.. And the sad fact of the matter is that improving education was never the true reason for free-market fundamentalists’ embrace of vouchers. As Friedman signaled in that first 1955 manifesto and argued for over a half century, school “choice” was a way station on the route to radical privatization.
The vouchers were a tactic. The strategy they served was to stick parents with the full cost of their children’s schooling and the labor of finding and arranging it.
“In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing,” Friedman repeated in 2004 what he had long maintained. “Private charity would be more than ample to assure that there were schools available for every child.” He was as frank in addressing a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) four months before his death in 2006.
Said Friedman: “the ideal way [to give parents control of their children’s education] would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.” In the real world, this would be engineered inequality so staggering that it would make today’s inequities look modest by comparison.
That is what today’s libertarian billionaire backers of vouchers, with Charles G. Koch in the lead, are keeping from the unsuspecting parents on whom the cause relies for electoral success, now Black and Latino as well as white. Vouchers, like freedom, are a horse to ride somewhere. The destination would shock most people, but soon it could be too late to reverse course...
= new reply since forum marked as read
