Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Right-Wing ALEC Now Says School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia,
Not the Poor
________________________________________
Right-Wing ALEC Now Says School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia, Not the
Poor
By Jonas Perrson [1] / PR Watch [2]
July 23, 2015
School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students.
But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for
some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers
gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize
public schools.
But the times they are a-changin'. Wisconsin is well on its way [3] toward
limitless voucher schools, and last month, Nevada signed into law [4] a
universal "education savings account" allowing parents to send their kids to
private or religious schools, or even to home-school them-all on the
taxpayers' dime. On the federal level, a proposed amendment to the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would have created a
multi-billion-dollar-a-year voucher program was only narrowly defeated [5]
in the U.S. Senate.
The American Federation for Children (AFC), chaired by Amway billionaire
Betsy DeVos, estimates that vouchers and voucher-like tax-credit schemes
currently divert $1.5 billion [6] of public money to private schools
annually. But that is not enough. By expanding "pro-school choice
legislative majorities" in state houses across the country the organization
hopes that $5 billion a year will be siphoned out of public schools by 2020
and applied to for-profit and religious schools.
With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC [7]), which is meeting in San Diego this week, has decided to
drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial
equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class-a project which, if
pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system
and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic
standing.
ALEC Comes Clean, Vouchers Are for the Middle Class
The agenda [8] for this week's ALEC meeting includes a presentation
entitled: "Problems in Suburbia: Why Middle-Class Students Need School
Choice, Digital Learning and Better Options."
Perhaps more importantly, ALEC's revisions to three of its "model" voucher
bills make clear that it is changing focus from underserved inner-city
schools to middle-class suburbia. The talking points at the end of the bills
state:
. "Legislators . should keep in mind the financial burden many
middle-class families face in paying for private schools."
. "The authors believe that all children from low- and middle-income
families should receive public support for their education regardless of
whether they are attending a public or private school."
. "The authors do not adjust the amount granted to an ESA [Education
Savings Account] student based upon the student's income because states do
not adjust the public investment for a student attending a traditional
public school or a charter based upon their household income."
As if to further nail down the point that school vouchers are not about
equity, ALEC also advises legislators against including language "banning
discrimination in hiring." But if they choose to do so, they should "take
care not to interfere with the ability of religious institutions to hire
individuals who share their religious beliefs."
"Abolishing the Public School System"
ALEC is not the only organization coming clean on vouchers.
At the American Federation for Children's [9] National Policy Summit held in
New Orleans, lobbyist Scott Jensen-who, before being banned from Wisconsin
politics for violating the public trust [10] served as chief of staff to
governor Tommy Thompson, and was a prime mover behind the first voucher
program in the nation-admitted that vouchers were really all about "pursuing
Milton Friedman's free-market vision" even though the ideological agenda was
nowadays sugarcoated with "a much more compelling message ... of social
justice."
So what exactly was the brave new world Milton Friedman envisioned when he
first floated the idea of school vouchers? While lecturing rightwing state
lawmakers at a 2006 ALEC meeting [11], Friedman jumped at the opportunity to
explain what his vision was all about. It had nothing whatsoever to do with
helping "indigent" children; no, he explained to thunderous applause,
vouchers were all about "abolishing the public school system."
Here is an excerpt from Friedman's ALEC speech:
If I were to ask everyone here, what would be your idea of the right way to
conduct, to have an educational system constructed, you would say the ideal
would be to have parents control and pay for their school's education, just
as they pay for their food, their clothing and their housing. That, of
course, would leave some indigent and problems of charity. Those should be
handled as charity problems, not educational problems. The reason we cannot
do that is because taxes are used to pay not for education, but for schools,
for teachers.
How do we get from where we are to where we want to be-to a system in which
parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way
would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes
that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private
schools, but you're not gonna to do that. So you have to ask, what are
politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion,
is choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed.
Instead of it being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide
how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money,
provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children
so the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.
Ditching the Marketing Plan
By shifting the focus from poor, minority children to the predominantly
white middle class, ALEC has come full circle. Vouchers were first proposed
in the 1950s [12] as a way for white families to get around the
desegregation resulting from the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court
Decision. ALEC first pitched vouchers to legislators in 1984 as a way to
"introduce normal market forces" into education and to "dismantle the
control and power of" teachers' unions. While there was a narrative of
parent "empowerment" at that time, there was not even a passing mention of
children-let alone minority children.
But when William Bennett joined Ronald Reagan's cabinet in 1985, vouchers
soon gained a unique selling point. In the words of The Black Commentator
[13]:
"Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was
missing from the voucher political chemistry: minorities. If visible
elements of the Black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was
then a lily-white scheme, then the Right's dream of a universal vouchers
system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a
practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other rightwing
strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between
Blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In
1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to "seek out the poor, the
disadvantaged.and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair
recompense for your efforts"-vouchers. The game was on."
Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups across the nation soon launched
massive whitewashing campaigns; they started churning out policy reports and
books purporting to show how school vouchers would actually benefit minority
students. Examples include: We Can Rescue Our Children: The Cure for
Chicago's Public School Crisis (Heartland Institute, 1988) and Liberating
Schools: Education in the Inner City (Cato Institute, 1990).
By proposing schemes with vouchers weighted to boost racial diversity, or
restricted to children from low-income families, the organizations pushing
vouchers were able to kill two birds with one stone. They made them
acceptable by obscuring the segregationist history [14], and, crucially,
they could now cast themselves as the "new" civil rights movement.
In state after state, politicians were in on the trick. They would sign
limited voucher programs into law as "civil rights" measures only to
gradually expand the programs to higher-income white families. The Milwaukee
program-the first in the country-was originally restricted to families
learning less than 175 percent of the federal poverty level. But under Gov.
Scott Walker, the income ceiling was recently upped to 300 percent. A
married couple with two children can currently earn [15] $78,647, which is
far more than the median U.S. family income of $52,250 [16], and still send
them off to private schools at the public's expense. Most students receiving
vouchers last year were already attending private schools [17]--meaning
vouchers were being used a taxpayer subsidy for private education rather
than as a way for students to escape underperforming public schools.
Walker's newest voucher expansion in the state budget could suck some
$600-800 million [18] out of public schools over 10 years.
"They have high-jacked the program," Annette "Polly" Williams, an
African-American lawmaker who co-sponsored the original bill, told the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [19].
This is a pattern across the country. The voucher-like corporate tax credit
program in Georgia was originally billed as a way of helping
African-American and Latino families, but most scholarships have been
awarded "white students from upper income families," the Southern Education
Foundation wrote in a scathing report [20]. In 2013, Governor Mike Pence of
Indiana raised the income requirements of the voucher program in the Hoosier
State, and last year, Florida's Republican governor Rick Scott lifted the
income bar for the state voucher program [21], allowing a family of four
making up to $62,010 a year to participate-$20,000 higher than the previous
ceiling.
With upped income ceilings in multiple states-not to mention the universal
"Education Savings Account" system signed into law in Nevada last month-ALEC
seems poised to ditch the civil rights "marketing plan [22]," (as the
rightwing Heartland Institute aptly put it in a 1991 paper) and get back to
basics: school vouchers are for privatizing public education.
ALEC makes this abundantly clear when it recommends in its talking points
that legislators not adjust the amount granted based on family income. The
upshot of this is that vouchers will be a welcome bonus for well-off
families whereas poor families may not be able to afford private school
tuition even with the extra money.
This, in turn, will lead to increased segregation "based on race,
socio-economic status, disability, English language proficience," as public
school watchdog Educate Nevada Now [23] warned when Gov. Sandoval signed the
universal ESAs into law in June-a prospect that does not seem to faze ALEC
legislators who are set to renew and refresh these policies in San Diego
today.
Jonas Perrson is the Center for Media and Democracy's writer focused on
education policy.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [24]
[25]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-alec-now-says-school-vouchers-a
re-kids-suburbia-not-poor
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jonas-perrson
[2] http://www.prwatch.org/
[3] http://prwatch.org/news/2015/06/12861/walkers-voucher-expansion
[4]
http://www.rgj.com/story/news/education/2015/05/29/nv-legislature-approves-p
rivate-school-vouchers/28190165/
[5]
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/education_law/2015/07/senate-votes-down-vou
chers-esea-process-presses-forward.html
[6]
http://www.federationforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AFC_EIR_2014
_FINAL.pdf
[7] http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
[8]
http://www.alec.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-06-23-Final-EDUC-35-Day-Mailing.
pdf
[9]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_American_Federation_for_Children
[10] http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/112195794.html
[11] http://library.fora.tv/2006/07/21/Milton_Friedman
[12] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/02/12730/segregation-school-vouchers
[13] http://www.blackcommentator.com/92/92_cover_vouchers_pf.html
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_plan
[15]
http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lfb/publications/Informational-Papers/Documents/2
015/25_Private%20School%20Choice%20Programs.pdf
[16]
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/acs/acsbr
13-02.pdf
[17]
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/education/2014/10/23/voucher-
students-came-private-schools/17793217/
[18] http://media.jrn.com/documents/5.27.15+-+LFB+Memo+on+Voucher+Costs.pdf
[19] http://m.jsonline.com/news?cid=207753841
[20] http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED535565.pdf
[21] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/article1967461.html
[22]
http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs
/8953.pdf
[23] http://www.educatenevadanow.com/
[24] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Right-Wing ALEC Now
Says School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia, Not the Poor
[25] http://www.alternet.org/
[26] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Right-Wing ALEC Now Says School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia,
Not the Poor
Right-Wing ALEC Now Says School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia, Not the
Poor
By Jonas Perrson [1] / PR Watch [2]
July 23, 2015
School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students.
