I recently got an unsolicited e-mail from the Goldwater Institute touting the part the group played in the final destruction of teachers’ unions in Arizona. The wording of the press release was absolutely giddy, explaining how the cabal of white guys in expensive suits has stripped away all legal protections from people who have selflessly devoted themselves to the education of Arizona’s young people for decades and suddenly find themselves at the mercy of petty administrators, dysfunctional school boards, and lawmakers who refuse to obey the law (301 monies, anyone?).
Before the guys at the Goldwater Institute move on to their ultimate goal—the complete elimination of the public school system (which helped make America the great country that it is)—they will pause for a photo op in which they will gather in front of a retirement home and kick the canes out from under old folks.
If it weren’t for the fact that it would have a massive negative impact on an entire generation of our state’s schoolchildren, I would almost enjoy watching the Goldwaterites and their Republican lackeys in the Legislature get their way in driving the final nail in the coffin that holds what used to be respect for teachers. Under their plan, Arizona would hand out, to parents, checks worth thousands of dollars per each school-aged kid in the house. Then, the state would say, “Now, go buy some education.”
I was recently e-mailing back and forth with a good friend of mine who, due to some unknown trauma during his formative years, has turned out to be a mega-Republican. When I asked, quite sarcastically, what could possibly go wrong with such a system, he wrote “Will there be waste or some abuses? Probably…” That instantly becomes the frontrunner for the “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem” Memorial Understatement of the Year Award.
This thing will be the alt-fuels fiasco on steroids.
There are so many really awful things that could go wrong here, but let’s start with the absolutely false notion that this plan will allow every parent to send his/her child to a good private school. We’ll say that the state gives every parent $7,000. If I’m running a top-level private school (where the current tuition is already twice that amount), all I’m going to do is raise my tuition by the amount of the check. The parents who are already sending their kids to my school will gladly hand over the checks, knowing that it’s not costing them a penny to do so and that the bump in tuition will help keep the Clampetts away.
For some reason, when you throw lots and lots of information at people, their eyes glaze over. So, I’ll just focus on one small part of their plan and when I am done explaining it, if you don’t think that it has disaster written all over it, there will officially be no hope for you.
One of the lesser-publicized parts of the plan is to give thousands of dollars per kid—no strings attached—to parents who claim to home-school their children. I’ve never been a fan of home schooling; I think it’s, at the very least, an overreaction to the “evils” of society. But it’s not against the law, so people can do it if they want to. All we can do is hope that their children don’t turn out like that Spelling Bee kid from a few years back.
As it stands now, home-schooled kids are twilight, neither here nor there. It doesn’t cost the state anything to educate them publicly and doesn’t cost the parents anything to educate them privately. But now, the Republicans in the Legislature want to give your tax dollars to people who claim to be home-schooling their kids, whether they are doing so or not. This appears to be the Perfectly Bad Idea, one that everyone, regardless of political affiliation, can hate.
Let’s start with those on the Left. They probably see a birther/gun nut/fanatic who wants to use that free money to build up an arsenal just in case a family of Mud People even thinks about moving into his trailer park. From the other fringe perspective, they see a crack ho/welfare mother who takes her brood of four kids out of public school and has them sit around and watch TV all day while she spends the 30 grand on personalized recreational activities.
But what about this scenario? You’ve got a family of five, good, decent people who have been unsuccessfully trying to swim upstream ever since the economy went in the toilet. Mom’s job got eliminated in the downsizing and Dad can’t pick up enough hours at work to make ends meet. They’re near the breaking point when they hit on a plan born of desperation. They’ll take their three kids out of school for a year, “school” them at home and use the $20,000 to pay down their credit cards and maybe buy that second car that the family needs. The state’s not going to check where the money goes. Such a bureaucracy would be prohibitively expensive; plus, that would be an intrusion.
After a year, things are better, so they put their (uneducated) kids back in public school. But they’re all a year behind and their test scores stink. Guess who gets the blame?
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2014.
Oh MAN, I certainly blew it. If only I’d had four or five kids – why I could teach them everything I know in about five minutes, earn about $30K a year, and send the brats out to vandalize your cars and homes.
