Exclusive: Students Tear Gassed Ferguson-style By Police While Protesting School “Choice”
Are you ready for more protests and Furguson-style draconian police responses? If school “choice” supporters get their wish, it just might happen. Why? After 30 years of school “choice,” that is what is happening in Chile. Supporters of school “choice” want you to believe that school vouchers “work” and promote Civil Rights. I wrote in the post Billionaires co-opt minority groups into campaign for education reform that the reality is just the opposite. Vouchers foment segregation and help the few at the expense of the many. Evidence? Our research team from the University of Texas at Austin read and written about failure of vouchers and the predominance of the research literature on vouchers in the US and in Chile.
Considering the protests in Chile and a potential turn of events in the country against vouchers, we thought it was a good idea to travel to Chile to ask Chileans directly about their 30 years of experience with universal school choice (See Dear Cloaking Inequity Readers! Thank you!). We also recently published a peer reviewed paper on the segregation and ill effects of a universal vouchers system this summer in the journal of Educational Policy Analysis Archives. I profiled the paper in the post New Research: Vouchers Increase Segregation and Offer Benefits to the Few.
Wednesday, the Chilean police responded to ongoing student protests Ferguson-style by tear gassing students protesting school choice 3 decades of universal school choice that has CREATED inequality. Our UT voucher research team was caught in the middle of the police response to the students. Here are the email reports from Sarah Ishmael (former TFAer and UT-Austin Policy Masters student) and Lourdes Perez (from HispanaEducation).
We have been in the middle of a student demonstration; got tear gas; were hidden by a business woman so we did not get wet with water cannons.
and,
Students were occupying the Ministry of Education on Wednesday August 20 (we almost we didn’t get in to see our contact) and the protest today was relatively peaceful (the part we observed) but we all gotExclusive: Students Tear Gassed Ferguson-style By Police While Protesting School “Choice” | Cloaking Inequity: