VOUCHER 2

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GOP 'voucher scheme for the wealthy' would hand $5 billion to religious, private schools

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AN 3 25 THE CONV

“And one other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education.”

Donald Trump made this promise in a Sept. 13, 2023, campaign statement and repeated it frequently on the.

Trump tried to make this long-standing pledge a reality on March 20, 2025, by signing an executive order that he said will “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.”

Trump said that he hopes Democrats would support his executive order. “I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” said Trump, speaking from the White House in front of a group of children seated at desks. “Because ultimately it may come before them.”

Project 2025, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, provides detailed recommendations for closing the Education Department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.

The Department of Education already announced on March 9 that it laid off more than 1,300 of its 4,100 employees.

Trump’s new executive order calls for Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure (of) the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” according to a White House statement distributed to media.

I am an anthropologist and have been studying U.S. political culture for years. During Trump’s first presidency, I wrote a book about the extremist far right called “It Can Happen Here”. Since then, I have continued to study the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, seeking to understand it, as the anthropological expression goes, “from the native’s point of view.”

Education policies in the U.S. are largely carried out at the state and local levels. The Education Department is a relatively small government agency, which as late as February 2025 had just over 4,000 employees and a US$268 billion annual budget. A large part of its work is overseeing $1.6 trillion in federal student loans as well as grants for K-12 schools.

And it ensures that public schools comply with federal laws that protect vulnerable students, like those with disabilities.

Why, then, does Trump want to eliminate the department?

A will to fight against so-called “wokeness” and a desire to shrink the government are among the four reasons I have found.

1. Education Department’s alleged ‘woke’ mentality

First and foremost, Trump and his supporters believe that liberals are ruining public education by instituting what they call a “radical woke agenda” that they say prioritizes identity politics and politically correct groupthink at the expense of the free speech of those, like many conservatives, who have different views.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives promoting social justice – and critical race theory, or the idea that racism is entrenched in social and legal institutions – are a particular focus of MAGA ire.

So, too, is what Trump supporters call “radical gender ideology,” which they contend promotes policies like letting transgender students play on school sports teams or use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, not biological sex.

Trump supporters say that such policies – which the Education Department indirectly supported by expanding Title IX gender protections in 2024 to include discrimination based on gender identity – are at odds with parental school choice rights or, for some religious conservatives, the Bible.

Race and gender policies are highlighted in Project 2025 and in the 2024 GOP’s “Make America Great Again!” party platform.

Trump has repeatedly promised, as he did on Aug. 14, 2024, in North Carolina, to “keep critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.”

2. American Marxist indoctrination

For MAGA supporters, “radical left” wokeness is part of liberals’ long-standing attempt to “brainwash” others with their allegedly Marxist views that embrace communism.

One version of this “American Marxism” conspiracy theory argues that the indoctrination dates to the origins of U.S. public education. MAGA stalwarts say this alleged leftist agenda is anti-democratic and anti-Christian.

Saying he wants to combat the educational influence of such radicals, zealots and Marxists, Trump issued executive orders on Jan. 29 that pledge to fight “campus anti-Semitism” and to end “Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools.”

3. School choice and parental rights

Trump supporters also argue that “woke” federal public education policy infringes on people’s basic freedoms and rights.

This idea extends to what Trump supporters call “restoring parental rights,” including the right to decide whether a child undergoes a gender transition or learns about nonbinary gender identity at public schools.

The first paragraph of Project 2025’s chapter on education argues, “Families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.”

Diversity, according to this argument, should include faith-based institutions and homeschooling. Project 2025 proposes that the government could support parents who choose to homeschool or put their kids in a religious primary school by providing Educational Savings Accounts and school vouchers. Vouchers give public funding for students to attend private schools and have been expanding in use in recent years.

Critics of school vouchers, like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers unions, argue that vouchers would diminish public education for vulnerable students by taking away scarce funding.

Trump has already issued a Jan. 29 executive order called “Expanding Educational Freedom and Educational Opportunity for Families,” which opens the door to expanded use of vouchers. This directly echoes Project 2025 by directing the Education Department to prioritize educational choice to give families a range of options.

4. Red tape

For the MAGA faithful, the Education Department exemplifies government inefficiency and red tape.

Project 2025, for example, contends that from the time it was established by the Carter administration in 1979, the Education Department has ballooned in size, come under the sway of special interest groups and now serves as an inefficient “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

To deal with the Education Department’s “bloat” and “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” Project 2025 recommends shifting all of the department’s federal programs and money to other agencies and the states.

These recommendations dovetail with Trump’s broader attempt to eliminate what he and his MAGA supporters consider wasteful spending and deregulate the government.

Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 that establishes a “Department of Government Efficiency” headed by billionaire Elon Musk. Musk said on Feb. 4 that Trump “will succeed” in dismantling the Education Department.

Can Trump abolish the Education Department?

Trump’s executive order shuttering the Department of Education will almost certainly spark legal challenges in court.

Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota also introduced a bill in November 2024 to close the department.

Trump has dismantled other government agencies in his second term, chiefly the U.S. Agency for International Development, without the required congressional approval. A federal judge ruled on March 18 that the dismantling of USAID likely violated the Constitution and ordered the Trump administration to restore all USAID employees’ email and computer access.

Abolishing the Department of Education would legally require congressional approval and 60 votes to move forward in the Senate, which is unlikely since Republicans only have 53 seats.

Regardless of such legal challenges, Trump’s March 20 executive order will further weaken the Department of Education even as it remains in the crosshairs.

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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When Voters Vote, Vouchers Lose

by David Armiak | November 25th, 2024

On Election Day, voters in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska rejected efforts by right-wing school privateers to support and expand school vouchers in their states.

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Of the 11 Texas Republicans who lost their seats this year in Gov. Greg Abbott’s quest to create a school voucher program, none went down swinging quite like state House Rep. Steve Allison.

Last session Allison, a former Alamo Heights ISD board president, was one of 21 Republicans in the Texas House who joined Democrats in stripping school vouchers out of a broader education funding bill.

The move turned him from a longtime ally of the governor into an overnight political target, drawing a deluge of attack ads from his own party’s leaders in his primary race.

In the face of that fight, Allison’s long record as a conservative lawmaker has quickly been overshadowed by his unusual cross-party efforts to keep public education in the spotlight.

The roughly $4.5 billion that Texas lawmakers approved for public schools last session never made it into districts’ hands after the governor demanded school vouchers be included in the legislation. Even after losing his primary, Allison tried unsuccessfully to rally lawmakers back to pass a school funding bill over the summer.

“When [schools] have to lay off staff, lay off teachers, discontinue programs, that is moving towards a breaking point,” Allison said in a Dec. 18 interview. “The money was there this last session. And for it to be held up over this voucher scheme that could have just been separate, it’s really heartbreaking.”

In a stunning rebuke to his party’s leaders, this fall Allison joined forces with the Democrat running for his seat who shared his views on school finance.

He’s also been speaking out about a messy 88th legislative session that left public schools scraping for money while Abbott cashed campaign checks from a billionaire voucher proponent and Attorney General Ken Paxton sought taxpayer dollars to cover his own legal defense.

“I’ve been asked several times if I regret my vote on Paxton’s impeachment, or regret my position on school vouchers, and I don’t regret either one one bit. I’d do the same thing again,” Allison said. “Integrity is so important and I think we’re missing that … I’m not haunted.”

When state lawmakers return to work on Jan. 14, House District 121 will be represented by a new face. Republican Marc LaHood, who defeated Allison in the primary, and is a member of the conservative wing who found success in a district that’s elected moderates.

While wrapping up his final weeks in office, Allison spoke about a changing Republican Party, rifts with party leaders and lessons learned from six years in the Texas House.

San Antonio Report:When you were first running in 2018, the incumbent, then-Speaker Joe Straus, had just been through his own disagreements with the party’s conservative wing, and a crowded field of Republicans signed up to run for his seat. What was on your mind when you joined that race?

