This could be the opening paragraph of an article in an Arizona paper the day after the 2018 election.
Voters decisively rejected the will of the . . . Legislature and governor Tuesday, defeating what would have been the nation’s most comprehensive education voucher program in a referendum blowout.
That’s an actual opening paragraph of an article, but not here in Arizona. It’s from Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune (I put three dots where the state name should be) on November 7, 2007. A recently formed group, Save Our Schools, has begun collecting signatures to put a similar referendum on Arizona’s November, 2018, ballot to overturn the bill expanding empowerment scholarship accounts to all Arizona children. If the referendum succeeds, Arizona journalists have their opening paragraph written for them.
Since 1990, people across the country have voted against vouchers every time they’ve had a chance. The No votes have ranged from 60 to 71 percent. The last vote was in Utah in 2007, and the circumstances were similar to ours. The Utah legislature passed its voucher law by one vote. This year, our legislature passed SB1431 by three votes in the House and Senate. With one more Democratic representative and senator, it would have been a one vote margin. (Two more Democrats in either the House or the Senate, and the bill would have gone down.) Utah’s voucher opponents collected 124,000 signatures. This year Arizona needs 152,000 valid signatures. In Utah, the teachers union led the signature gathering effort. At this point, Arizona’s teachers unions haven’t been a visible presence, though it’s still early.
By the time votes were cast in Utah, $8.5 million had been spent, with the money reasonably evenly spread between the pro- and anti-voucher forces. Most of the $4 million pro-voucher money came from one man: Patrick Byrne, then the chief executive of Overstock.com. The National Education Association and the state teachers union put up most of the anti-voucher money. I’m not sure the teachers unions are going to have deep pockets like that if the Arizona referendum makes it to the ballot. They’ve got lots of expensive battles to fight across the country. Meanwhile, the privatization/”education reform” movement has grown so popular among multimillionaires and billionaires, it has almost unlimited cash, so the financial battle over an Arizona referendum could be lopsided. But remember, only 8 percent of Arizona’s children attend private school or are home schooled, so 92 percent of parents won’t see any benefits from the expenditure of taxpayer money on vouchers. Pure self interest is on the anti-voucher side.
A These-Sons-Of-Bitches-Will-Resort-To-Anything-To-Win Note. I just received an email directed at signature gatherers warning that a new law can invalidate any signature or other voter information on a petition that goes outside the lines. That means an oversized signature or even a lower case g, j or y extending into the box below can mean the signature won’t count. I didn’t know that law is in effect for this round of petitions, but if it is, it means petitions are likely to have lots of signatures thrown out which are valid except that the signers’ information goes outside the line. This isn’t voter suppression per se. It’s suppression of the ability of voters to put their ideas to a vote. Add “preemptive voter suppression” to the garden variety voter suppression Republican legislatures have put in place in Arizona and across the country.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2017.
The lay of the land is different in Utah. They do not have as extensive a Catholic schools network as Arizona does, and so one significant interest group that will put its collective efforts behind defending vouchers is absent there.
You assert that all the adult voters in the households of the 92% of students enrolled in public schools before the ESA bill passed will see an anti-voucher vote as something that promotes their “self-interest.” However:
–Among the 92% enrolled in public schools before that bill passed will be some who intend to use the ESAs to leave public schools.
–There will be some families with a child or children in privates and a child or children in publics as well. It seems unlikely that they will vote against ESAs.
–Hard as it may be for you to believe, there are actually some people all of whose children are in public schools who don’t want to use the children of other families as economic hostages to the dubious goal of supposedly “saving” troubled public school districts. They recognize that it is in the community’s best interest if other people are able to place their children in schools where they will thrive and succeed. There are, for example, a lot of parents of children in well-managed public school districts in Southern Arizona who don’t think anyone’s children should be imprisoned on sinking ships like TUSD, and who would be happy if families within the boundaries of TUSD were given the opportunity to spend their per pupil funding anywhere they chose — in another school district, in a charter, OR in a Catholic or Independent school, if that is the family’s preference.
Framing education policy the way you do — in broad categories like “PUBLIC DISTRICT” vs. “CHARTER” vs. “PRIVATE” — and then assuming these categories have constituents whose policy aims and opinions are unified as they defend what you imagine to be their “self-interest” oversimplifies to the point of absurdity a landscape in American (and Arizonan) education that is considerably more complex, diverse, and difficult to interpret than you make it out to be.
But I guess, after the embarrassing gaffes of the past year (so-called Democrats’ and supporters-of-public-schools’ active support of 123 being the most conspicuous among them) folks who were previously duped and led astray have to have something to contemplate that cheers them up. Simplistic fantasies about how things will play out in our collective political future may be helpful as a mood-altering supplement to the daily depressing dose of reality that the news-feed from Phoenix provides.
Why would parents vote against their own self interests? Let it go.Your desire for public school domination is unreal.
Lets see. District schools were designed by racists to keep Catholics and minorities out. They are very effective at doing that – 99% of the public is excluded from these schools. To call them “public” schools in two ways. First, they are not open to the public.
Second, there has never been an experiment to test as to whether they are really schools for children in poverty neighborhoods. To do that, you would have to randomly assign students, one to a district school, one to a detention center to see which one would end up with greater academic achievement.
