I can’t remember agreeing with Greg Miller—a Republican who runs a charter school and is ex-president of the Arizona Board of Education—before. But an op ed he wrote for the Capitol Times, GOP support of voucher expansion bill an insult to most students, is an exception to the rule. It begins,
As an advocate for education reform for the past 35 years, a co-founder of a very successful charter school, a lifelong Republican, and the most recent past president of the Arizona State Board of Education, I have never been more embarrassed, outraged, disappointed, and angry to call myself a Republican. How on earth do the Republicans in the state Legislature who voted for the Empowerment Scholarship Account (voucher) bill, or our governor, who signed it, look in the mirror and in good faith, not understand what they have just done.
Miller continues,
Public education has been the equalizer for 150 years of economic growth and assimilation of immigrants into the culture that we enjoy today. This is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of students who do not have the resources to pay the additional thousands of dollars for the tuition these private schools will be charging above the state subsidy, and without the opportunity of a quality education provided in their local schools where due process and common goals of expectation drive the continued development of economic expansion for everyone, not just a privileged few.
He ends by saying voters need to kick out the ESA expansion supporters in 2018.
All Republicans that share this view [against voucher expansion] use your vote in next summer’s Republican primary to replace anyone who supported this transfer of economic wealth from our public school system to the private schools of the wealthy.
I’ll take exception with Miller here and say we need to kick out the anti-education Republicans and replace them with some pro-education, pro-child Democrats, but hey, we can agree to disagree on that one.
It looks like the negative reaction to the ESA expansion by Miller and some other reliable Republican supporters caught pro-voucher Republicans by surprise. They’ve been patting themselves on the back for a job well done and basking in the praise they’ve received from privatizers around the country, but the reception haven’t been quite as cheery as they’d hoped on the home front. Witness this sudden change of plans. ESA expansion supporters were all ready to take a victory lap Thursday in the form of a free “Thank You to the Legislators” lunch at the Capitol paid for by the American Federation for Children—that’s U.S. Ed Head Betsy DeVos’s education privatization group, which pours money into the campaign coffers of right-thinking candidates in Arizona and around the country. At the last minute, speaker of the House J.D. Mesnard called off the celebration because he thought, according to an Associated Press article, “it was ill-timed and emotions are still running high at the Capitol.”
Seeing as how Republicans never worry about the feelings of Democrats, who they ignore whenever possible, those can’t be the folks Mesnard is worried about. He’s still got a budget to pass, and he doesn’t need to alienate dissenting Republicans any further by rubbing the ESA victory in their faces. Then there are the sizable number of Republican parents who send their kids to district and charter schools and agree with Democrats that more money for their schools, including raises for their children’s overworked, underpaid teachers, is more important than helping send other people’s kids to private schools.
Meanwhile, House Democrats aren’t letting Mesnard, Ducey, & Co. forget the vote either.
Democrats who opposed the voucher plan passed on April 6 continue to keep the issue in the forefront, reading letters from teachers nearly every day on the House floor. Earlier this week, Mesnard moved those floor speeches to the end of the day from the beginning because they were consuming hours of time. Thursday afternoon, he threatened to change House rules to limit vote explanations because Democrats were using that time to read the letters.
Much as they’d like to, the Republican leadership may not be able to put this genie back in the bottle. Even in reliably Republican Arizona, sentiments for public schools and against vouchers run high.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2017.
Are there “pro-education, pro-child” Democrats David?
Who exactly would that be? The people who want to lock low-income kids into malfunctioning public schools like those where a rotating cast of outsourced and underpaid subs, not certified teachers, staff the classrooms?
But that doesn’t serve either the cause of excellence in education OR the best interests of the children who could be learning more in an alternative setting, e.g. one of the private schools in Tucson where seats go begging for lack of families able to bear the full cost of tuition.
Not surprised that those who profit from charters are up in arms about the ESA legislation. Low quality charters have been able to draw enrollment off of high quality privates because of the state’s economic discrimination against private schools. They know they can’t compete once the economic discrimination is elimitated.
If it weren’t so sad, it would be quite funny, the way the promoters of an egregiously mismanaged public school district that, though it has lost thousands of students during the last decade, still has more than 40,000 student stuck in it, persist in trying to pitch their transparently shoddy merchandise to the public as “the best kind of education possible!!!”
Meanwhile they scheme to alter public policy to ensure that as few people as possible will have any way of escaping the sick institutions and shockingly poor governance they love to excuse and justify.
