In honor of school choice week, and the rally being hosted by Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity tomorrow, we’re sharing this article. To be clear, we support school choice. In Kansas, we have traditional public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, private secular and religious schools, and home schools, and we wouldn’t take any of those choices away. We oppose the diversion of public tax dollars away from public schools for the benefit of non-public schools that don’t serve all children and have no accountability, especially given how the school choice movement has become a vehicle for dismantling support for public schools.
“The proponents of school choice will tell you that they are only doing the will of the people. This is what parents want, they say. Baloney. While there are individuals who support school choice, the overwhelming majority of money behind this movement comes from conservative billionaires actively trying to dismantle the public education system. They want to steal the public system and replace it with a private one. They don’t care about your child. They just want to steal the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we pay to educate our children. This is not philanthropy. It is a business transaction meant to screw you and your child out of your rights.”
Here are the 10 reasons listed in the article.
1) Voucher programs almost never provide students with full tuition
2) Charter and voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone
3) Charter Schools are notorious for kicking out hard to teach students
4) Voucher and charter schools actually give parents less choice than traditional public schools
5) Charter Schools do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools
6) Charters and voucher schools increase segregation
7) Charter and voucher schools take away funding at traditional public schools
8) Properly funding parallel school systems would be incredibly wasteful and expensive
9) School choice takes away attention from the real problems in our public schools – poverty and funding equity
10) School choice is not supported by a grass roots movement. It is supported by billionaires.
Read the entire article here: https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/top-10-reasons-school-choice-is-no-choice/