Happy New Year! We hope you have enjoyed the holidays and are getting ready to advocate for our community schools and they children they serve. The 2022 legislative session starts later this month. To kick things off, here’s another explanation of why vouchers (aka “school choice”) are not an effective strategy for improving student achievement. We agree with the conclusion. “Better yet, let’s just eliminate school choice policies entirely. School choice is an experiment that we have seen fail time and time again (Milwaukee, New Orleans, Michigan), and yet the reformers continue beating the same old drum. School choice policies do nothing but siphon billions from struggling school systems and exacerbate the impact of income inequality on America’s children.”A far better solution is to call a halt to the school choice ‘experiment’ altogether, and refocus our energies and attention on supporting and maintaining our public schools, making sure that all children have access to a great school in their own community…”School choice is just another tired track from the same old reformers’ playlist, repackaged as an issue of ‘social justice’ from those who don’t advocate for social justice in any other arena. But the end game is the same: punish students and teachers, destabilize schools and communities, and turn the public schools into private profit centers.”
Originally posted to Facebook 1/1/2022