Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs

There is sadly no mystery about the damage befalling public schools when private school tuition vouchers are expanded: Vouchers suck millions of essential dollars out of state and local public school budgets. Usually state legislatures start with a small program and then, several years later, explode the number of students eligible and the size of each voucher. Even though we know that aggregate standardized test scores reflect primarily a school district’s economic level and are a flawed measure of school quality, voucher proponents regularly market their new product as an escape for the poorest children from so-called “failing” schools.

Vouchers originally started in two of the nation’s school districts that serve concentrations of poor children: Milwaukee and Cleveland. But in 2021, we are watching a new phase of nationwide growth and expansion of vouchers.

In 2017, economist Gordon Lafer explained: “From 2011 to 2015, eighteen states established some form of voucher program. Vouchers are typically introduced as a limited, targeted intervention aimed at helping the neediest families but then expanded gradually to cover the general population. The country’s oldest voucher program was established in Milwaukee in 1990 and was restricted to poor children in failing schools and capped at a limited number of participants. In 2011, Governor Walker removed the cap, raised the income eligibility threshold, and expanded the program to include students in suburban counties. In 2013 the program was expanded yet again, this time to cover the entire state. Indiana and Ohio were CONTINUE READING: Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child - Public Enemy Number 1

Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child

Grift inflation is coming. Know your voucher grifters now to avoid them in the ESA future. Also regulate voucher schools like banks so public schools don't have to be the FDIC of education.

Part 1: Florida's Low Capital, Jim Crow Voucher and ESA programs imitate pre-Brown American education - only worse

Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else

The smartest way to shop for a voucher school is not to shop for one at all. There are very very few worth buying. This is why the education savings account (ESA) concept is doomed as anything but grift.

When Kelli Stargel dismantles your educational Publix this legislative session and gives you a dollar store debit card for educational groceries instead, it doesn’t mean the dollar store gets anything better on its shelves. The dollar store doesn’t have the capital or product development systems that Publix has built over decades. The dollar store doesn’t have supermarket capacity.

There is almost nothing worth buying today in the ESA dollar store; and there will be almost nothing worth buying in the future.

Opaque grift inflation is coming; I have a tool to help

Testing and mass 3rd grade retention and forced busing away from neighborhood-turned-magnet-or-charter schools will keep driving vulnerable kids away from the capital of public schools (and eroding education capital and capacity for everyone, including the rich).

And the same group of grifter garbage voucher providers will just take more money from you, the taxpayers, to cheat and harm and segregate the socially, economically, CONTINUE READING: Segregation factories, pt. 3: how to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child - Public Enemy Number 1

FL SB48: Marie-Claire Leman testifies against converting vouchers into debit cards full of inequity - Fund Education Now

FL SB48: Marie-Claire Leman testifies against converting vouchers into debit cards full of inequity - Fund Education Now

FL SB48: MARIE-CLAIRE LEMAN TESTIFIES AGAINST CONVERTING VOUCHERS INTO DEBIT CARDS FULL OF INEQUITY

Marie-Claire Leman a Leon County public school parent and Fund Education Now associate testified this week in the Senate Appropriates Committee against SB 48 which converts the state’s five voucher programs into two Education Savings Accounts pre-loaded with designated public-school funds that entitles parents whose children do not attend public school, wide spending flexibility to reconstruct their education piecemeal. This was the final Senate committee stop on the third day of the 2021 session and now its onto the Senate floor for a vote!

Much thanks to Marie-Claire, who is consistently among the few citizen voices present to testify in Tallahassee for Florida’s public school children. Her wise words were quoted in news reports and can be seen on the Florida Channel at 59:94.

Read Marie-Claire’s complete testimony in opposition to SB 48: 

“After raising many concerns in the first two committee stops where this bill was heard, I want to focus on two that I think should preoccupy you most as members of the Appropriations committee with a fiduciary duty to all Florida tax payers.

1) The first is fiscal responsibility. I would disagree with Senator Diaz: the financial burden will not be the same. With this bill, we are increasing access to vouchers and ESAs to new students, students who were not already in public schools. And the number of vouchers and ESAs being increased means that new money is going to fund some of these vouchers. In a year where we have heard that cuts will need to be made across the board and to expect them in education, it seems misguided to increase spending by expanding these vouchers. And sometimes we hear that it’s one pot of money and at others time, in order to counter this CONTINUE READING: FL SB48: Marie-Claire Leman testifies against converting vouchers into debit cards full of inequity - Fund Education Now

Florida: Stop the Mega-Voucher Bill! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Florida: Stop the Mega-Voucher Bill! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Florida: Stop the Mega-Voucher Bill!

The Constitution of the state of Florida bans the transfer of public funds to religious schools or any religious institution. The ban is unequivocal. It says: “No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”

In 2012, the state voted on a referendum to permit vouchers for religious schools. The proposed Amendment 8 was misleadingly called “the Religious Freedom Amendment.” Voters turned it down by 55%-45%.

Despite the explicit language of the State Constitution, despite the defeated state referendum, despite the body of research that shows that voucher schools are mostly inferior to public schools, despite the number of religious schools that openly discriminate in admissions and that use textbooks that are racist and sexist, Florida’s Republican governors and legislature have steadily CONTINUE READING: Florida: Stop the Mega-Voucher Bill! | Diane Ravitch's blog