Steve Allison: Education. Education was terribly important. And then I thought it was important — and the encouragement I was receiving was — that Joe Straus was well-respected in our district and had done a good job. I think there was a strong interest in having someone older and more experienced, that had been around, to try to fill that role. My background in business and education and transportation, and my experience at the capitol, seemed to fit. I wasn’t planning on it at all, it just kind of snowballed.

SAR:So even though the party as a whole was shifting right, this district was still in the market for someone more moderate. What do you think changed in this election?

Allison: I think I’ve got a pretty conservative voting record… so to be labeled a RINO [Republican in Name Only], or Democrat sympathizer, more recently. Even sometimes to be called a moderate, I guess I do kind of tend more there.

But I think we’ve seen it around the country — we saw it in this primary in particular — a lot of outside influence. A tremendous amount of money and mailers and campaign efforts came from outside [the district], some pro-choice, some pro-voucher, and some just on extreme conservative issues. Then the governor picked up on that, and that changed everything.

There was a feeling, really up until this election, that House District 121 was changing and becoming a more middle, moderate — however you want to describe it — that there was a Democrat increase. I won the first two times by seven or eight percentage points, and the last time by 10. But then you see this time LaHood won it by just under five. So what does that say? … That kind of supports the fact, I think, that this district is still a little more middle of the road.

SAR: You’ve been working on public education issues in Texas for a long time, well before running for a seat in the legislature. How have those policy discussions changed in recent years?

Allison: When I first got involved… it was primarily over school finance. That’s when recapture and Robin Hood started [which is the practice of redistributing property tax dollars from wealthy districts]. Alamo Heights was one of the original Robin Hood districts and it was devastating. What’s frustrating is, it’s come full circle. This was back in the ’90s, and it’s where we are again: There’s a funding issue....

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Despite Trump’s win, school vouchers were again rejected by majorities of voters

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For the next time some idiot tries to tell you the GOP is 'The Party of Business'

Nikki Haley is ‘whitewashing’ her record on Putin while hypocritically attacking Democrats: conservative

Thom Hartmann

August 30, 2023

As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn.

All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.”

It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

Between 1933 and 2020 there were 14 American presidents, 7 Democratic and 7 Republican.

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The economy during this time grew at an average rate of 4.6% under the Democratic presidents, but only an anemic 2.4% under Republican presidents. For example, the economy has grown three times faster under Biden than under Trump.

Ten of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents,although lifelong Republican and Trump Fed appointee Jerome Powell seems hell-bent on producing one for Joe Biden, just in time for the 2024 election.

Republican presidents have exploded the national debt, while the only balanced budgets out of the past 60 years have been presented by Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus (after 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses): Bush immediately squandered it with a massive tax cut for billionaires and two criminal wars.

Just last year, President Biden decreased federal spending by $550 billion and reduced the deficit by $1.4 trillion — the largest one-year deficit drop in American history — all while creating five times more jobs in 2 years than the last three Republican presidents combined.

If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be zero instead of over $30 trillion.

The core of American business and thus the livelihood of American communities before Reagan was small- and medium-sized companies.

We enforced anti-trust lawsso aggressively that when Buster Brown and Kinney shoe companies wanted to merge in the 1960s the Supreme Court blocked the merger because the combined company would control about 5 percent of the US shoe market.Nike alone today controls around 20 percent of that market.

Small- and medium-sized companies built America and brought us the American middle class, the first and largest middle class in the world. But in 1983, when Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the Sherman Act of 1890, giant corporations began a relentless campaign to destroy locally-owned companies.

Strip malls and small-town downtowns that were once mostly home to local retailers are now dominated by giant monopolistic national chains. Big Box stores, spreading across the country unconstrained since Reagan, have been wiping out small towns and rural communities.

One study found, as Reuters reported:

“[T]he closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.”

For most American businesses and the communities they serve, Republican governance has been a disaster since the Reagan 1980s.

In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower championed building tens of thousands of new public schools all across America, an effort supported by the business community because an educated workforce is a productive workforce.

From the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were proud that we had one of the best-educated workforces in the world, and that itself was a huge boost to business.

In 2010, though, when fossil fuel billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party and were looking for an issue to beat up on Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they seized on the national standards for education program conceived and legislatively initiated by both Republicans and Democrats called “Common Core.”

Although it had been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and GOP presidential front-runner Jeb Bush (among others) and was in place in 45 states, word went out that it was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students.

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The story ran day after day on Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio. Hysteria followed, and Red state after Red state outlawed these new high standards for high-school graduation. Republican grandstanding for political gain actually dumbed down America.

The 2020 version of this was Critical Race Theory, another equally bogus attack on public education. Between this, “Don’t Say Gay,” and banning thousands of books, the Republican war on public education has blossomed into full flower.

Now, Republican states are trying to shut down their public schools altogether via state-wide voucher programs, replacing Eisenhower’s AAA+ education system with state-funded religious and rightwing for-profit schools that refuse to teach actual science, civics, or American history.

Arizona was the first to go statewide with vouchers, and Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Kansas, and a dozen other GOP-run states are considering the same. It’s quite simply an all-out effort to destroy public education and subsidize religious schools and private all-white academies for upper-middle-class people who can take advantage of a voucher that only covers part of the cost of tuition.

The only option left for the very poorest people will be the few remaining public schools, essentially turning them into ghettos.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election in the 1956 election by bragging that he’d expanded Social Security across America, and his 1952 election was mostly powered by his enthusiastic endorsement of unionization.

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At a speech before the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1952, Eisenhower noted that the first national legalization of unions in America was signed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, the 1926 Railway Labor Act.

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“Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions,” he told the union group now known as the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest. “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

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Similarly, in September of 1970 President Richard Nixon hosted labor leaders from across America, praising the movement. As The New York Times noted on September 8, 1970:

“When the ‘great issue’ has been whether to support the President and to meet the nation’s responsibilities ‘for defending and protecting the forces of freedom in the world,’ he said, ‘American labor has never been found wanting. It has always been the first in war and in peace.’”

As a result of combined Democratic and Republican support of unions, by Reagan’s election in 1980 about two-thirds of all American workers had a union job or it’s equivalent,with great pay, benefits, and retirement plans, because a third of workers were union members and that set the pay and benefits floor for the non-union employers to compete for another third of workers.

But, following Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1971, the GOP began to adopt the positions in thePowell Memo, which included gutting labor unions so the morbidly rich could become even richer.

Their rationale was that workers having a say in the workplace had “destabilized” America, a point first made in 1951 by Russell Kirkin his book The Conservative Mind that I detailed two years ago here.

President Reagan, however, declared war on organized labor with his attack on the PATCO union. Ever since, the GOP has been fighting efforts to expand unionization.

Combined with Reagan’s massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations, this loss of union representation has led to a$50 trillion transfer of wealthfrom the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people straight into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

Instead of two-thirds of Americans having a middle-class lifestyle like in 1980, today that number is down to around 45 percent of us. As a result, both poverty and homelessness have exploded across the land. And poor and homeless people can’t afford to support a strong economy — and thus American business — the way a prosperous middle class can.

Dwight Eisenhower created the Small Business Administration to “aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns.”

He signed a massive expansion of Social Security to take the pension/retirement onus off small- and medium-sized employers, increased the minimum wage so a prospering working class could purchase the products of American manufacturers, and built low-income housing across the nation to end the homeless “hobo” problem left over from the Republican Great Depression.

Eisenhower created from scratch the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to build a healthy and well-educated workforce, while Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law to save the lives of American workers being killed by toxic pesticides and other chemicals (the agency’s creation was provoked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring).

Today’s GOP opposes all of these programs and agencies. They only support the largest American companies and the richest citizens.

When Trump was president, he rolled back regulation of toxic pesticides known to cause brain damage to children, and one of his first official acts in office was to end the prohibition of coal mines dumping their toxic waste and tailings into America’s rivers, polluting downstream water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals.

Arguably, the best policy possible for American businesses of all sizes is the Medicare For All program promoted for decades by progressive Democrats.

Back in 2004, Toyota announced they’d be opening a new factory in North America. Three southern US states offered them billions in tax advantages and free land, with the Republican governor of Alabama openly bragging about how cheaply his citizens would work for the company.

