After privatizing everything, who will Corporate America blame when
things go wrong?
King Midas learned the hard way just what happens to unchecked Greed.
Corporate America will keep on taking everything in sight until it
suddenly realizes that there is such a thing as, "Too Far!" Of course
we'll all suffer their stupidity and greed.
But we'll have the last laugh because we will have very little
distance to fall.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/28/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Republicans Come Out Swinging Against Military Family Education
Monday, May 28, 2018
By Emily Ludolf, Occupy.com | Report
Military parent with child
(Photo: LightField Studios / Shutterstock)
It's become an alarming trend that lawmakers sneakily attach unpopular new
amendments to big annual legislation that invariably passes. This has
happened repeatedly with the National Defense Authorization Act, a very
popular bill especially among Republicans (passage of the NDAA hasn't
failed
once in the last 57 years).
The 2019 NDAA represents yet another campaign against public education,
this
time with some unlikely victims: Now, the Republicans are turning to attack
their own base, because hidden in the language of the annual "must-pass"
bill is a direct assault on the children of people in the military.
Certain terms in this bill -- which they've given the innocuous name, "The
Education Savings Accounts for Military Families Act of 2018 (H.R. 5199) --
would lead to an incredible defunding of public schools, specifically those
that cater to children of military families. One might consider this an
unconscionable tact for even the Republicans to take, given their staunch
support of the military.
But all the old rules are being re-written, in this case literally. The
language in the bill boils down to this: GOP lawmakers feel fine about
asking citizens to fight and die for our country, but not fine about
providing a proper education for those people's children.
The fact is, this bill does the opposite of what its title implies. At its
core it is a targeted effort to massively defund public schools and shift
more money into private institutions. If the NDAA passes with the added
terms -- which it's on its way to doing after 131 congressional Democrats
joined their Republican colleagues in voting Yes -- military schools will
suffer a huge decrease of their portion of the Federal Impact Aid, which
provides funding to public schools in areas that don't collect local taxes.
This happens, for example, on federal land, and since the majority of these
schools are located near military bases, they are also where military
families send their children.
A large portion of funding for military family schools comes from Federal
Impact Aid, but Republicans have suggested a perennial conservative
favorite
to replace it: a voucher program. Why? Because it would put the money
directly into the hands of private businesses. This will clearly hurt the
most defenseless parts of our society. But who's counting? Fortunately, we
still live in a world where it's at least nominally unpopular to pass
legislation that strips funding from children, especially those of military
families. Yet even that taboo may be broken.
Opposing the legislation are the Military Child Education Coalition,
Military Officers Association of America, National Military Family
Association, National Military Family Foundation, National Association of
Federally Impacted School and the Military Impact Association. In a
collective statement released recently, the groups wrote: "Proposals to
divert Impact Aid from schools that educate concentrations of
military-connected students are short sighted and will only reduce
opportunities for all students in these school districts."
Those who are part of the military, and who know military children, are the
ones most likely to disapprove of this "short-sighted" plan. But even they
appear of little concern in the new political climate where winning is more
important than running the government in good faith. Bolstered by the Trump
administration, Republicans have taken the sting out of controversy and
scandal. Now, while everyone intently watches the whirlwind of the Trump
circus, the rest of the Republican clan are making the most of the chaos by
covertly passing as much reprehensible legislation as possible,
capitalizing
on the grand distraction.
Who, specifically, are we talking about that will bear the costs of this
policy? Nearly 60 percent of children in military families are school aged,
and 80 percent attend public schools. The majority of these schools rely on
the Impact Aid program, which has existed since the 1950s to bridge the
funding gap created by their non-taxable federal regions.
If H.R. 5199 passes along with the NDAA, children attending schools on
federal land will have a choice of either attending their school or
receiving a voucher for a private school. But as we've seen time and again,
the quality of charter schools varies, and as a whole they haven't shown
themselves to be better than public schools.
Margaret Raymond, director of the CREDO program at Stanford University and
a
self-described pro-market enthusiast, publicly admitted that the supposed
benefits of voucher programs have failed to materialize. Student results
are
not improving, and taxes are actually increasing in many areas.
One large factor that has to be considered: Private schools lack any form
of
standardized courses. Military families have special needs because they are
often impacted by frequent moving, which happens on average six to nine
times. Keeping them within the public system is much easier for children
because they can pick up where they left off educationally, regardless of
where they go.
