The Right-Wing Machine Behind ‘School Choice’

[xchrom]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13849/the_right_wing_machine_behind_school_choice


"Vouchers are ... a means to make a transition from a government to a market system," wrote Milton Friedman in 1995. (Chalkboard image via Shutterstock.)

In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. “Vouchers,” he wrote, “are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.” The article was republished by “free market” think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, with the title “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”

While Friedman has promoted vouchers for decades, most famously in his masterwork Free to Choose, the story of how public funds are actually being transferred to private, often religious, schools is a study in the ability of a few wealthy families, along with a network of right-wing think tanks, to create one of the most successful “astroturf” campaigns money could buy. Rather than openly championing dismantling the public school system, they promote bringing market incentives and competition into education as a way to fix failing schools, particularly in low-income Black and Latino communities.

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling deregulated campaign finance and unleashed millions in political donations, concentrated wealth has played a role in politics. Now in the limelight for its attacks on unions and the exposure of 800 model bills and documents, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has produced model bills favorable to its corporate and right-wing funders behind closed doors for decades (as In These Times uncovered in 2011)– including school vouchers and tax credit bills.

This concentrated wealth is reaching into America's classrooms state by state, promoting the transfer of public funds to private education through vouchers that allow parents to pay for tuition at private schools with public money. Promoting “school choice” through privately run charter schools doesn’t go far enough for these billionaires. Today, “private school choice” programs, as vouchers are called in the annual report of the Alliance for School Choice, are in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In 2011, a year when states across the nation slashed their education budgets, 41 states introduced 145 pieces of private school choice legislation.

[d_r]

1. I'm sorry but it goes back to this

[longship]

2. Also it is a blatant attempt to put religion into school.

Check out what's happening in LA where some charter schools are using textbooks from Bob Jones University with overt creationism and revisionist US history, among other horrors.

[Freddie]

3. A great way for huge corporations to feed off the cash cow of our tax $$

Should be outlawed.
Privatizing any public service means the 1% line their pockets while employees and often the public get screwed.
If we ever had a truly progressive government (like that would ever happen) we would recognize that some things should NOT be privatized because serving the public and making a profit are at cross purposes.