But in the end, in 2005, Toyota announced they’d be building the factory in Ontario, Canada because US healthcare costs are nearly twice those of Canada, which has had a successful Medicare For All system in place for more than a half-century (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich).

Since then, as Republicans (and a few bought-off Democrats) continue to fight any effort to establish a national healthcare or health insurance system, the company has built two more North American factories in Canada.

If it wasn’t for Republican obstruction, they would’ve been built here and the jobs would be here.

The simple reality is that Republicans have no coherent plans for the American economy beyond more tax cuts for their morbidly rich donors and more deregulation of the very largest and most polluting corporations.

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To compensate for this deficiency, they push hate against queer people, public school teachers, women, and dark-skinned immigrants. DeSantis has gone so far as to attack Disney, Florida’s largest employer and source of tax revenues, because they had the temerity to respect their gay, lesbian, and trans employees and customers.

Republicans have banned hundreds of books from public schools and libraries, saturated our towns and cities with weapons of war, banned women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and packed our courts with judges who’d be comfortable with the American Nazi movement, the Federalist Society, and the John Birch Society.

Not only are these policies and positions bad for America, they’re also destructive of most American businesses.

So, the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the GOP is “the party of business,” let them know the real facts.

The only businesses Republicans actually support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors, and giant monopolies. And none of those are good for average Americans, locally-owned businesses, or the US economy.

https://www.alternet.org/defeat-of-school-voucher-program/

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supreme Court hands victory to school voucher lobby – will religious minorities, nonbelievers and state autonomy lose out?

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The ‘choice’ lie: The school voucher SCOTUS case isn’t about giving students options. It’s about coerced support for religion

Andrew L. Seidel / Religion Dispatches

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new sleazy end run?

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/devos-slams-union-bullies-for-opposing-her-plan-to-send-federal-tax-dollars-to-private-and-religious-schools/

w. kellyanne at aei]

US. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was the headliner at an American Enterprise Institute event Tuesday morning to promote “Education Freedom Scholarships,” the Trump administration’s education tax credit proposal. In her remarks, DeVos attacked opponents of the plan as “union bullies” and declared that “union bosses don’t put kids first.”

Vilifying teachers’ unions is standard operating procedure for DeVos. In January, she used a Heritage Foundation event marking the avowedly “nonpolitical” National School Choice Week to complain that teachers’ unions were “the only thing standing in the way” of more “school choice.”As Right Wing Watch noted at the time:

DeVos is an old hand at this. She has, in the words of Mother Jones’s Krisina Rizga, been “trying to gut the public schools for years.” Indeed, DeVos and her allies have spent many years and many millions of dollars engaged in bare-knuckled politics to elect politicians who will advance an anti-public-education, anti-labor, pro-privatization agenda, and her family has played a key role in building right-wing anti-public-education infrastructure.

At AEI, DeVos and White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway promoted the administration’s plan, which was proposed in February but hasn’t moved through either house of Congress. One news report from today’s event called it DeVos’s effort to “breathe new life” into the proposal by “calling out Republicans in Congress who have refused to entertain the idea and conservative education policy experts who’ve opposed the plan.”

At AEI, DeVos and Conway said conservatives who worry about increasing federal involvement in education are off-base, because states would have the freedom to use the federal money to design their own programs or simply supplement existing programs.

State “tax credit scholarship” programs are basically a way for legislators to divert tax dollars to private and religious schools without using vouchers, which have been consistently unpopular with voters. The Trump-DeVos proposal would allow for up to $5 billion every year in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to state-based “scholarship granting organizations.”

In response to a questioner who said he was from the Alliance Defending Freedom, DeVos said the administration’s proposal included language that would require participating states not to prevent religious schools or nonprofits from accessing the tax dollars. DeVos has previously slammed state restrictions on public funding for religious schools.

DeVos and Conway had a lot of praise for Florida, one of the states that has most aggressively pushed “school choice” proposals. RWW’s Adele Stan reported last year that DeVos and her family had pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a political action committee promoting voucher proponent Ron DeSantis, who narrowly defeated Andrew Gillum in last year’s governor’s race.

Following DeVos’ and Conway’s appearance was a panel conversation featuring officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Tennesseetouting their own school–choice programs and backing the administration’s proposal.

When Trump announced DeVos’s nomination, People For the American Way called it “a high-water mark in the right wing’s long war on public education.”When DeVos was confirmed, the secretive right-wing Council for National Policy had its own ambitious policy agenda for her: “a gradual, voluntary return at all levels to free-market private schools, church schools and home schools as the normative American practice.”

Tags: Betsy DeVosKellyanne ConwayChurch-StateSchool ChoiceVouchersAmerican Enterprise InstituteTrump Administration

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-the-koch-brothers-co-opted-minority-groups-in-a-push-for-a-profit-based-approach-to-education/

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How the Koch brothers co-opted minority groups in a push for a profit-based approach to education

Written by The Conversation August 23, 2019

Under the mantra of civil rights, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers and the powerful corporate-funded lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are using venture philanthropy and the political process to press for school reforms in the United States.

The ongoing Vergara law case in California in which nine students are suing the state over teacher tenure laws, is backed by Student Matters, a non-profit that has received donations from the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation, run by the Walton family that founded supermarket chain Wal-Mart.

The driver behind the case is a campaign to loosen labour rules in order to make it easier to fire “bad” teachers, under the argument that their presence discriminates against disadvantaged children. Opponents of the case argue that it is a blatant attempt to change the conversation from the realities of California’s divestment in education — the state is 46th in the nation in spending per student in 2010-11, and 50th in the number of students per teacher.

What these organisations and other others such as the the Koch brothers, Bradley Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Students First and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education – all supposedly supporters of school reform – have as a common denominator is a vision of a profit-based market approach to education.

School vouchers are one of the primary education reform policy approaches pressed by the billionaires and the business lobby. Voucher programs, which provide public funding for students to attend private schools, have become more popular in the US in the past several decades.

Most existing school voucher programs in the US have been small-scale and targeted at low-income students, such as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, and the Washington DC program. But there has recently been a push to expand programs to include students from middle income families.

Notably, a small, but vocal cadre of civil rights advocates from US minority groups have allied with the billionaires and business lobby via groups such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), pushing for school vouchers and other neoliberal education reforms.

Have they been hoodwinked or led astray? It is understandable that minority groups are searching for alternatives to the status quo, as the US has a history of consistently and purposefully underserving students of colour. In fact, we still do. For example, one wealthy suburban district in Texas recently spent nearly $120m on a football stadium and performing arts centre, while poorer districts have struggled to afford adequately trained and certified teachers.

School reform advocates in the US are often a motley alliance between civil rights proponents whose primary focus is greater opportunity for historically underserved students of colour, and neo-liberals who desire to reduce the role of the state in public education and shift the education system towards a profit-making enterprise.

Vouchers aren’t the answer

In the case of vouchers, the long-term impact on civil rights is already known. A decade of peer-reviewed research in Chile has demonstrated that a voucher market has increased inequality for students living in poverty and closed public schools.

A voucher approach escalates inequality because capital rules the day. Test scores become negotiable capital in addition to hard currency. Students without this capital are denied access to attractive schools because there are other individuals in the market that are more desirable to schools.

School choice becomes exactly that in a voucher system — schools choose. So, if you are a proponent of school “choice” and interested in civil rights and equity —- vouchers will not help you realise your goals. But if you are a neoliberal, you are in business.

How can we conceive choice and education reform differently? If you don’t like the choices that have been forced upon you for decades, then you are going to want access to alternatives. Are vouchers the choice parents should have? Turns out that vouchers show very little promise in analyses of peer-reviewed research literature for improving student success or equity at large.

However, there are gold standard reforms in the peer-reviewed research literature that show at much more impact on student success than vouchers. These include full-day pre-kindergarten education. Underserved communities should have access to empirically-supported choices rather than ideological ones. Parents in Milwaukee and elsewhere should also be able to choose schools that are attractive and well-resourced like the private and public schools across the tracks or river or highway. Why don’t US high-poverty communities have these choices?