The amount given for vouchers will be about $5.4K vs. $7K, but that makes Tom’s point even more valid. Those who currently can’t afford private school still won’t find it affordable even with the vouchers. This is not about helping disadvantaged kids. It is about helping the rich get richer and the poor stay down!
I think Tom needs to go back and actually read the law , there are a lot more stipulations in the law than this rant leads you to believe.
We get it Tom, you hate successful people (at least if they’re white and male) and people who home school. Now go crawl back under your rock for another week.
Look around, open your eyes and minds. Young people walking around no jobs, no hope lacking opportunity because we failed them, too much special interest destroying public education for their own pocketbooks.
Life without education is like an unsharpened pencil, it has no point.
Time to look at a new leader as Superintendent of Public Education, one who believes in one responsive education system serving all Arizona’s young. David Garcia fits that requirement.
The world is fill of false equivalents, and statements comparing the belief in tax funded public systems to persons who hate “successful people” is one of the best arguments for publicly funded education I have seen. The profound implications that we already have oligarchs and plutocrats claiming to be pictures of success is an astounding indication of how far this problem has progressed. Allow me to throw a reckless equivalency out there: Believing that the money you hoard at the expense of social welfare will buy you protection from the consequences of such belief is like believing that the food you eat will not create feces!
Oh my god, I completely agree with Tom about something! They must be ice skating in hell.
The program he speaks of is even worse, in that the unused portion of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts can be saved for college. So a home school family can save for college for years, resulting in a taxpayer subsidized college education. Nice deal, and as Tom points out, potentially an alt fuels type debacle.
Bslap is an educated idiot. Greedy people should be taken.
This is truly scary business. I fear for the fate of AZ and its next generation.
Bslap is an educated idiot. Greedy people should be taken. This idea sounds about as good as Obamacare…. Not very! Another step to giving our country to the UN and drive down American economy so the world rich can stay wealthy.
You get nowhere throwing hand grenades and spouting bile and vitriole. Deep seated entrenched positions like yours get no one anywhere. What we have done gets us no where. Time to try something new, a whole bunch of somethings new. So bitching about being drug into something new, kicking and screaming about it isn’t helping. Get on board and help control the vectors, bud.
It amazes me that those that describe themselves as progressives and that decry those that believe in traditional values would defend our archaic education system that is failing our children. Tom is also resorting to making exaggerated and hysterical leaps of logic in predicting the demise of education. Shouldn’t we be willing to try new things for the sake of the children?
This corporate ploy is doomed to fail because of the human factor: most parents work and do not have the opportunity to take time off to drop off and pick up their kids at out-of-district schools.
Well we have expended one of two if Tom’s two topics. Girls BB and this.
I fully support the voucher system, charter schools, home schooling and any other approach that recognizes (as Tom does not) that our current public school system is a 125 year experiment that has failed. While an effective public school system that focuses upon developing citizenship and knowledge originally, just as Tom says, ‘helped make America the great country that it is’, that system has been corrupted and altered so that it often serves the opposite of its original charge, and turns out ignorant citizens and graduates with no know-how. My view is that there was one truly effective implementation of that original charge, and that was the one-room rural school. I would like to buy Tom a Popeye lunch if he would like to discuss the basis for that, which, incidentally, could lead to a restored public school system that does not need the kinds of tweaks so many well meaning folk, including our legislators and the Goldwater Institute people, are fumbling for.
Chuckj. Please cite the particular failures of the public school system, and where ever did you get the idea that the Goldwater institute was well meaning?
For-profit prisons and for-profit medical care are both shitty and cost people more in the long run so, sure, why not fuck up education too?
Hey Not a Rancho Snob, I bet when the cretins in the AZ legislature accomplish that they’ll feel like they won a Trifecta. They’ll also continue to wonder why no companies that offer jobs with a living wage are moving in with those jobs.
” So a home school family can save for college for years, resulting in a taxpayer subsidized college education”
It would be very difficult to do this. You could only do it after trying the public school system, having your kids attend a failing school for a set amount of time, then pulling them out and homeschooling. All the time you would have to have faith that the legislature wouldn’t change the law on you. Good luck with that.
