Caught between greed and religion: the battle for Kansas public education

[cbayer]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/20/caught-between-greed-and-religion-the-battle-for-kansas-public-education

Attempts in Kansas to erode both the funding of public schools and the separation of church and state within them have reached fever pitch in recent years, but some are fighting back

Sarah Smarsh
Tuesday 20 January 2015 20.16 GMT


‘In God we trust’: the source of many American conundrums. Photograph: Sean Russell/Sean Russell/Corbis

In a hypothetical Venn diagram, one circle representing extremist Christians and the other fundamentalist capitalists, the lens-shaped overlap contains Sam Brownback, the newly reelected governor of Kansas. It also includes a broad spectrum of citizens who have supported him: working class members of the Tea party, wealthy members of C Street, a middle class college student who once handed me an essay on zero-sum economics while wearing a T-shirt that read “pro-life, pro-God, pro-gun.”

Governor Brownback, in his state of the state address, said that “Kansas is the most pro-life state in America. And we are not going back.” Kansas is also $280m short on due payments for this fiscal year, following an experiment with historic tax cuts now in its fourth year. The projected shortfall for next year is nearly $650m. On this point, too, Brownback is not going back: “We will continue our march to zero income taxes.” Indeed, while his administration recently called for slowing deep tax cuts, lofty supply-side goals remain.

This ideological juxtaposition, in which subjective morality is controlled by the state and in which citizens’ objective needs are left for the market to sort out, is by now familiar to most voters. But its most poignant setting, perhaps, was the main focus of Browback’s speech: public education.

In recent years, attempts in Kansas to erode both the funding of public schools and the separation of church and state within them have reached fever pitch. Last March, partially settling a historic, 15-year, multiple-lawsuit battle pitting Kansas schools against Congress, the state supreme court set a national precedent by ruling with Gannon v Kansas that the state inequitably funds public education – the “suitable provision” for which the state constitution has required since a 1960s amendment. Last month, a district court ruling all but sealed the deal.

more at link

[easychoice]

1. Other people have addressed this very issue.

see the link:
http://www.venganza.org/

[cbayer]

2. Written 9 years ago. Might be time to try some new approaches.

It is cute, though.