Arizona is the only state in the nation to have a legitimate claim to have a public school system. Every school in our state is open to every student through our public education system.
Now, you want to vote to exclude some of those from some of those schools.
Two different visions for public education. Some people who want to ensure that the worst teacher in the worst school in the worst school district has a full classroom.
While some of us want to ensure that there are so many choices that every full classroom is evidence of a teacher who is among the best in the world.
The Recall Diane Douglas people only gathered 100,000 signatures in 120 days and no one knows how many were actually valid. These people don’t have a chance to get the needed amount in 90 days without paid signature gathers which they don’t have the funds to pay for. Not a chance.
If you get rid of vouchers, you end up with the status quo….education run by a government sanctioned monopoly. Being a monopoly, their solutions tend to be in their own self interest. There will no doubt be a call to lard up budgets and raise taxes on ” the rich”. If you want to look at other states for inspiration, try California. High taxes and approval of many education bond issues. Studies show most of that money goes to the education monopoly bureaucrats and not the classrooms.
The biggest objection to vouchers is that it rewards motivated parents. Maybe we should encourage more motivated parents.
Vouchers are clearly a way to drain public dollars that go to the schools that 80% of the population chooses … in order to fund private schools. I am not at ALL convinced that public schoolchildren are being sacrificed (or held as “economic hostages”) in order to save public schools (in fact I think its really offensive)–nor am I convinced that we should all overlook the religious side of Catholic education just because the schools are well organized. I would not expect public monies to send my student to a madrasa, to a Jewish school, nor to a Catholic or Bible school. Kudos to them if their schools are so-called “good schools”–public monies going to religious entities goes against the separation of church and state that this country is supposedly founded on. But who cares about that?!
If and when this thing gets on the ballot, expect millions of dollars from the pro-voucher movement to pour into the State to defeat it. That said, I hope the people prevail!
You also cannot abbreviate the name of the city, or write with anything other than a blue or black ball point pen. And yes, cursive letters that go below the line will make your signature invalid. The intent of the lege is on full display.
Betts Putnam-Hidalgo writes, “vouchers are clearly a way to drain public dollars that go to the schools that 80% of the population chooses.” That repeats Democratic party orthodoxy, but is not an accurate way of characterizing what vouchers do. Vouchers are per-pupil funding that is transferred from the public school where it would have been applied in support of that child’s education in that setting to a private school, which, if the child transfers, must bear the cost of educating that child. It’s a zero sum game. The public school loses the expense of educating that child at the same time that it loses the per pupil funding. There is no “drain” on public schools involved. Public schools only get “per pupil” funding when the pupil chooses to enroll there, not when they withdraw.
In a context where the above-described transfer is not permitted through vouchers or tax credits or some other equalizing type of law or policy, what is actually going on is economic discrimination against families who want their children’s academic instruction delivered in a context different from the public district or public charter schools. In states like Arizona where there are deeply troubled public school districts that have been permitted to mismanage the education of tens of thousands of students, when students transfer out of one of these troubled districts into a high-performing private, if there are no vouchers or tax credits, the state is able to benefit from better educated, higher earning, more productive citizens at no cost to itself. Voucher supporters believe the state should be asked to pay its fair share towards the education of all K-12 students. (It would be best if the state provided some way of verifying that the quality of education delivered in alternative institutions is at or above the quality of education delivered in publicly funded schools. Unfortunately, Arizona legislators have not seen fit to put in place any regulatory mechanisms that can accomplish this, and that is a serious flaw in the way the law and policy relating to this have been structured to date.)
The so-called “separation of church and state” which voucher opponents call in to service to back up their economic discrimination against families using alternative schools which happen to have religious affiliations shows a misunderstanding of the context in which the US Constitution was framed. The founders were trying to prohibit the kind of economic discrimination practiced in England against all those who refused to affiliate with the state-sponsored religion. They wanted to prevent the formation of a state-sponsored religion in this country. Allowing people to choose to apply the public funds available for the K-12 education of their children in whatever alternative institution they prefer — religiously affiliated or not — in no way limits the freedom of other citizens, constitutes the establishment of a state-sponsored religion, or discriminates against anyone who does not want to make the same choice.
Unfortunately, what is at the bottom of a surprising amount of anti-voucher advocacy is resistance to the entitlements citizens should have in a country that grants freedom of religious affiliation and — even worse — thinly disguised prejudice against organized religion. Citizens with religious affiliations have not always found the public district school system a “value-neutral” environment. For generations now, those who have chosen not to educate their children in contexts that show subtle and not-so-subtle forms of disrespect for their values and beliefs have carried an inappropriate economic burden as they have paid out-of-pocket for schooling that, if they had chosen to ignore the discriminatory flaws too often found in the public district system, would have been free. It’s a good thing that this form of economic discrimination is now, in some contexts, being reversed. It seems unlikely that the citizens benefiting from these programs will fail to organize to support their continuance, if they come under threat in upcoming elections.
Amen brother! And the non establishment clause kept the government fro endorsing or establishing their own religion.
That’s may be why they adopted the environmental theology. Most people didn’t see it as religious, and were easily duped.