Mike Pence Has Pushed Hard for School Privatization With Lousy Results
Donors love Trump's VP's conservative, ALEC-aligned rhetoric, but ignore the effects of his policies.
Public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools. The magnitudes of the negative impacts were large.
— BROOKINGS INSTITUTION REPORT ON VOUCHERS IN INDIANA AND LOUISIANA
Mike Pence is a hardcore right-winger playing the long game, especially when it comes to privatizing public schools.
It’s not just that the Republican vice-presidential nominee and Indiana governor last weekend told a roomful of deregulation-obsessed executives and lobbyists in Indianapolis, “You are the model for Washington, DC, after this election. You really are.”
The nation is “at a fork in the road,” Pence said at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual meeting, referring not only to who would be president for the next four years but who would control the Supreme Court for the “next 40 years.”
The choice is “whether we will have justices appointed to the Supreme Court, as my partner in this endeavor is committed to doing, that reflect the brilliance and the greatness and the principles of the late justice Antonin Scalia,” he said. “So I would say to all of you, for the sake of the rule of law, for the sake of the sanctity of life, for the sake of our Second Amendment and all of our God-given liberties, we must ensure that the next president making appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States of America is President Donald Trump.”
Pence was no stranger to the stage of ALEC, a corporate-funded behemoth that drafts bills and finds right-wing lawmakers to carry them. He’s been an ALEC fixture for years, touting deregulation, privatization and extreme social conservatism. But he’s best-known for a personal focus on supplanting traditional public education, notably embracing taxpayer-funded vouchers so parents can send kids to K-12 private schools and aggressively expanding privately run charter public schools.
As is typical at ALEC, Pence praised enterprise and deregulation, and said a Trump administration would result in “empowering states with resources and flexibility.” But a closer look at his Indiana record of privatizing education, where the ALEC model has been in play, has shown it to be a brazen and failed experiment.
Charter School and Voucher Problems
A recent National Public Radio profile of Pence’s education record noted that he has been one of the leading governors pushing K-12 privatization. “Under Gov. Pence, the growth in the number of charter schools and the use of private school vouchers have exploded,” it said. “After the voucher program survived a state Supreme Court challenge in 2013, it’s grown into one of the largest in the country. Pence helped to do that by advocating to expand the program to include middle-income, not just low-income families, and also by removing the cap on how many students qualify.”
Yet this May, when WTHR, Indianapolis’ NBC-TV affiliate, looked at the charter school experiment, it found that “nearly half of the state’s 76 charter schools are doing poorly or failing.” The scores were based on the state’s new accountability standards.
In one example, reporters quoted sources from Indiana Science Academy West who said, “Nothing is taught… nothing is learned,” and cited “unlicensed teachers,” high staff turnover Mike Pence Has Pushed Hard for School Privatization With Lousy Results - BillMoyers.com:
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