Pressure on public school funding

In Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Texas we have seen billions of dollars in fiscal cuts to schools while school vouchers, Teach For America, and charter schools are peddled by ALEC and the usual billionaire proponents as an alternative to the restoration of school funding for public schools.

In Texas and elsewhere, legislatures have used politics to force inadequate funding of US public schools while at the same time arguing that the schools are inadequate. The response from coalitions of citizens across the US has been a slew of lawsuits aimed at states over inadequate public funding to force politicians to respond.

Colin Powell once said, “If you break it you own it.” That’s the end game for these education “reformers” backed by billionaires and corporations. First, they seek to transfer the cost of education from the state budget to the family, household budget. Second, civil rights and equity are not their true priorities.

Instead these special interests are supporting vouchers and other neoliberal reforms contrary to the interests of students of colour. In doing so they will shift the US education system to maximise corporate profits, while limiting democratic control of public schools.

These same billionaire “reformers” have co-opted the equity discourse by offering a carrot to minority groups. This can sometimes be in the form of millions of dollars as in the case of the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina. But all this hides the inequity that profit-based approaches to education foment.The Conversation

By Julian Vasquez Heilig, Associate Professor of Educational Policy and Planning, University of Texas at Austin.

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DeVos and her GOP allies keep pushing school voucher programs — even though the data says they can hurt kids

The ConversationJune 7, 2019

Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University and Joel R Malin, Miami University For the past couple of decades, proponents of vouchers for private schools have been pushing the idea that vouchers work.…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/betsy-devos-right-wing-school-indoctrination-program-betrays-a-fundamental-misunderstanding-of-the-differences-between-public-and-private-schools/

What do you do when thinking people reject your political ideology?

You get rid of thinking people.

That’s Betsy DeVos’ plan to rejuvenate and renew the Republican Party.

The billionaire heiress who bought her position as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary plans to spend $5 billion of your tax dollars on private, religious, and parochial schools.

This would be federal tax credits to fund scholarships to private and religious institutions—school vouchers in all but name.

It’s a federal child indoctrination program to ensure that the next generation has an increasing number of voters who think science is a lie, white supremacy is heritage and the Bible is history—you know, people just gullible enough to believe a reality show TV star who regularly cheats on his many wives with porn stars is God’s chosen representative on Earth. A measure to make child kidnapping, imprisonment, and wrongful death seem like a measured response to backward immigration policy. A measure to make collusion and fraternization with the world’s worst dictators and strongmen seem like global pragmatism.

To make matters even more galling, consider the timing of DeVos’ proposal.

In the beginning of February, Donald Trump Jr. criticized “loser teachers” who he said were indoctrinating school children into—gasp—socialism.

At the end of that same month, DeVos proposed funding Christian madrasas from sea-to-shinning-sea.

Apparently indoctrination is just fine for conservatives so long as it’s the right kind of indoctrination.

But even beyond the blatant hypocrisy, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between public and private schools.

Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted that if a school receives public funding—whether it be a charter or voucher institution—it is a public school.

To which DeVos tweeted her glowing approval.

This makes a few things strikingly clear: either (1) these folks have no idea what happens at authentic public schools or (2) they’re pretending not to know so as to further their political and financial ambitions.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate children into socialism or any other ideology.

They’ll teach what socialism is and how it has functioned historically without commenting on its merits or deficiencies. It’s up to individual students to decide whether it’s a good thing or not.

Public schools are supposed to be ideologically neutral.

At most, they teach children how to think. They teach media literacy, skepticism, and critical thinking skills.

If that leads kids away from Republican orthodoxy, it’s not the fault of the teacher or the child. It’s a problem with your orthodoxy.

You can’t proclaim the benefits of a marketplace of ideas and then decry that too many ideas are on display.

Nor can you conflate the way a school is funded with what that school actually does and how it teaches.

There is a world of difference between authentic public schools and their market based alternatives—especially the parochial and religious variety.

It’s the difference between telling students the answer and getting them to think about the answer. It’s the difference between total certainty and doubt, between trite truths and useful skills that can help you arrive at deeper truths.

When you ask children to think, you never know what conclusions they’ll draw. When you tell children what to think, you know exactly what conclusions you want them to hold.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate. Conservatives graduate from these hallowed halls the same as liberals, moderates, and the politically checked out. The difference is that in a world where facts are prized and logic is exercised, conservatism becomes less appealing.

I’m not saying liberalism or progressivism is guaranteed, but they are certainly more fact-based world views than their opposites.

The same cannot be said of the kinds of institutions DeVos wants to bankroll.

They educate kids behind closed doors with little to no transparency for the public about how their money is being spent. But word seeps out of the cracks in the system.

We’ve seen the textbooks they use to teach. Their graduates have returned to the public square to tell us about the instruction they received.

The American Christian Education (ACE) group provides fundamentalist school curriculum to thousands of religious schools throughout the country. Included in this curriculum is the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know—all the greatest Trump campaign hits!

We should not be funding the spread of such ignorance.

Frankly, DeVos’ ambitions have little chance of coming to fruition.

Two years ago, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, she wanted to spend $20 billion on the same nonsense. Her party refused to back her.

Now with Democrats in control of the House, it seems even more unlikely that her plan will pass.

But sadly smaller scale versions of it have been allowed by state legislatures throughout the country—often with full support from Democrats.

My own state of Pennsylvania spends $125 million in taxpayer dollars on the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs to send children to private/religious schools. And every year legislators ask for more.

Why any Democrat would support conservative indoctrination programs is beyond me.

And this is true even though indoctrination is sometimes unavoidable.

To a limited degree, it may even be desirable. You might even say it’s a normal part of growing up.

Even the most fair-minded parents often want their children to hold at least some of the same values as they do. They want to be able to relate to their kids and view them as a continuation of the kinds of lives they lived.

But what’s okay for parents is not okay for governments.

If Mom and Dad want their kids to have a Biblical education, they should pay for it. The burden should not be shouldered by society since it’s not in society’s interest.

Governments have no right taking public money and using it to prop up private interests. And that’s exactly what this is.

It is political and religious interest. It is a way to circumvent skepticism and free thought.

It’s a way to ensure that in a time where information flows freely and dogmas crumble, people like Donald Trump continue to be elected.

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Teachers in West Virginia celebrated a major victory Tuesday when a contested education reform bill was blocked by House delegates, just hours into a statewide strike protesting the legislation. The bill would have legalized charter schools, which are currently not allowed in West Virginia. Teachers’ unions say they were not consulted in the drafting of the legislation and that it was retaliation for last year’s historic strike, which was credited with launching a wave of teacher walkouts in other red states. Teachers are set to continue their strike for now.

2/19 dn

• West Virginia Teachers Celebrate as Lawmakers Halt Pro-Charter School Bill

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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/31/how-teachers-might-end-beating-back-koch-brothers-plan-privatize-arizona-schools

The moment Beth Lewis realized the powerful political forces she was up against was when she was seated in the gallery of the Arizona House watching Republican legislators, one-by-one, fall into line to support a new bill she and her fellow teachers had come to the capitol to oppose.Republican Governor Doug Duceyand others “working the bill” on the floor took any wavering members into a back room for a “conversation,” while lobbyists in the wings nodded and hand-signaled with lawmakers to track the bill’s progress. When the bill’s handlers agreed a vote was in order, it passed easily. Then, “it was like a party,” Lewis recalls, with lawmakers high-fiving each other and lobbyists shaking hands and backslapping. “It was sickening,” she says. “I realized our state legislators weren’t at all interested in representing the people.”

The bill, which the State Senate also passed and the governor quickly signed, opened up education savings accounts, calledEmpowerment Scholarship Accounts, to all of the state’s 1.1 million students. The new accounts, previously restricted to students with special needs and students attending schools receiving a grade of D or F on the state’s school report card, would provide $4,400 a year, 90 percent of the amount of money the state would typically send a district for enrolling a student, for a family to spend as they wish on their children’s education. Students with disabilities and poor students would receive more money than other students.