Secondly, since a home school family pays taxes for education and never receives any benefit, I fail to see how this is a “subsidy.” Getting back a small part of the money you paid into a program you don’t use is not a subsidy.
I don’t particularly like the law, but Tom’s predictable reaction, without any real thought, and his smearing of the same groups article after article is sad.
nasty comments, not all the home schooled kids are uneducated,,,
Henry J. I have a good household income and we did NOT pay over 5k in taxes as a three person home. Shenanigans erroneously claiming your average Arizonan family would be getting back what they paid in and didn’t receive. Next up. It is a CHOICE to turn down get public education, you don’t deserve a cent back. That’s like claiming people who don’t own cars should receive money for roads they don’t drive on, people who don’t use public libraries get that money back etc…. part of living in ANY civilized nation is you pay taxes that pay for services available to you regardless of your choice to utilize those services.
To the idiots claiming this is only for families who enroll their child in their neighborhood failing school. That school is ONLY failing because the state legislature has deliberately privatized education and given all the would have been involved families an easy out. The families left do NOT have the luxury of homeschooling. This plan encourages low income families to have more children and keep mom’s at home for state aid. It is classic anti woman policy. They don’t want women working, they want them breeding but they especially don’t want the children educated as that won’t benefit the for profit prison plans down the road. They know parents earning minimum wage will be hard pressed to turn down a better wage by unenrolling their children from school and staying home.
The very notion of paying families to NOT educate their children is sickening and evil. Yes. Some homeschooling families are rocking it but it is still a choice they have made to reject public and private education. AZ has no standards for homeschooling. No annual tests. No checking up that the child is learning.
This plan deliberately encourages families to not educate children for profit! It’s insidious. It hands money to families that can afford private schools. All of this takes money out of public schools which have been getting worse ONLY because AZ refuses to pay for it. Do the people claiming our schools are failing realize how dumb they sound? They’re applauding the state for slashing funding to schools while claiming schools need to be closed because they’re failing. Yes. They are failing. Because AZ wants them to fail.
That is the goal and as Danehy has pointed out they’re getting away with it brilliantly.
Tom is right despite his red herrings and hyperbole. Estimates of the number of students eligible under proposed rules vary from 200,000 to 800,000 depending on the whims of state legislators (Debby Lesko et. al.) who do actually intend to torpedo public education in Arizona. Do the math. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in state subsidies for an unproven program driven by a right wing political agenda.
Of course only a small percentage of eligible students’ parents will take advantage of the scheme due to sheer inertia and fewer still will take the money and then fail to educate their kids. These are the fringe one-offs that Tom is so concerned with. Will the funds benefit private and parochial schools? Certainly. The AZ Supreme Court has ruled that hunky dory. My concern is that religious and ideologically driven groups, each with their own agenda, will rush to form their own academies now that the floodgates have been (or will be) opened. We will be left funding the best organized groups too cheap to build their own schools and quite eager to get their hands on “free money.”
I am in favor of and support the charter schools that Danehy also finds to be the work of the devil and attacks with equal venom and dubious argument. Students and their parents should be given an option to flee failing schools and poor teachers led by incompetent administrators. In Tucson they can do this freely and many have voted with their feet contributing to the well documented exodus from the district to nearby districts.
The voucher program will see a flood of new schools developed by religious and ideologically driven suspects driven by greed and the opportunity to do with our money what they refuse to do on their own using their own resources.
MY daughter went to public school and got a very good education in the widely-maligned TUSD. The Republicans have pushed the meme that “our public schools are failing” for so long that they actually believe it. They are wrong. Test continually show that most public schools do a better job than most charters. If students are enrolled in one of the few poorly performing schools, they have the freedom to enroll them elsewhere. Home schoolers? Most parents greatly underestimate the difficulty of teaching and end up with kids who are socially and academically inept. The longer they remain at home, the further behind they become.
Teachers unions are advocates for Teachers, not students. Don’t mourn the death of the union. There are many teachers who ARE student advocates but their union isn’t, unions look out for their members and especially themselves.
The problem is combing true student advocacy with the power to administrate. Until unions, gub-ment bureaucrats and politicians stop feathering their own nests there is no good answer except for parents to take charge of their children’s education and home school.