Now, the new bill will bounce kids between private schools with completely
different curricula, generating potentially disastrous results for their
education. In an effort to avoid this pitfall, in 2015 Congress passed the
Every Student Succeeds Act, creating a Military Student Identifier for each
student with the hope of improving the quality of education for military
families by tracking educational continuity. All that progress flies out
the
window with the current legislation.
The changes proposed in the NDAA bill are, in fact, the brainchild of the
Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank. If approved, the bill would
provide eligible families between $2,500 and $4,500 per child from Federal
Impact Aid if they pulled their children out of public K-12 school. It's
estimated that over 125,000 children would be eligible under this change.
Like most of the ideas put out by the Heritage Foundation, this is one too
stems from ideology, not evidence. Heritage only cites a survey of readers
from the Military Times, and predictably concludes from the data that the
solution to all problems must be privatization. Although military families
have cited that school performance can often be a factor for their leaving
or staying in the military, the solution to under-performing schools
cannot,
in any rational world, be to take away their funding.
That same survey of Military Times readers found that, by a factor of
almost
2 to 1, moving between schools was the one factor that led to the greatest
difficulties in military families' children's education. Heritage doesn't
consider the impacts of curriculum discontinuity in its advocacy and
conveniently assumes that private schools will handle these unique
challenges well, even without the aid of standardized curricula.
However, research has shown that kids in charter schools tend to move
between schools even more than public school children, mainly because of
the
variability in the quality of education. Parents are forced to shop around
just to find adequate schools. Rather than focus on passing legislation
that
might improve these schools, GOP lawmakers have instead chosen to undermine
public schools that actually work in the name of ideology.
Defenders of the bill contend that they are trying to help military
families
by giving them a choice of what school to attend. That sounds alright in
theory until you realize that the end result will present military families
with an impossible choice: between giving their voucher to the owner of a
charter school that is looking to make a profit, or sending their kids to a
school that has just had a large chunk of its annual budget disappear.
It's hard to see how this could benefit the children, who are forced to
choose between the lesser of two evils/ Worse still, switching students
between private schools with different curricula actually exacerbates one
of
the key challenges in educating military children. The changes being
advocated would negatively impact students' education, and the unfounded
notion that choice alone will solve the issues of educating military
children is an illusion.
The House author of the bill, a 37-year-old Indiana representative named
Jim
Banks, is a relatively new congressmen. His first contribution in Congress
was to introduce a bill last year requiring all visa applicants to have
their social media accounts scrutinized. A reluctant Trump enabler, he
nonetheless shares the president's goal of shifting public funds to private
interests, and his bill typifies the duplicity of modern conservative
legislation.
After all, look at his own state. Indiana has the nation's largest school
voucher program, which conservatives hail as an unmitigated success. But in
reality, it is a shocking failure, robbing a proper education from
thousands
of children.
A University of Arkansas study found that, for Indiana students at the
schools studied, "lower quality schools have a higher tendency of
participating in voucher programs." Although good charter schools exist, on
average voucher programs reduce educational achievement because they
introduce the nasty element of profit into the equation. Not all the
voucher
money goes directly toward your child's education; it's also used to pay
off
stakeholders.
If Rep. Banks had taken a closer look at the performance of voucher schools
in his own state, he would know this federal law will reduce the
educational
opportunities of children nationwide, just like it did in Indiana. Public
schools, bled dry of funds, have resorted to advertising on billboards and
on the radio to attempt to increase student retention. For Rep. Banks and
his ideological followers, these facts clearly don't play a part in their
decision.
Sadly, HR 5199 will likely pass with little notice. The fact is, not many
people are looking too closely at the NDAA, even as the Trump presidency
threatens to send America rearing off a cliff. Though the exact date of the
vote isn't set, it won't occur until later in the year. Meanwhile,
propaganda pushing for the private looting of public funds under the guise
of "school choice" is in full swing. Military families are more likely than
not to vote conservative, but the proposed GOP changes to Federal Impact
Aid
are most definitely not in their children's interests. No wonder lawmakers
are trying to sneak the bill into the NDAA, hoping nobody will notice.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may
not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Emily Ludolf
Emily Ludolf is a contributor to Occupy.com.
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