For parents to receive the money, on a debit card, they must agree not to enroll their children in a public school—essentially giving up their children’s right to a free public education. Other than that, the program has few regulations and there’s little oversight in how public money is being spent. For that reason, Lewis, an Arizona public school teacher, and others who oppose the bill, call the savings accounts “vouchers” that drain funding from public education.

The lobbyists working the House floor that night were from the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing advocacy group based in Arizona with extensive connections to the Koch brothers and a number of organizations and networks with close Koch ties including ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), the State Policy Network, and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. For years, Charles and David Koch and their associated foundations have invested heavily in electing Arizona lawmakers, including Governor Ducey, and expanding the education savings accounts was one of their crowning achievements.

Passing the bill was also a moment of triumph for the education agenda of the Trump administration. Shortly after news of the passage of the voucher expansion broke, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tweeted, “A big win for students & parents in Arizona tonight with the passage of ed savings accts. I applaud Gov. @DougDucey for putting kids first.”

But in the upcoming Arizona midterm elections, that achievement is at risk, as Lewis and her colleagues with Save Our School Arizona have successfully pushed a referendum onto the ballot, Proposition 305, that lets Arizona voters decide the fate of the bill. Should the initiative fail, the Koch brothers’ plan to expand vouchers would be defeated.

Arizona Democrats running for office, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Garcia, who is taking on Ducey, have embraced opposition to the voucher program and thrown their support behind teachers who are calling for more funding of public schools.

Should pro-education candidates win, and Prop 305 go down in flames, the teachers would have led a remarkable campaign that not only would be a victory for public schools but also would threaten to topple the Koch brothers’ political empire in the Grand Canyon State.

Before There Was #RedforEd

“The teachers’ protest movement, which calls itself #RedforEd, has transformed the political battleground” in Arizona, says an article in the New York Times.

The weeklong walkouts that happened earlier this year demanded higher teacher pay and more funding for schools. #RedforEd not only won concessions from Ducey and the state legislature; it culminated in placing a referendum on the ballot, called InvestInEd, that would have raised income taxes on individuals and households earning more than $250,000 and directed the increased revenues to public schools. However, the State Supreme Court struck the initiative from the ballot, for technical questions about its wording.

But months before there was #RedforEd, there was the fight against school vouchers.

After Lewis and her colleagues watched the statewide voucher expansion pass in the Arizona capitol, they began to meet regularly and formed Save Our Schools Arizona. At first, their effort to overturn the legislation got few supporters, Lewis recalls, even among teachers. Few understood that “scholarships” is just another word for “vouchers” and that “empowerment” actually means parents have to give up the right for their children to receive a free public education.

The “turning point,” according to Lewis, was the revelation that citizens could use a petition campaign to refer legislation to a ballot. That gave anti-voucher advocates a specific goal and steps—how many signatures they’d need and how many volunteers they’d need to recruit to circulate the petitions.

A Costly Program for Wealthier Families

Also aiding to their communications effort was an accumulation of evidence of how poorly the voucher program measured up to its purported intention to “save” low-income families from “failed” public schools.

Most of the students who participate in the program, 70 percent, come from some of the state’s most highly rated schools—rated A or B on the state report card. Only 7 percent of the money is being used by students leaving D- or F-rated schools. The majority of these families are also not low-income, but instead reside in the wealthier suburban communities in the state.

Other analyses have found that the vast majority of parents participating in the program use the money to pay for private school tuition. Given that most private schools in Arizona are religious schools, a reasonable conclusion is that the education saving accounts are mostly subsidizing wealthier families’ desires to leave public schools to seek out religious educations for their children.

Furthermore, since the average payout from the voucher program is $5,700 per year for children without disabilities, and the average private school tuition in Arizona is $6,126 for elementary schools and $19,162 for high schools, the vouchers are supplementing parents, who may already be able to afford private schools, with a “coupon” that heavily discounts the tuition. Families of students with disabilities, who receive $19,000 in voucher money on average, could even be “profiting” from the program, as there is very little to no monitoring of how they spend from the accounts.

Currently, Arizona’s voucher program drains $141 million from the public school system, and in fact, costs the state an additional $62 million each year—roughly $4,700 per student, adding 75 percent more to what the state pays to educate a regular public school student.

Kochs vs. ‘a Bunch of Volunteers’

Armed with information about how the voucher program was defrauding the state of millions of education dollars, the SOS Arizona team formed their campaign to get 75,321 signatures to place Prop 305 on the ballot.

“We did most of our outreach through social media,” recalls Sharon Kirsch, another leader in SOS Arizona. “SOS never had any money.”

Kirsch, a university professor, became interested in overturning the voucher expansion after she saw the bill zoom through the State Senate without serious consideration of what the expansion would do to public schools. Its sponsor was former State Senator Debbie Lesko—a recipient of large campaign donations from the Koch brothers and other conservative donors—who now sits in Congress and is up for reelection in November. Lesko is also Arizona state chairman for ALEC.

Relying on a network of volunteers—made up mostly of retired educators, parents, and community activists—SOS Arizona submitted 111,540 signatures in August 2017.

After SOS Arizona announced it had successfully gathered more than enough signatures to place the referendum on the ballot, the Koch network intervened again. On the night SOS delivered the signatures for review by the secretary of state’s office, Lewis recalls, they were told “both sides” would be allowed to be present at the review. Who was the other “side”?

“All of a sudden all these men in dark suits came into the room,” says Lewis. “They paired up with each examiner from the state and hovered over their shoulders, pointing to signatures they felt should be challenged or thrown out.”

The “suits” were from Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing pressure group that operates as a political arm of the Koch brothers to advocate and lobby at state and local levels for small government, deregulation, privatization, and anti-labor union policies.

“When I investigated what these right-wing organizations were doing to oppose us,” Kirsch explains, “I realized how strategic they’ve been. They’ve been working on their privatization efforts for years. They fund teams to work full-time on the issues. They’re breeding their own PhDs through academic centers they sponsor. And we just have a bunch of volunteers.”

Americans for Prosperity, along with the American Federation for Children, formerly led by Secretary DeVos, sued to block the referendum. But in January 2018, a judge dismissed the lawsuit.

In the meantime, Governor Ducey was meeting with donors in the Koch network, pledging to go big on passing Prop 305 and asking for their support. “This is a very real fight in my state,” he said. “I didn’t run for governor to play small ball.”

“In 2018, Koch donors see Arizona as ground zero in their push,” the Washington Post reports, and Koch brothers’ money has continued to pour into the state through Americans for Prosperity and the Libre Institute, an astroturf group spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to a local news outlet, “targeting Arizona Latino families with ads, mailers and phone calls” urging them to vote “yes” on Prop 305.

“We had to bring in Spanish-speaking volunteers to counter the propaganda being spread by the Koch Brothers’ Libre group,” says Kirsch. “We reached out to community organizations like LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona),” an Arizona-based grassroots group advocate for social and economic justice in the Latinx community. “They’ve been very helpful in spreading our literature,” Kirsch says.

In addition to its stealth campaign in the Latinx community, supporters of school vouchers also created a #YesforEd campaign that mimics the logo of the teachers’ #RedforEd campaign—a blatant attempt to mislead voters about the initiative and convince them to vote yes.

“This is the lowest of the low when it gets to political dirty tricks,” says Dawn Penich-Thacker of SOS Arizona. “They are obviously trying to mimic #RedforEd,” and create the false impression that a “yes” vote on Prop 305 supports teachers and public-school funding, when it would in fact do the exact opposite.

‘Education Is the Driving Issue’

While SOS Arizona has tried to keep its effort to block voucher expansion nonpartisan, its cause has champions running for office in the Democratic Party.

In the race for governor, Democratic candidate David Garcia is stridently opposed to the voucher expansion and urges voters to vote no. Should Garcia win, he would be the state’s first Latinx governor, but education issues could be what propels him over the top.

“A change in education is Arizona’s No. 1 issue,” Garcia said in a televised debate. “It is my strength, it is Ducey’s weakness, and it’s going to be the difference.”

Ducey has extended his small lead in recent polls, but Garcia insists the surveys likely miss a rising new electorate in the state that includes Latinx voters and teachers and pro-education voters energized by #RedforEd and the presence of Prop 305 on the ballot.