But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for
some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers
gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize
public schools.
But the times they are a-changin'. Wisconsin is well on its way [3] toward
limitless voucher schools, and last month, Nevada signed into law [4] a
universal "education savings account" allowing parents to send their kids to
private or religious schools, or even to home-school them-all on the
taxpayers' dime. On the federal level, a proposed amendment to the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would have created a
multi-billion-dollar-a-year voucher program was only narrowly defeated [5]
in the U.S. Senate.
The American Federation for Children (AFC), chaired by Amway billionaire
Betsy DeVos, estimates that vouchers and voucher-like tax-credit schemes
currently divert $1.5 billion [6] of public money to private schools
annually. But that is not enough. By expanding "pro-school choice
legislative majorities" in state houses across the country the organization
hopes that $5 billion a year will be siphoned out of public schools by 2020
and applied to for-profit and religious schools.
With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC [7]), which is meeting in San Diego this week, has decided to
drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial
equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class-a project which, if
pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system
and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic
standing.
ALEC Comes Clean, Vouchers Are for the Middle Class
The agenda [8] for this week's ALEC meeting includes a presentation
entitled: "Problems in Suburbia: Why Middle-Class Students Need School
Choice, Digital Learning and Better Options."
Perhaps more importantly, ALEC's revisions to three of its "model" voucher
bills make clear that it is changing focus from underserved inner-city
schools to middle-class suburbia. The talking points at the end of the bills
state:
. "Legislators . should keep in mind the financial burden many
middle-class families face in paying for private schools."
. "The authors believe that all children from low- and middle-income
families should receive public support for their education regardless of
whether they are attending a public or private school."
. "The authors do not adjust the amount granted to an ESA [Education
Savings Account] student based upon the student's income because states do
not adjust the public investment for a student attending a traditional
public school or a charter based upon their household income."
As if to further nail down the point that school vouchers are not about
equity, ALEC also advises legislators against including language "banning
discrimination in hiring." But if they choose to do so, they should "take
care not to interfere with the ability of religious institutions to hire
individuals who share their religious beliefs."
"Abolishing the Public School System"
ALEC is not the only organization coming clean on vouchers.
At the American Federation for Children's [9] National Policy Summit held in
New Orleans, lobbyist Scott Jensen-who, before being banned from Wisconsin
politics for violating the public trust [10] served as chief of staff to
governor Tommy Thompson, and was a prime mover behind the first voucher
program in the nation-admitted that vouchers were really all about "pursuing
Milton Friedman's free-market vision" even though the ideological agenda was
nowadays sugarcoated with "a much more compelling message ... of social
justice."
So what exactly was the brave new world Milton Friedman envisioned when he
first floated the idea of school vouchers? While lecturing rightwing state
lawmakers at a 2006 ALEC meeting [11], Friedman jumped at the opportunity to
explain what his vision was all about. It had nothing whatsoever to do with
helping "indigent" children; no, he explained to thunderous applause,
vouchers were all about "abolishing the public school system."
Here is an excerpt from Friedman's ALEC speech:
If I were to ask everyone here, what would be your idea of the right way to
conduct, to have an educational system constructed, you would say the ideal
would be to have parents control and pay for their school's education, just
as they pay for their food, their clothing and their housing. That, of
course, would leave some indigent and problems of charity. Those should be
handled as charity problems, not educational problems. The reason we cannot
do that is because taxes are used to pay not for education, but for schools,
for teachers.
How do we get from where we are to where we want to be-to a system in which
parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way
would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes
that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private
schools, but you're not gonna to do that. So you have to ask, what are
politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion,
is choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed.
Instead of it being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide
how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money,
provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children
so the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.
Ditching the Marketing Plan
By shifting the focus from poor, minority children to the predominantly
white middle class, ALEC has come full circle. Vouchers were first proposed
in the 1950s [12] as a way for white families to get around the
desegregation resulting from the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court
Decision. ALEC first pitched vouchers to legislators in 1984 as a way to
"introduce normal market forces" into education and to "dismantle the
control and power of" teachers' unions. While there was a narrative of
parent "empowerment" at that time, there was not even a passing mention of
children-let alone minority children.
But when William Bennett joined Ronald Reagan's cabinet in 1985, vouchers
soon gained a unique selling point. In the words of The Black Commentator
[13]:
"Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was
missing from the voucher political chemistry: minorities. If visible
elements of the Black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was
then a lily-white scheme, then the Right's dream of a universal vouchers
system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a
practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other rightwing
strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between
Blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In
1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to "seek out the poor, the
disadvantaged.and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair
recompense for your efforts"-vouchers. The game was on."
Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups across the nation soon launched
massive whitewashing campaigns; they started churning out policy reports and
books purporting to show how school vouchers would actually benefit minority
students. Examples include: We Can Rescue Our Children: The Cure for
Chicago's Public School Crisis (Heartland Institute, 1988) and Liberating
Schools: Education in the Inner City (Cato Institute, 1990).
By proposing schemes with vouchers weighted to boost racial diversity, or
restricted to children from low-income families, the organizations pushing
vouchers were able to kill two birds with one stone. They made them
acceptable by obscuring the segregationist history [14], and, crucially,
they could now cast themselves as the "new" civil rights movement.
In state after state, politicians were in on the trick. They would sign
limited voucher programs into law as "civil rights" measures only to
gradually expand the programs to higher-income white families. The Milwaukee
program-the first in the country-was originally restricted to families
learning less than 175 percent of the federal poverty level. But under Gov.
Scott Walker, the income ceiling was recently upped to 300 percent. A
married couple with two children can currently earn [15] $78,647, which is
far more than the median U.S. family income of $52,250 [16], and still send
them off to private schools at the public's expense. Most students receiving
vouchers last year were already attending private schools [17]--meaning
vouchers were being used a taxpayer subsidy for private education rather
than as a way for students to escape underperforming public schools.
Walker's newest voucher expansion in the state budget could suck some
$600-800 million [18] out of public schools over 10 years.
"They have high-jacked the program," Annette "Polly" Williams, an
African-American lawmaker who co-sponsored the original bill, told the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [19].
This is a pattern across the country. The voucher-like corporate tax credit
program in Georgia was originally billed as a way of helping
African-American and Latino families, but most scholarships have been
awarded "white students from upper income families," the Southern Education
Foundation wrote in a scathing report [20]. In 2013, Governor Mike Pence of
Indiana raised the income requirements of the voucher program in the Hoosier
State, and last year, Florida's Republican governor Rick Scott lifted the
income bar for the state voucher program [21], allowing a family of four
making up to $62,010 a year to participate-$20,000 higher than the previous
ceiling.
With upped income ceilings in multiple states-not to mention the universal
"Education Savings Account" system signed into law in Nevada last month-ALEC
seems poised to ditch the civil rights "marketing plan [22]," (as the
rightwing Heartland Institute aptly put it in a 1991 paper) and get back to
basics: school vouchers are for privatizing public education.
ALEC makes this abundantly clear when it recommends in its talking points
that legislators not adjust the amount granted based on family income. The
upshot of this is that vouchers will be a welcome bonus for well-off
families whereas poor families may not be able to afford private school
tuition even with the extra money.
This, in turn, will lead to increased segregation "based on race,
socio-economic status, disability, English language proficience," as public
school watchdog Educate Nevada Now [23] warned when Gov. Sandoval signed the
universal ESAs into law in June-a prospect that does not seem to faze ALEC
legislators who are set to renew and refresh these policies in San Diego
today.
Jonas Perrson is the Center for Media and Democracy's writer focused on
education policy.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [24]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[25]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-alec-now-says-school-vouchers-a
re-kids-suburbia-not-poor
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jonas-perrson
[2] http://www.prwatch.org/
[3] http://prwatch.org/news/2015/06/12861/walkers-voucher-expansion
[4]
http://www.rgj.com/story/news/education/2015/05/29/nv-legislature-approves-p
rivate-school-vouchers/28190165/
[5]
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/education_law/2015/07/senate-votes-down-vou
chers-esea-process-presses-forward.html
[6]
http://www.federationforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AFC_EIR_2014
_FINAL.pdf
[7] http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
[8]
http://www.alec.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-06-23-Final-EDUC-35-Day-Mailing.
pdf
[9]
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_American_Federation_for_Children
[10] http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/112195794.html
[11] http://library.fora.tv/2006/07/21/Milton_Friedman
[12] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/02/12730/segregation-school-vouchers
[13] http://www.blackcommentator.com/92/92_cover_vouchers_pf.html
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_plan
[15]
http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lfb/publications/Informational-Papers/Documents/2
015/25_Private%20School%20Choice%20Programs.pdf
[16]
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/acs/acsbr
13-02.pdf
[17]
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/education/2014/10/23/voucher-
students-came-private-schools/17793217/
[18] http://media.jrn.com/documents/5.27.15+-+LFB+Memo+on+Voucher+Costs.pdf
[19] http://m.jsonline.com/news?cid=207753841
[20] http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED535565.pdf
[21] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/article1967461.html
[22]
http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs
/8953.pdf
[23] http://www.educatenevadanow.com/
[24] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Right-Wing ALEC Now
Says School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia, Not the Poor
[25] http://www.alternet.org/
[26] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
