It’s not just me pointing out that the republicans, led by Scott Walker, want to privatize(and profit from) public education. Let’s take a look:
1. Bruce Murphy from Urban Milwaukee:
The word was out last year that Republican Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald intended to retire and make the big money working as a lobbyist. Two days after his term was up, he signed up as a lobbyist for School Choice Wisconsin.
Fitzgerald’s decision underlined the ironic facts of life in Wisconsin. Choice Schools may be badly underfunded, getting just $6,442 per pupil in public funding (about half of what public schools get), and may often pay lousy salaries to teachers. But those who lobby for school choice are doing just fine, thank you. Indeed, the pay is so good that three former Republican Assembly Speakers now do lobbying and advocacy for school choice.
The first to jump aboard the gravy train was former Speaker (and key figure in the legislative caucus scandal) Scott Jensen, who works for two Washington D.C.-based groups that work to increase School Choice funding: the American Federation for Children and the Alliance for School Choice, two sister organizations located at the same address, 1660 L Street NW, Suite 1000. Both groups have a key consultant, Chartwell Strategic Advisors, the one-man consulting company run by Jensen from his Brookfield home. In 2011, the most recent for which these groups filed federal income tax forms, Jensen earned $202,972, including $102,7346 from the American Federation for Children and $100, 236 from the Alliance for School Choice.
These groups have often worked to influence issues and elections in Wisconsin. A report by the American Federation for Children bragged that “With expenditures of $2,392,000, [AFC] engaged in hard-fought, successful battles to ensure educational choice majorities in both chambers of the Legislature” in Wisconsin, as the the Badger Herald reported.
2. The Inimitable Ruth Conniff from The Isthmus:
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign released a report in April showing that “wealthy campaign contributors and shadowy electioneering groups that back school voucher programs have spent nearly $10 million in 10 years in Wisconsin” — mostly to keep Gov. Scott Walker in office as he tries to dramatically expand school vouchers.
Walker’s budget expands our first-in-the-nation private-school voucher program beyond Milwaukee and Racine to nine new districts, including Madison. A friend of mine whose kids go to a Catholic school got an email recently telling her that if Madison becomes a voucher district, Catholic-school families can look forward to a tuition rebate.
Perhaps Madison voters ought to be allowed to weigh in on whether they want their tax dollars to subsidize private-school tuition, including for families whose kids have never attended public school at all.
Moderate Republicans in the state Legislature think so, and have suggested that local communities ought to be allowed to hold a referendum before vouchers are shoved down their throats.
3. More of the great Ruth Conniff from The Progressive:
If you want to see how truly dishonest the school-choice lobby(edit note – led by former convicted felon Scott Jensen) is about its goals, take a look at AFC’s “2012 Election Impact Report” (not findable on the web, except where it’s attached as a PDF to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s elections-board complaint, and to Dan Bice’s column.
The smiling faces of African American and Latino children beam from the pages of the report.
Billing itself as “the nation’s voice for educational choice,” the American Federation for Children pushes forward students of color as the beneficiaries of its lobbying work, but the politicians they support are not exactly heroes of the civil-rights movement.
You’d never guess it from all those smiling black and brown faces that the biggest recipients of AFC funds are Republican state legislators who are busy enacting plans to slash funding for public schools and, at the same time, redirect tax dollars to private-school families–many of whom have kids who’ve never attended public school.
4. Ed Hughes from the Madison School Board:
Do you sense a common theme here? Voucher school expansion is good because it allows parents to choose the best schools for their children.
But here’s a news flash: parents already have that choice. They are free to send their children to parochial or other private schools, transfer to other public schools in their school district, open enroll into public schools in neighboring school districts or into virtual schools, or be home schooled.
The issue isn’t whether parents should have a choice. That issue is settled: they do. It is whether the government should subsidize their preference for other options when parents decide that the public schools provided for their children aren’t what they want.
It is hard to see what larger societal interest is furthered by these subsidies. This is particularly so since there is no convincing evidence that voucher students learn more than they would in public schools and it is apparent that creating a second, private, taxpayer-supported school system is both costly and damaging to our existing public schools, which must be the education providers of last resort for everyone. “Choice” isn’t a virtue when it is created by offering options that undermine our important institutions.
No one wants failing schools. We want all of our students — whether they attend public or private schools — to succeed. Parents should have the right — as they do now to choose where they want to send their children.
But it’s counterintuitive to suggest that the way to improve public schools is to reduce their funding and transfer the money to private institutions, where there is no accountability and different standards. Diluting the strength of public education will not solve its weaknesses.
The state should actually spend more on public education. Updated budget figures that came in late last week show the state with an additional $500 million. A good chunk of that money should be reinvested in public education, since the last budget cut $1.6 billion in education funding, to the tune of $550 a student.
Public schools are subject to open-records laws and total transparency when it comes to spending. Private schools are not. Sending taxpayer dollars into a system that does not have to justify how it is being spent nor share specific results on testing standards is poor public policy.
The very nature of public schools makes them big-tent educators. Students from all walks of life — rich or poor, inner-city or rural, all cultural backgrounds and learning disabilities from the mild to severe — are entitled to a public education. If a student with a severe learning disability requires one-on-one help from an aide, that’s what is provided. Public schools are required to provide teachers or instructors who have specific training for special needs students. All public school teachers are licensed, which is not a requirement with all private schools.
Private schools have the right — even under vouchers — to not accept a child, for whatever reason. They also have the right to teach religious-based curriculum, which is often the reason why parents choose to send their children to those schools. Putting childre
n into that setting who may resist religious-based learning can spoil that learning environment for the children who want to be there.
Wisconsin families already have plenty of school choices without an expansion of vouchers. Open enrollment allows families to enroll their children in other districts.
6. Top political blogger Blue Cheddar:
Grant Meier can invest $20K in the Evergreen Elementary School and come out with a $120K salary, no education experience required.
For newly minted self-proclaimed principal Grant Meier, the earnings will be $1,666 per pupil. Consider that two other area principals earn $250/pupil and $194/pupil. [see the numbers for that at the end of the post]
His $20,000 investment will be only 4.1% of the total budget for the operation with about 1.4% coming from fund-raising and 94.5% coming from the State of Wisconsin. Meier thought he would have some money from his business partner Coleman but then Coleman went bankrupt – something Meier learned about after the Journal Times got involved in the situation:
“He found out about Coleman’s personal finances Tuesday [March 5th]; Coleman told Meier’s son about his pending bankruptcy Monday evening, a few hours after The Journal Times questioned Coleman about it.”
7. Daily Kos:
Alas, far from the honesty that we’d love to be able to expect, the underlying philosophy is a dark secret. Instead, they “justified” it by creating a new way to define “failing schools,” even though Wisconsin’s schools rank high among US states on metrics like graduation rates and 8th grade reading scores. This plot took the form of a new report-card system for schools, a complex and convoluted system that graded individual schools in ways they’d never been graded before. The first round of report card grades for schools came out this fall. And then, without giving schools any recourse or opportunity to improve, came the budget voucher attack: Any school district with at least 4000 students and at least two schools with grades of “D” or “F” will be voucherized like Milwaukee and Racine, including having to pay for students already in private schools, with family incomes of up to 300% of poverty.
Contact YOUR legislator and tell them NO to School Vouchers*!
*unless your representative has been given hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from School “Choice” organizations, then you are too late!
He or she has already been bought and paid for!
