern" about curriculum is just cover to sell it to the masses.

[SWBTATTReg]

6. Just wait until the bills come due. People will be shocked at how much they will be. And the

backlash IMHO will be swift and immediate and angry, with cries of 'you didn't tell us how much this would cost!', etc.

[SYFROYH]

7. My wife and I have been sendin our son to a secular private school.

Last edited Sat Apr 15, 2023, 04:22 PM - Edit history (1)

It’s been good for him. Small classes. Lots of educational opportunities.

We have just one more year, but a voucher would have been nice to offset the cost a bit.

[walkingman]

9. I totally understand your sentiments but not at the cost of making our public education

system (the schools for the masses) even worse than they are now.

I can only speak for Texas but our State government has cut funding for public education every year for decades and not because of budgetary issues. It is obvious that they do not support education in the State of Texas.

I personally think it is because they realize that an undereducated public is more likely to vote for the GOP. And you can see that for the last 30 years that has been the case. Otherwise you would not have the dumbassery we now have in Texas State Government.

In my mind it is obvious that our school systems are failing our society and segregating school choice is not the answer. It makes things worse.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

10. It was your choice to send your child to private school rather than secular

You are not entitled to public funds for your private choices.

[SYFROYH]

13. Obviously it is my choice. But if I sent my kid to public school

That would have been my choice, too.

Do you think I’m entitled to public funds for that private choice?

I’m not pushing for vouchers, but I’m not opposed to them either.