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"...Ninety-eight percent of Indiana’s voucher schools are faith-based, with restrictive admissions policies that prove “school choice” is, in practice, the “school’s choice.”
Last year, 36% of new state tax funding for K-12 education flowed to voucher schools educating about 7% of Indiana students. Public schools, including charter schools, educated 93% of students but received only 64% of the new funding, according to legislative budget estimates at the time." -- by Karen Francisco in the Colorado Sun
PRIVATE SCHOOLS' CHOICE
Colorado families already enjoy school choice. Amendment 80 would open door to school vouchers.
Private schools choose their students.
From Retired FW Journal Gazette Editorial Page Editor, Karen Francisco, in the Colorado Sun.
In Indiana, I watched a fledgling school choice movement grow from a handful of public charter schools to a voucher entitlement program expected to cost state taxpayers $600 million this year.
The money diverted from public schools is not going to students who live in poverty. An investigation by the University of Notre Dame’s Gallivan Program for Journalism, Ethics and Democracy found the average Indiana voucher recipient is a white female who has never attended public school and comes from a family earning more than $99,000 a year. A family of four earning as much as $220,000 a year now qualifies for vouchers, in a state where the median household income is a paltry $66,800.
None of this comes as a surprise. Indiana’s near-universal voucher program was always the end game for former governors Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, the legislature’s Republican super-majority and a nationwide network of wealthy donors that included Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s former secretary of education.
Emails obtained by The Associated Press under open records law revealed private meetings involving politicians and some of Indiana’s wealthiest powerbrokers — strategy sessions held over cocktails at high-end restaurants to plot out the voucher bill’s passage. A black-tie event at an Indianapolis hotel celebrated the misnamed “Indiana Choice Scholarship Program” — not a scholarship, but a handout to families already sending their children to private and parochial schools.
2024 ELECTION AND EDUCATION
Read the following articles for information about the Harris/Walz and Trump/Vance federal education plans.
Only a Harris-Walz Administration Would Protect Equity and Inclusion in the Public Schools
From Jan Resseger
In 1899, on the first page of The School and Society, John Dewey defined educational equity as essential for the public schools : “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put through the agency of the school at the disposal of is future members. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”
Certainly, John Dewey didn’t fully anticipate the ugly conversation we are having today—where an attack on Dewey’s principle of equity and on public schooling itself has been mounted by well funded billionaires in philanthropies like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Americans for Prosperity, well supplied with ideology and policy developed by the Heritage Foundation and other so-called think tanks, and spouted by billionaire-funded proxies like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The ethos underneath the wave of school vouchers passed by far-right state legislators as well as the specific educational policies promoted in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 includes individualistic consumerism and white ethno-nationalism. There is a lot of money being invested today to help us all forget about Dewey’s vision.
One of the most troubling aspects of today’s far right attack on public schooling is that it appears to be a another in a long a series of political reactions against the principle of equity in our public schools. Since the Civil War, according to constitutional scholar Derek Black in his powerful book, Schoolhouse Burning, our society has struggled to realize our long declared principle that all children, no matter their race, gender, or immigrant status have an equal right to education. Black writes that after the Civil War in order to join the union, states were required to guarantee in their state constitutions that no child would be denied the opportunity for education...”
If Trump wins, count on continued culture wars, school vouchers, and a fixation on ending the federal Department of Education
From The Hechinger Report, by Josh Cowen
...With the former president and his allies still denying that he lost the 2020 election, with Trump and his running mate embracing unfounded stories about Haitian immigrants eating household pets and with Trump’s obsession with the size of his cheering crowds, any analytical projection about his future agenda is all but impossible. With such an absence of facts or evidence-based policy designs, we must turn to past actions, current rhetoric and the priorities of Trump’s political alliances for a hint of what could come.
On that basis, we could expect more debates about bathrooms and women’s sports, more inexplicable musings about whether slavery had benefits for enslaved Americans, more spending of scarce resources to put Bibles in public schools and more singling out of kids because of their immigration status.
Many Republican proposals have been well-covered, starting with Project 2025 — the policy agenda assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a new Trump term. Although Trump denies that controversial document speaks for his candidacy, more than 140 former members of the first Trump team had a hand in its crafting.
The key education points in the platform Trump does claim as his own — the so-called Agenda47 and the GOP party platform — strike the same notes of emphasis as those in Project 2025. Indeed, the one-page education “chapter” in the 16-page party platform is all but a summary of its much larger Project 2025 counterpart.
Trump Describes His Plans for Education
From Diane Ravitch
When Donald Trump appeared recently in Milwaukee, he described his plan for the future of the Department of Education. It’s not quite the same as the scenario in Project 2025, which envisions the total elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Trump imagines it as a “department” with only two employees: A Cabinet Secretary and a secretary.
The severely shrunken Department would focus solely on the three Rs and would somehow mysteriously have the power and personnel to prevent public schools across the nation from teaching anything connected to “woke.” That is, anything related to race, gender, or social justice. How this fictional Department would impose bans on curriculum when federal law prohibits any federal interference in curriculum is not explained. Actually, it’s nonsense.
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes in The New Republic about Trump’s vision for the federal role in education.
†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.
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