Charter School Mvmt. Implodes; WH Plan For 'School Choice' Leads To More Privatization of Public Ed
'The Charter School Movement Is Imploding. What Comes Next May Be Worse.' Trump’s plan for 'school choice' will lead to the further privatization of public education. Jeff Bryant, Common Dreams, Feb. 18, 2020. Excerpts:
For too long,” Trump declared in his State of the Union address on February 4, “countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools.” Trump, to shore up his point, introduced two guests in the audience: Stephanie Davis, a black single mom from Philadelphia, and her fourth-grade daughter, Janiyah, who the President said was on a waitlist in Pennsylvania's voucher program. Trump then revealed that one of these voucher had magically “become available” for Janiyah.
It turns out that none of this was quite true. First, federal officials—Trump, included—do not have the power to issue a school voucher for a child in Pennsylvania or any other state. Janiyah was only able to skip a waiting list more than 40,000 applicants for a voucher because of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who promised to personally fund her tuition for an indefinite number of years. Second, Trump called Janiyah’s school a “government school”—the term privatization advocates use when they refer to public schools. But, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, she wasn’t enrolled in a public school. She was attending a charter school, which are often privately managed and, though run on public funds, not truly public.
- Stephanie Davis and her daughter, Janiyah, attend the State of the Union address on Feb. 4, 2020 in Washington, D.C.
And finally, Trump blamed Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf for thwarting the girl’s admission into a private, voucher-supported school. He claimed that Wolf recently vetoed a bill to expand the state’s voucher program, but that’s not the whole picture. While Wolf did veto an expansion bill, he also passed a budget that expanded the voucher program and provided larger tax breaks for low-income families who are eligible to apply.
Trump, in his State of Union speech, also proposed a $5 billion Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act, something Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supports and Republican lawmakers first introduced. The proposed legislation would allow states to give tax credits to individuals and corporations for the cost parents incur when they choose to send their kids to private schools or opt for homeschooling. Similar tax-credit programs were already set up in eighteen states, as a workaround to provisions in state constitutions that forbid funneling tax money to private religious schools (the majority of private schools are religion-affiliated).
These programs, which distribute vouchers from a nonprofit created by the state, are entirely funded from private individuals and corporations, even though donors are mostly remunerated by getting the tax credit. If this sounds like a legal form of money laundering, that’s because it is. By now, Trump’s grandstanding for “school choice” has been picked apart and exposed as an empty gesture. But things became more confusing when, six days after his speech, he presented a budget to Congress that clarified his intentions to press forward with an expanded voucher program at all costs—even at the expense of charter schools...
And prominent charter school proponents, such as New York magazine pundit Jonathan Chait, expressed complete astonishment to learn that what Trump and DeVos had intended all along was for the school choice agenda to be vouchers. They shouldn’t have been. The whole idea of school choice, according to most policy experts, was the invention of libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who advocated for a fully privatized educational system. The Walton family (of Walmart fame)—whose foundation claims to have funded one of every four charter startups in the nation—put its considerable fortunes into efforts to spread school vouchers and only became supporters of charter schools after their voucher efforts failed in multiple elections and court cases...
More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/18/charter-school-movement-imploding-what-comes-next-may-be-worse
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