Heads up, Dems. If you live in Southern Arizona and have even the smallest degree of awareness of local conditions and events, you recognize that people who want to lock students into a district where the governance has deteriorated to this parody-able level are neither “pro-education” nor “pro-child”:
http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/fitz/fitz-i-m-the-man-for-the-tusd-job/article_f7e6d63d-e83c-5be9-9d40-ea9c55e747cd.html
Let’s translate the propagandistic doublespeak in Safier’s blog on “Trouble in Republican City”: “Democrats hope to profit from squabbles between factions on the other side of the political fence to push their self-interested, political machine-feeding public policy agenda through the legislature. This agenda has nothing to do with expanding access to SOUND education or protecting CHILDREN’S best interests, and everything to do with keeping certain powerful politicians and their networks, which are interwoven with districts like TUSD, happy.”
What a surprise. Southern Arizona Democrats “dislike” the hard truth about their public policy preferences and their favored public institutions.
Perhaps they should recognize that if they want people to support their policy preferences and public institutions, they need to do a better job of managing them and communicating honestly with the public about them.
Loudly applauding dysfunction, disparaging legitimate progressive policy goals like integration, and engaging in a systematic program of trying to block the truth about what’s actually going on in these institutions from getting to the electorate is not, in the long run, a winning approach. (Or, as Jo Holt once wisely said, “Lying is not a sustainable strategy.”) All it will achieve is disenchantment and disengagement among those paying enough attention to see the difference between dishonest propaganda and the realities in the lives of constituents. When you observe entrenched resistance to competent management and honest communication, what else can you conclude but that the constituents being mistreated and underserved need to be given a way to leave?
Yes, I know. You disagree. Many of you think the only thing to do is lie to the public and engage in a no-holds-barred, last ditch street-fight with your political opponents to try to “save” the public district system. You conveniently ignore the fact that you yourselves and your entire filthy network have, over the course of the last few decades, conspired to turn large portions of this system into something impossible to reform, and thus, not worth saving.
Job well done. Just make sure you assign the blame where it actually belongs. Hint: a good, hard look in the mirror is what’s called for.
Turf reactions are everywhere. Only 50% of Republicans support school choice on polling data. But, when they go into the voting booth, they don’t trust democrats to make the right decisions.
If your brain is wired to believe that the school is public, that these bricks, these teachers are public, then you have that reaction.
The truth is that the parents and the children are the public and now, close to 100% of the schools in Arizona are open to the public while the public in other states finds 99% of the schools closed to them.
We in Arizona now have a public school system, unlike almost every other state which have district school systems.
I was thinking @ this the other day. What really made America the greatest nation in history?
FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR ALL.
No ifs, ands, or buts. It’s that simple to me. A literate+numerate populace is the single greatest advance in the history of our species. Forget fire.
The first mission of Republicans was to cut public education funding to a level (last in then nation) where most districts would struggle to retain quality educators. This in turn would make it incredibly difficult for public schools to succeed. Second, drastically cut their capital budget so schools would fall in disrepair in areas where home owners couldn’t afford to bond to maintain or expand their schools. Third, point to the failing schools you created as an excuse to pass school vouchers as an alternative to public schools.
Reality, Republicans long ago became the party of the rich whose only goal was to make life even easier on the rich as the expense of the middle and lower classes. ESAs are simply an education subsidy for a group of people who do not need it and it once again comes at the expense of the middle and lower class. Republicans like the Koch brothers are doing everything they can to squash the American Dream and they are winning at the expense of our nation.
Education has been the way up and out of poverty since the inception of our nation. Now they want to take that away.
You might want to look at education pensions and modify your thinking.
Yes, “Republicans Killed the American Dream,” that’s the party line, a.k.a. the fairy tale the Democratic Party likes to tell over and over and over again to people gullible enough to believe it. It bears about as much resemblance to reality as the party line / bedtime story told on the other side of the political divide, that the free market and its deus ex machina Invisible Hand will magically produce an education system that meets the needs of everyone if we just make sure to destroy all regulatory oversight.
You can see what kind of monsters fantasy-loving constituents on both sides of the political divide are capable of producing: in some circumstances following the Democratic Party line will produce TUSD, a bloated, deeply dysfunctional, inequitable disaster of a public school district, and in a different set of circumstances following the Republican Party line will produce Basis, a Hunger Games-style survival-of-the-fittest public charter chain that runs a program of mindless cramming for machine graded, corporate produced AP exams. Both have massive attrition rates, but for different reasons and through different means.
At the same time, excellent private schools with decades-long distinguished traditions of sound and humane education teeter in the brink of bankruptcy because of the damage the recession and the ever-escalating costs of higher ed have done to Southern Arizona’s residents’ ability to afford the luxury of a good K-12 education for their kids. And the uproar from the Democrats whose networks feed on public districts and the Republicans whose networks feed on public charters is defeaning. They can’t agree on anything else, but they can certainly agree that allowing citizens to apply the tax dollars the state has available to educate their children in an institution that actually does EDUCATE them, rather than abusing them or wasting their time, is the most horrific thing that could ever happen in this nation.
That, unfortunately, is where our local public discourse on “education” seems to be. What further evidence do we need that the project of producing an educated citizenry through public institutions has failed?