Someone with insights on both those issues—the rising power of Latinx voters and the significance of education in the Arizona elections—is Alex Gomez, the co-executive director of LUCHA.

She tells me LUCHA recently completed an effort to register over 20,000 new voters in the Latinx community and is now canvassing them to ensure they vote. Working with other like-minded organizations, LUCHA’s goal is to turn out 190,000 new voters from the Latinx community in the midterm elections.

LUCHA supported the educators who walked out of schools statewide this spring. “The midterms caught its wind after the teacher strike,” says Gomez. “That moment when there were 75,000 people at the capitol was a big part of building momentum. It became so clear that the legislature is more interested in their corporate donors than in doing the right thing for education and moving the state forward.”

Gomez expects its support for Garcia’s pro-education platform and opposition to Prop 305 will energize new voters, particularly those in the Latinx community who “are very grateful because no one has ever come to them before.”

“Education is the driving issue in Garcia’s campaign,” she says, and “we’re encouraging voters to vote against 305.

In many down-ballot races, Democratic candidates are uniting around education and opposition to Prop 305. In the race to unseat Debbie Lesko in U.S. House District 8, Hiral Tipirneni has drawn a sharp contrast to the Republican incumbent on education, calling Lesko, “the ringleader behind the infamous voucher bill, which takes our tax dollars out of public schools and uses them to pay for private school tuition.” Tipirneni nearly defeated Lesko in a special election in April.

In state legislative races, two Democratic candidates and LUCHA endorsees, Raquel Terán, running in Legislative District 30, and Gilbert Romero, in LD 21, are canvassingand phone-banking on Prop 305 and urging voters to vote no.

‘No Hiding Behind the Curtain’

Those leading the opposition to Prop 305 hope to do more than just defeat the bill; they want to expose the corrupt network behind the effort to privatize Arizona public schools and change the conversation about what would truly help education in the state.

“Teachers are carrying the torch against privatization in ways they never did before,” says Lewis. “They have a level of understanding of the issues I’ve never seen before.”

“Even if we defeat 305, I know folks at Goldwater are already crafting a new bill to replace the voucher bill with something else,” says Kirsch. “But people are paying attention in ways they never have in the past. They’re changing the conversation to making public schools the priority instead of all these other schemes that take money away from them.”

“We’re leaving everything out on the field and are really hopeful about the results,” says Gomez. “Even before election day, we’ve already won because we’ve exposed the corruption of the Republican Party. There’s no hiding behind the curtains anymore.”

To learn more about school privatization, check outWho Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.

Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/betsy-devos-and-family-bankroll-florida-governor-candidate-desantis-a-school-voucher-enthusiast

Betsy DeVos and Family Bankroll Florida Governor Candidate DeSantis, a School Voucher Enthusiast

ByAdele M. Stan | October 24, 2018 5:54 pm

The third in our three-part series on the right-wing players around Ron DeSantis, the Republican candidate for governor of Florida.

When Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, found himself in hot water—once again—over his beliefs about black people and America’s racial history, a handful of wealthy donors swooped in to try to rescue his campaign.Polls showed him in a dead heat against Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is African American.

Among the angels to alight in his coffers was the heiress Betsy DeVos, who currently leads the U.S. Department of Education, and whose family enriched a pro-DeSantis political action committee this month with hundreds of thousands of dollars. The DeVos family has long invested in the project of building a right-wing political infrastructure that is designed to elevate the policy prescriptions of white evangelical leaders, as has DeVos’ family of origin, the Princes. (Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, is DeVos’ brother. Her parents, Elsa and Edgar, helped found the Family Research Council, which is classified as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

It’s not surprising that DeVos would want to rescue DeSantis. Take a look at the education agenda he has put forward and you’ll find a wish list of goodies for Religious Right leaders and other “small-government conservatives.” And even more than that, the specter of a progressive Democrat like Gillum leading education policy in a state as populous as Florida (20 million) could create a significant pocket of resistance to any federal policy imposed by DeVos.

While DeSantis may not be especially involved with the evangelical community, he knows on which side his bread is buttered. DeVos, champion of the privatization of education, and the Trump administration’s secretary of education, descends from Religious Right royalty. When Trump chose DeVos for that spot, it was because he knew on which side his base is buttered—the evangelical side.

Right-wing evangelicals and Catholics favor school voucher plans and supports for homeschoolers that siphon money away from public schools, as well as from the public-sector unions that represent teachers and other school personnel, all positions DeVos advances. The vouchers amount to tax dollars applied to tuition at private schools and those run by churches and other religious organizations. (For more on DeVos’ record as a school privatizer, see PFAW’s 2017 report, A New High Water Mark in Right Wing’s Long War on Public Education.)

In fact, on a visit to New York City last spring, the U.S. secretary of education seemed to go out of her way to insult public-school students and teachers by choosing two religious schools for a visit, but none of the city’s public schools. From a May 18 New York Times report:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos toured two New York City schools on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the city’s public schools, with their 1.1 million students, were not among them.

Instead, Ms. DeVos visited two Orthodox Jewish schools, and offered her strongest comments to date in support of public funding for religious schools in a meeting with Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and other Catholic dignitaries.

In addition to his pro-voucher position, DeSantis stood behind Amendment 8—a measure ultimately struck from the 2018 ballot by the Florida Supreme Court for being “misleading”—which would have yanked control of charter schools from local school boards and handed it to the state—through changes to the state constitution. Conservatives have found certain localities to be  unwelcoming to charter schools.

The measure would also have imposed eight-year term limits on local school boards. Absent the ballot measure, DeSantis has folded those positions into his own education policy agenda.

The court’s actions stirred right-wing ire about the ideological balance of the state’s highest court. Governor Rick Scott, who is currently challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson for his seat, had planned to replace three of the court’s justices just hours after he leaves office, but the court overruled his power-grab. Because of term limits on the state’s Supreme Court justices, three retirements will kick in automatically in January, leaving the next governor to determine the shape of the court.

SINCE WINNING the Florida GOP gubernatorial nomination, DeSantis’ attitudes towards African Americans have attracted scrutiny, beginning with comments he made at the outset of the general election campaign, when he urged Floridians to “not monkey this up” by electing Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum, who is black. Something of a steady trickle commenced, with DeSantis having to ditch a fundraiser, state Rep. Ralph Arza, who had used the “N” word in threatening voicemails to a colleague 12 years ago, and who has a reputation for using racial slurs. Next, the Washington Post published a report on DeSantis’ participation in the far-right conferences convened by David Horowitz, where he appeared on the same stage as the professionally offensive, white-nationalism-sympathizer Milo Yiannapoulos, and other far-right figures. Then, on October 8, the American Ledger blog published by the American Bridge super PAC unearthed a book he authored that made excuses for slavery in the U.S. The DeSantis campaign was losing momentum, virtually tied with Gillum in the polls.

Three days later, the candidate’s PAC, Friends of Ron DeSantis, received a total of $200,000 from four members of Betsy DeVos’ family, as well as infusions from others in the donor network created by the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.

Each of those donors no doubt has his or her own checklist of expectations and demands, but DeSantis’ school privatization agenda seems robust, hitting all of the key constituencies: the homeschoolers, the religious schools, the union-haters.

Some of the candidate’s education agenda, as posted on the Ron DeSantis for Governor website:

Support School Choice Options.To ensure that all Florida students can go to a good school and empower parents to make educational decisions for their children, Ron DeSantis will support school choice options such as public magnet schools, district & non-district managed public charter schools, Florida Virtual School, home education, and the various other choice options. DeSantis will also look at the possibility of creating Education Savings Accounts for more Florida students including those from low-income and working-class families.

[…]

Ensure Equal Access for Parents Who Home School Their Children.To support the families of the nearly 90,000 students in Florida that are home schooled, Ron DeSantis will ensure that these children have equal access to resources available to other students, such as dual enrollment and extracurricular activities. The decision on how a child should be educated is best left to their family, as no far-away bureaucrat could ever understand a child the way a parent does. For many Florida families, homeschooling provides the best opportunity to educate their children.

