What Might Seem to Benefit the Educational Consumer Turns Out to Be a Disaster for Society
This week the Senate will consider President Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos to be our next U.S. Secretary of Education. Tomorrow the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will very likely vote to recommend DeVos’s confirmation for a vote on the Senate Floor. Her nomination has become extremely contentious. Please call your U.S. Senators again today to oppose the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as the next Education Secretary.
Because Betsy DeVos has devoted her life and her financial fortune to replacing our society’s system of public education with publicly funded tuition vouchers that children can carry to private schools and with unregulated charter schools that are publicly funded by privately operated, much attention has been paid this month to weighing public vs. privatized education. Valerie Strauss has published another excellent piece by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, that enumerates What Taxpayers Should Know About the Cost of School Choice. “School choice” is, of course, another name for school privatization—always framed by its supporters through the much prized values of freedom and choice without naming their social consequences.
Burris examines the financial implications of school privatization. She explains: “American taxpayers cannot afford to run the multiple systems of K-12 education that the ‘choicers’ desire, nor would it be in the best interest of children to do so. We have been experimenting with taxpayer-funded choice for two decades, and the evidence is clear. We have wasted billions in tax dollars, with no comprehensive evidence that charters, online schools and vouchers have resulted in increased academic performance of American students. It is time we have an honest discussion about the true cost of school choice.”
Here is Burris’s argument. I urge you to read her entire article to grasp the quantity of evidence she amasses to demonstrate each of her propositions:
- “Billions of federal tax dollars have poured into charter school promotion, without regard for success and with insufficient oversight.” Burris explains that by 2015 the federal Charter Schools Program had spent $3.7 billion in startup grants for charter What Might Seem to Benefit the Educational Consumer Turns Out to Be a Disaster for Society | janresseger:
