School deformer arrogance took a hit in 2021

I saw about the SCOTUS call on Maine. Not good, but it was no surprise, and it probably won't have wide practical effect. Opposition to school privatization in fact runs wide and deep.

But what voucher proponents had not counted on was the pushback—not just from the usual coalition of teachers’ unions, progressives, and grassroots public school advocates, but from bipartisan lawmakers in politically “red” states...

“The fact that private school voucher bills fail even in states where Republicans have full control shows that these schemes are not nearly as popular as Betsy DeVos and others say they are,” says Jessica Levin, the director of Public Funds for Public Schools, a national campaign that uses litigation, advocacy, and research to oppose vouchers and other forms of school privatization.

“There are multiple reasons for these failures,” she says, “including that Republicans representing rural areas know vouchers won’t benefit their constituents because of the lack of private schools in these areas and because public schools often are important for jobs and community-building.” - Jeff Bryant/The Progressive

Public education is being assaulted more frantically than ever

This is from an interview included in the linked item. The interview originally appeared in the Washington Post. What jumped out at me is the shameless, ultra-cynical manipulation that is going on. Page Amendment, anyone?

BURRIS: What were some of the tricks of the trade, so to speak. Were there certain individuals you searched out to carry the message?

SILER: We would seek out people with sympathetic stories, families or individuals with sincere struggles. The goal was to find people with whom the general public could empathize.

When Florida's voucher program faced a lawsuit by the teachers union there in 2014, I flew to meet with a handful of families who had children with disabilities to create a video series promoting the value of the voucher program. I met with a single mom whose daughter had Down syndrome and needed highly individualized care and therapy. I met with a home-school mom who taught her five kids, but one had severe autism, and she struggled to meet his needs on her own. I met with other families hoping to enroll their kids in special schools that focused on their kids' specific needs. These people were part of the campaign's public face around the legal defense of the voucher program.

Also, if we could ever find minority families willing to speak up about their struggles and desires for school privatization, we'd work to put their faces in as many places as possible. It's one reason privatization advocates focused so heavily on promoting vouchers within the Navajo community recently in a bid to leverage their tribal identity to expand their state's voucher program. In many ways, there's an emphasis on playing identity politics to subvert actual equity efforts, especially when it comes to privatization. - Down With Tyranny

MN lege: Education, so far

It’s unclear whether we’ll get any real change for the better in education funding through the Party of Trump-controlled MN Senate. Here’s what they’re about:

A proposal at the core of the differing education policies favored by Minnesota Republicans and DFLers might end up on the table for end-of-session negotiations between Gov. Tim Walz and Senate majority Republicans.

The bill is called the Equity and Opportunity Scholarship Act, and it would allow donations to scholarship foundations to be credited against state income taxes. The foundations would use the money to give private school scholarships to low- and middle-income students.

It is a version of private school vouchers and tax credits that have been used in other states (and to some extent in Minnesota) that have often raise constitutional questions, though the bill’s chief supporter believes the structure of the proposal would allow the program to pass muster with the courts. - MinnPost

A voucher for a few thousand dollars isn’t going to help a typical living paycheck-to-paycheck family be able to make the five-figure tuition at some private school. As always this is just the rich man’s whimpering, groveling political curs of the GOP looking to provide requisite payback. In this case, at the expense of public schools, which in spite of all the obstacles continue to turn out more and more graduates who are just plain too smart to ever vote for a conservative.

Moreover, and as people have been pointing out for a long time now, there is absolutely no evidence that private schools do a better job. Quite the contrary, more often than not.

The EPI report’s findings contribute to a significant and growing body of research showing the negative impacts of school voucher programs on student learning and the public education system.

New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey writes, “a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are startling — the worst in the history of the field, researchers say.”

Carey lays out how recent studies of voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio reveal that students who use vouchers to attend private schools tend to fare worse academically, particularly in math, compared to their peers attending public schools. - Jeff Bryant/OurFuture.org

Thankfully, while Gov. Tim Walz has said he’ll be willing to negotiate on a lot of things, according to the MinnPost article this isn’t one of them.

Voters rejected the school deformer agenda

At least, majorities of them did, in a number of places.  Good deal.

The blue wave that swept the nation in the recent midterm elections was also a broad rejection of recent trends to privatize public education through school voucher programs and privately operated charter schools. From New York to California, new candidates ran and won on platforms opposed to privatization, big-money backers of charter schools suffered humiliating losses, and voters trounced efforts to expand voucher programs that drain public schools of the funding they need.

This spring’s teacher walkouts that made news across the country can take some credit for propelling the anti-privatization message to voters and prompting educators to take their support for public schools to the ballot box. But opposition to the privatization industry was also strong in states that did not experience teacher walkouts, and public education advocates are vowing to take their cause to state capitals and Congress to curb the flow of public money to unaccountable, privately operated education providers. - Jeff Bryant/AlterNet