DeSantis also embraces a so-called “merit pay” scheme that seems designed to pit teacher against teacher, and teachers against non-teaching staff, by pledging to cut “wasteful” spending on the education “bureaucracy,” and funneling that “savings” into merit increases for selected teachers.

Like DeSantis, DeVos is a fan of charter schools, which also draw their funding from tax dollars, but exist outside the traditional public school system. In April 2017, DeVos visited the Excel Academy, a public charter school in Washington, D.C., describing it as a “shining example of a school meeting the needs of its students, parents and community.” By January 2018, the school had closed because of its poor performance.

Of course, there are reasons beyond DeSantis’ education agenda that make him an attractive repository for DeVos dollars. The family owns the Orlando Magic basketball team, a business, like any, that could always use a friend in the governor’s mansion.

Read more in our series on DeSantis and the right:

**Ron DeSantis’ Appearances at Horowitz Events: Even Worse the Closer You Look**

**Ron DeSantis Embraces Right-Wing Plan to Rewrite U.S. Constitution**

Tags: Andrew GillumBetsy DeVosEdgar PrinceElsa PrinceErik PrinceRon DeSantisElection 2018AmwayDepartment of EducationFamily Research CouncilSouthern Poverty Law Center

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http://www.alternet.org/parents-treated-criminals

In researching an upcoming article I’m writing about the St. Louis school system, and the district’s ongoing funding crisis, I came across an astonishing example of who wins and who loses in current approaches to government budget balancing.

As a local St. Louis reporter tells it, during a public meeting about a proposed new $130 million 34-story apartment building in the city, alderman Joe Roddy used a slideshow to make a case for why the city should give the developers 15 years of reduced property taxes, a $10 million subsidy, in exchange for some additional retail space and 305 high-end, luxury apartments downtown.

In a slide show titled “How the City Makes & Spends Money,” Roddy, a Democrat mind you, laid out a hierarchy of those who “make money” for the city at the top and those who cause the city to “spend money” at the bottom.

At the top of his slide were businesses. In the middle were residents with no children and retirees. And at the very bottom – in the tier of city dwellers who place the biggest financial burden on government – were “criminals and residents with children in public school.”

When told that some might take offense at equating families with children needing free public schools to criminals, Roddy countered that the project would “target tenants who are young professionals without children. Attracting that demographic to the city is crucial, he says, and after the tax abatement ends, the revenue windfall for the city will be significant.”

By the way, St. Louis has a history of extending tax abatements for developers to longer terms.

Winners and Losers

The thrust of Roddy’s remarks is well understood by all – in a budget environment of forced scarcity, there are increasingly strong demarcations between winners and losers, and parents who plan on sending children to free public schools are increasingly losers.

To be fair to Roddy, a great deal of St. Louis’s financial constraints, particularly in relation to the city’s ability to cover the cost of education, is the fault of the state of Missouri.

A 2015 accounting of state school funding found Missouri is “underfunding its K-12 schools by $656 million statewide, nearly 20 percent below the required level.” The budget situation for families with children has not improved a lot since then, with this year’s installment cutting spending on school buses, higher education, and social services.

Missouri is one of 27 states that spends less on education than it did in 2008.

The severity of Missouri’s budget austerity seems specifically targeted at districts like St. Louis that happen to be stuck with lots of low-income families with children (Where would they fall in Roddy’s hierarchy?).

A 2016 study conducted by NPR found that St. Louis schools on average spend considerably less per student compared to the highest spending districts in the St. Louis area.

Another more recent analysis by EdBuild finds St. Louis schools have a cost adjusted revenue per student that is nine percent below Missouri’s average. The district gets only 35 percent of its revenue from the state even though the district is challenged to educate a student population in which 68 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a common measurement of poverty.

Pay to Play, and LearnThe trend of financial inequity for St. Louis schools is worsening, according to Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker, who finds that the district, since 1995, is increasingly at a funding disadvantage compared to the rest of the state....

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LA huge $

Zimmer has received numerous awards for his work with children and families, including the LA’s Commission of Children, Youth and their Families “Angel Over Los Angeles” award, El Centro Del Pueblo’s “Carino” award and the LACER Foundation’s “Jackie Goldberg Public Service Award.”

Nick Melvoin is the candidate completely sponsored by the 1 percent. His extreme lack of experience clearly doesn’t bother them. Melvoin is so devoted to the corporate agenda for our schools that he claims a “hostile takeover” is needed.

Who are some of the billionaires and corporate lobby groups that want to defeat Steve Zimmer and elect Nick Melvoin?

• Members of the Walton family (Alice Walton, Jim Walton, and Carrie Walton Penner) — heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune from Arkansas — have contributed $2.2 million to the PAC attacking Zimmer in the last two years. Alice Walton (net worth: $36.9 billion) lives in Texas and is one of the biggest funders behind Melvoin’s campaign. She and other members of her family also donated to the Super PAC that worked to elect Donald Trump, donated to Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and to the Alliance for School Choice, an organization that Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos helped to lead.

• Oil and Enron executivesfrom Texas and Oklahoma have contributed more than $1 million to the same committee.

• JOBSPAC — a PAC “largely funded by oil and tobacco companies,” according to the Los Angeles Times – contributed $35,000 to the same committee funding the attacks on Zimmer.

• Doris Fisher, co-founder of The Gap who has a net worth of $2.7 billion, has given $4.1 million to the California Charter School Association’s political action committee in 2015 and 2016. She lives in San Francisco.

• John Arnold made a fortune at Enron before the company collapsed, leaving its employees and stockholders in the lurch. Then he made another fortune as a hedge fund manager. His net worth is $2.9 billion. He and his wife Laura donated $1 million last year to CCSA’s political committee and $4400 directly to Melvoin. They live in Houston, Texas.

• Jeff Yass, who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, has given the maximum allowed contribution to Melvoin. He runs the Susquahanna group, a hedge fund. He has close ties to Betsy DeVos’ efforts to privatize public school. Yass donated $2.3 million to a Super PAC supporting Rand Paul’s presidential candidacy.

• Frank Baxter and his wife Kathrine donated $100,000 to CCSA’s political committee in the past two years and $3,300 directly to Melvoin. Frank Baxter is former CEO of the global investment bank Jefferies and Company that specialized in “junk” bonds. He is a major Republican fundraiser and was appointed ambassador to Uruguay by George W. Bush. He is one of at least five donors to Melvoin’s campaign who sit on the board of charter schools. He is also a big financial backer of Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Cong. Devin Nunes of California, and Cong. Steve King of Iowa (a Tea Party favorite).

What do these corporate moguls and billionaires want and what has Zimmer done to make them so upset?

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AZ makes all students elegible, no dems; same day NY sez free college for under 100K$

