Voucher supporters don’t believe in a fair fight. Pro-voucher legislators don’t trust the voters they work for. They’re trying to quash a referendum on the vouchers-on-steroids-for-everyone law passed last session, using any means necessary. If that effort fails, expect them to repeal and replace their own voucher law next session, rendering the referendum null and void.
If the referendum actually does end up on the ballot in 2018, it will make for an interesting battle. There’s no way to predict which way the vote will go.
When Republicans first passed the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts law—aka Educational Savings Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids—a limited number of Arizona families were able to use the ESAs. But from the beginning its advocates said their plan was to make vouchers universal so everyone from welfare recipients to billionaires could get government money to pay for private schools, or pretty much any other form of non-public education. “Eventually” came in the last legislative session. They got what they wanted. If the law stays in effect, it will take twelve years for every child who isn’t attending a district or charter school to receive between $5,000 and $30,000 a year to pay for their educations.
Along came a group, Save Our Schools, which began a quixotic quest to overturn the law. The effort should have been doomed from the start. Logic says you can’t collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the state ballot without lots of funding. But the group’s shoe-leather-driven volunteer effort worked. The referendum got the signatures it needed. Clearly, lots of Arizonans want the vouchers-for-all law off the books.
But the privatization/”education reform” movement wants its vouchers, so it mounted a challenge of the signatures. It looks like the challenge failed. According to the latest analysis, the petitions have more than enough valid signatures. The next move is to try and convince a judge that minor irregularities in the petitions are important enough to have them thrown out. That effort takes lawyers, and lawyers cost money. Enter the American Federation for Children, a big-bucks conservative education group which was founded and funded by Trump’s Ed Sec, Betsy DeVos. DeVos cut ties with the group when she joined the Trump administration, but it has the same focus it always had, to pour money into promoting vouchers and charter schools. Last election cycle, the AFC plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaigns of sympathetic legislators in Arizona and similar amounts in races across the country, and now it’s plowing more money into supporting the Arizona legislature’s ESA handiwork.
The effort to invalidate the petitions may fail, which would move the referendum a step closer to the 2018 ballot. But there’s still one cynical, anti-Democratic gambit left. When the legislature gathers in January, Republicans can get rid of their own vouchers-for-all law, which would get rid of the referendum fighting the law. Ten minutes later, they can vote in a new, slightly different law.
If the referendum doesn’t make it on the ballot, Republicans should be branded as the party that not only refuses to fund education, it doesn’t think the voters should have a direct voice in education matters.
If the referendum makes it on the ballot, history says the vouchers-for-all law will be voted down. Voters have never passed a pro-voucher initiative of any kind anywhere in the country. But in our current political environment, everything is up for grabs. According to a recent national survey, support of vouchers is close to a 50-50 proposition when you ask people if they support vouchers as a form of school choice. But voucher support drops when you ask if they support using government funds for private school tuition. The side that wins the slogan wars will win the vote—if Republicans have the courage and the integrity to allow the vote to happen.
This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2017.
Vouchers are just a backdoor way for the Republicans to convert public schools to private schools. The objective is to weaken and destroy the strength of the Teachers Union which is one of the strongest in the nation. Anytime that a Republican does anything for the working class you can bet your ass that it is just a scam to screw you in another way.George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was just another way for Republicans to get at the Teachers Union by showing some “compassion” for the students.
What does “public school” mean? A school receiving public funds? A school whose board is elected by a democratic electoral process? A school whose finances are transparent to the public? If all of the above, why not make public funds more broadly available, but dispense them together with the requirement that the institution receiving them meet all those criteria (democratic governance, transparent financials)? For schools that want appointed boards and non-transparent financials, that would kill the deal: problem solved.
But what most voucher opponents want is not the universal application of public standards. They want public district schools, which are largely controlled by people affiliated with one party, a party that wants to universalize its values and impose them on every American citizen, to retain their monopoly on the use of public funds. They succeed only in so far as they sell a faulty bill of goods — the shoddy “anti-privatization” narrative — to the public.
What these advocates are, in fact, is not “anti-privatization.” They are secularist moral absolutists, anti-pluralists, “liberal” authoritarians. They want ONE school system teaching the ONE party-authorized truth which they recognize as valid. There are many ideals this country has upheld, from welcoming refugees who’ve suffered limitations on their religious freedoms in other countries, to protecting freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, that do not get a fair shake in the attempt to deny public funding to any school hat is not part of the “public district system.”
Try again, “supporters of public schools.” And next time, you might want to try for an approach that is more genuinely liberal, and more genuinely tolerant of diversity.
Hey, long winded fuck…
Hey, “don’t have anything to offer in the way of a coherent thought or well founded opinion — only thing in the repertoire is vulgar and profane insults of other commenters.”
Let me guess, you are a “supporter of public schools.” Is this what’s taught in the school systems you favor? Then it’s pretty clear why a portion of our population (perhaps a minority, perhaps a majority, perhaps a plurality — it remains to be seen) favors having as broad a band of the population as possible given the option of having their children educated in environments that cultivate civility and rational discourse instead of mindless verbal aggression against anyone who disagrees with them.
If you have a well reasoned argument to make in support of your position, then make it.
Nice picture of a bulked-up bully that you paste on all your voucher articles, David, but let’s get who is FORCING whom to do what in perspective: I don’t know a single “private” school parent who would want to use economic disincentives to force their neighbor’s children to attend a school that the neighbors did not feel was meeting their child’s needs. In fact, I know private school parents who stood out collecting signatures for Prop 204 because they believed that public schools should absolutely be more adequately funded, whether or not their own children attended them. But the people behind SOS want to force people who would rather leave the public system (perhaps people who live in the catchment area of one of the low functioning schools in TUSD, where the district is staffing the classrooms with outsourced subs with no teaching credentials) to stay in the public system or forfeit their right to have the money they have paid in taxes applied in support of their children’s K-12 education.
Denying other families the right to choose the setting that best meets their children’s needs is sadistic and sick, particularly when the initiative is promoted by activists whose own children have managed to secure spots in one of the little enclaves within the public system that are staffed with fully qualified educators and that does produce decent academic results for its students. Perhaps SOS activists should immediately withdraw their children from Fruchthendler, University High School, District 13, District 16, and other enclaves like these and enroll them in the lowest functioning, poorest schools in Southern Arizona and then report back on whether they think it serves JUSTICE and EQUITY to lock students by their income level and geographic location into the portions of the public school system that have been allowed to deteriorate to the level of the public system’s lowest functioning, most troubled schools.
Drop the “anti-privatization” charade: the fact is, during the last Board term in TUSD (2013-2016) we saw no sign that most of the crowd behind SOS cared whether public schools had transparent governance and financials, no sign that they cared whether corporate donations (e.g. ESI) were used to support Board candidates who’d voted in favor of benefiting these corporations through outsourcing , no sign that they cared whether millions of dollars of deseg and Title 1 funds were actually applied to benefit of the intended populations. The only thing most of these folks seemed to be able to muster activism energy for was passing bad-deal-Prop-123 — and now they are on fire with the noble cause of preventing people suffering from the mismanagement of some of our massive, dysfunctional public school districts from exiting them. Their idea to “save” institutions they have not found a way to improve is what amounts to coercion and extortion of fellow-citizens who are being ill-served by them.
You can call that grassroots, equity-loving democracy in action if you like, David, but it looks like something else to me.
Many people criticize TUSD. SChool choice should be in the voting booth.
TUSD is the largest public district in Southern AZ, and it is criticized because it is profoundly dysfunctional. Any feasible education policy solution has to take what TUSD actually is — and the fact that it currently (under)serves tens of thousands of students — into account.
The voting booth addresses governance issues periodically. It is not a swift enough response mechanism to deal with problems that arise in an individual child’s education. A child can lose years of development in reading or math before enough public outrage can build in response to a dysfunctional Board that the voting booth can change the majority. Once a new majority is installed, more time will elapse before its decisions can have a measurable effect on the quality of programs and staffing in the schools. (Moreover, there is no guarantee that a new majority created by a change in governance will be any more functional than the last.)
Choice policy is needed in regions with large scale problem districts like TUSD. It is no doubt a minority of the overall electorate in AZ that has kids enrolled in low functioning TUSD schools, but I see no reason why a majority of the electorate that does not suffer from poor quality schools should be allowed to make decisions about whether this minority can be allowed to solve the very real problems it is encountering in its schools with portable per-pupil funding. To deny them the option is inhumane and unjust.