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Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and co-author of "Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privization is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry" (AlterNet eBook, 2016).=The ALEC agenda for this year’s State and Policy Summit contains the usual potpourri of anti-worker, anti-government proposals along with quite a few important pay-to-play measures for big telecom, health care companies, and nuclear utilities. But much of the agenda will be taken up with speculation on opportunities presented by a new Trump presidency to advance ALEC’s corporatist agenda and its politicians.TRANSPARENCY FOR UNIONS AND SCHOOL TEACHERS, BUT NOT FOR BILLIONAIRES OR CORPORATIONS BANKROLLING ALECALEC’s offshoot for local governments, ACCE, is taking a page from the ALEC play book and advancing a measure to harass public sector workers.ACCE’s “Public Employee Bargaining Transparency Ordinance” targets public sector workers by opening up public sector collective bargaining negotiations to public scrutiny and participation. The bill is nothing but an effort to advance the harassment of a targeted group of public-sector workers. There are no ALEC bills opening closed partisan caucuses or opening up economic development loan negotiations, other areas of state government where millions are spent with no public participation.Similarly, ALEC’s bill “Substantive Transparency in Education Act” is up for renewal vote by special interest lobbyists and legislators in the Education and Workforce Development Task Force. The bill requires public schools to open up their instructional materials for review by any parent or guardian. Note that the bill does not apply to private schools and many private charters refuse to abide by state open meetings and open records laws.ALEC, however, is for secrecy when it benefits itself and its donors.It is notable that another ALEC bill under consideration at this week’s meeting “Resolution in Support of Nonprofit Donor Privacy” recommends that the public be kept in the dark when it comes to finding out which millionaires or corporate interests are bankrolling ALEC, because the poor souls might be subject to public criticism or public pressure to drop their ALEC membership.The resolution highlights 501 (c) (3) organizations like ALEC, but the operative language also protects 501 (c) (4) dark money groups like the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity. ALEC along with the State Policy Network, the Wall Street Journal, and leaders of dark money groups have been fighting donor disclosure for dark money non-profits active in campaigns and elections. Wrapping dark money in the American flag and the Federalist Papers, they argue in endless articles, books, and speeches, that “anonymous speech” goes back to the founding fathers. But back then no Supreme Court had embraced the deeply flawed and corrosive concept that money is speech. They are sparing no effort to promote the idea that secrecy of donors is essential to protect First Amendment rights, despite the hundreds of millions now being secretly spent in elections without the disclosures the public supports to guard against corruption.It comes as no surprise that Wall Street Journal editorial writer Kim Strassel, who has become the key proponent of this propagandistic effort to shield the billionaire class from scrutiny with her fact deficient new book “The Intimidation Game,” will be addressing the ALEC meeting. Her book attempts to smear concerned citizens and small community organizations across the country that have successfully convinced over 100 ALEC firms to stop funding ALEC’s extreme agenda.HOSTILITY TO RAISE THE WAGE EFFORTSALEC’s offshoot organization for local officials ACCE is advancing a series of muddled measures geared toward keeping wages low and handicapping activist federal agencies.The “Local Resolution in Support of a State Minimum Wage Law” sounds like ACCE is in support of raising wages, but the cookie-cutter ordinance instructs local governments not to raise the minimum wage and to embrace preemption of local control by state legislatures. This is a rather odd position for a group whose model “Founding Philosophy and Principals Act” teaches American school children government “as close to the people as possible” is best.But ALEC and its key funders like the billionaire Koch Brothers have long opposed any measure to raise the wage, including living wages and prevailing wages, and the Kochs have even characterized the federal minimum wage as an “obstacle to prosperity.” ALEC opposes even having a minimum wage for workers.While ACCE favors state preemption of localities on some issues, on others it seeks unconstitutional local preemption of federal policy making. ACCE’s draft “Ordinance for Local Coordination on Federal Regulations” suggests that any local government — from a city or county to a school or water district — or even an NGO can invoke a theory of “coordination” to “force” the federal government to meet with them on an equal basis to work out their differences. “Coordination” is defined as “the process by which an agency of the federal government brings its regulations, whether proposed or established, into consistency with the public policy of [the local jurisdiction.”So for instance if Superior, Wisconsin, thinks that the federal mercury standards for walleye and perch are too strict, ACCE thinks they should be able to impose their own notions on the federal government. In truth, ALEC has no consistent position on federalism or local control and simply attempts to hamstring any policy it or its funders don’t like.ALEC’S EXTREME EDUCATION AGENDA ADVANCES WITH TRUMP PICK OF BETSY DEVOSALEC education bills were not publicly available at the time of this writing, but the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is a big win for the ALEC crowd and will be a hot topic at the ALEC meeting.DeVos and her husband of the AmWay fortune have long bankrolled the dark money group, American Federation for Children (AFC), which spends big each election cycle on politicians advancing her agenda to transform Americas public education system into a for-profit “cash for kids” enterprise. As CMD reported recently, AFC aggressively promotes school vouchers for private schools, religious schools, and even sham virtual schools through ALEC where DeVos lobbyist Scott Jensen, the disgraced former Speaker of the Assembly, has played a leadership role.CMD has also documented how charter schools promoted by DeVos in her home state of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and how the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never opened. The New York Times has covered in depth how they are failing the state’s children. Even charter advocates acknowledge that her efforts in Detroit represent “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.”...http://www.prwatch.org/files/new_charter_school_black_hole_report_oct_21_2015.pdf ref cmd report:  eg MICHIGAN Michigan provided the least information to CMD of any of the 12 states/jurisdictions within our investigation. However, information from CMD’s federal FOIAs and other sources sheds light on Michigan and reveals significant problems with oversight of charter schools. In many ways, state officials appear to be still reeling from a critical blockbuster series published last year by the Detroit Free Press about the serious failures in charter schools in Michigan. As part of that series, the leading state paper documented that Michigan spends about $1 billion in state taxpayer money on charter schools that are accountable to no one. 31 (Overall, Michigan has approximately 1.5 million public school students, and nearly 10% are in charters.32) According to information CMD has obtained about federal funding for charters, charter schools in Michigan received $34,997,658 between 2010-’15 under the CSP umbrella, after the state was awarded $43.9 million under the CSP expansion in 2010. 33 (This discrepancy is based on appropriations amounts and cycles and other differentials.) Almost half (139) of the charters in Michigan were subsidized in part by federal tax dollars, in the past five years. (Michigan itself calls charter schools “public school academies” (PSAs).) As of 2014, Michigan had 297 charter schools operating in the state, and 141,204 students were enrolled in charters, in the most recent school year with complete data.34 Since the inception of charters in the state, more than 100 charters have closed (108).35 Many of them have closed due to lack of “academic viability” (poor results) while other have closed due to lack of “financial viability” (such as inadequate enrollment) and some for both or other failings. The total amount these schools have received is not known, but they certainly consumed well over $1 million in federal CSP grants before shuttering. Other charter operators in the state have been accused, and convicted, of crimes: These crimes include felony fraud and tax evasion. For example, the “Bay City Academy,” landed a $200,000 CSP grant. Its founder, Steven Ingersoll, had obtained a construction line of credit to convert a church into the Bay City Academy, but instead funneled $934,000 to his private account. Union members with LIUNA Local 1098 “blew the whistle” on Ingersoll for improper asbestos removal, and eventually prosecutors discovered Ingersoll’s financial fraud, even though the “neither the school’s board nor Lake Superior State University, the authorizer of the charter school, nor the Michigan Department of Education found anything illegal in the school’s audits."36 In 2015, Ingersoll, pleaded guilty of two felony counts for tax evasion and “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”37 Bridge Magazine called this “the most significant federal criminal case in the history of Michigan’s 20-year-old charter school industry.”38 “If this happened in public schools, the public would be up... ===omg2Revealed: The Right-Wing Movement’s Agenda For Trump’s First 180 DaysPeter Montgomery on Tuesday, 7/26/2016 11:08 amThe Conservative Action Project is a network of more than 100 right-wing leaders created in 2008 as “an offshoot” of the secretive far-right Council for National Policy, making it part of an array of conservative coalitions that bloomed around and after the election of Barack Obama. Originally chaired by Edwin Meese, the ConservativeAction Project is now headed by Becky Norton Dunlop, Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. It includes leaders of all of what are often described as the three legs of the conservative movement: social, economic, and national security conservatives.The Washington Post reported in 2010 that the Conservative Action Project was helping fuel closer coordination across the multifaceted conservative coalition with its weekly Wednesday morning meetings at the Family Research Council. The group also promotes shared messaging and strategy with its “Memos for the Movement.”Now this collection of right-wing leaders has identified its policy priorities for the first 180 days of a new administration.At a forum organized by the American Conservative Union Foundation at the Republican National Convention, participants were given of a set of pocket cards containing policy proposals, quick facts and “market tested messages” on the one dozen highest priorities selected by Conservative Action Project leaders. The 12 priorities are divided into four categories: Constitutional Issues and the Judiciary; Preserving and Protecting Our Culture; Freeing Our Economy so Everyone Can Win; and Defending Our Freedoms.The package provides a clear picture of the ideas that right-wing organizations are pushing Trump to embrace. Some are vague, like, “The President should revive Public Diplomacy,” but others are quite specific. Taken together, they’re a pretty good indication of what we’d have in store on the policy front with Trump in the White House. Among the proposals, which signal the intense desire of right-wing organizations to infuse their priorities throughout the federal government’s executive branch agencies: