“The pandemic has required all of us to improvise, adapt, and overcome. This is a public health emergency. Proposing these extreme policy changes as a reaction to the past year is irresponsible. Students have been and will continue to be impacted by this disaster, and our Constitutional obligation is to ‘provide for intellectual, educational, vocational and scientific improvement by establishing and maintaining public schools…’ The Kansas Supreme Court found the 2019 school funding formula to be adequate, but we will not be fully funding our schools until 2023.” Originally published to Facebook 2/2/2021....
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Another Warning About Tax Credit Scholarships
Another warning about tax-credit scholarships and other neo-vouchers, this one from Florida. Stories like this are part of why we believe bills attempting to establish or expand these programs need to have standards and accountability provisions. “I recently received a call from a community partner in the south end of Miami-Dade County about a Mom in need of support. Impressed by glossy ads for a small, local private school, she had enrolled her two children a few years ago in a small private school using one of Florida’s many “scholarships.” These vouchers were specifically for low-income parents to...
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Leave a Comment Kansas…Let’s Not Learn the Tax-Cut Lesson All Over Again
We are carefully watching SB22. Tax policy is directly related to our ability to fund our schools. Kansas school supporters should remember what happened the last time our state tried big tax cuts and Kansas legislators should remember what happened to the legislators who were eventually held responsible for the damage. “You don’t have to be an economist to understand that giving even more tax breaks to multinational companies like Seaboard, Cargill and Spirit AeroSystems, which the Legislature has been trying to do for years now and is trying again with a pile of smelly favors that would...
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Leave a Comment Tax Credit Scholarship Expansion Passes Out of House and Senate Committees
HB 2068 and SB 61, the identical House and Senate versions of the tax credit scholarship expansion have passed out of the House K-12 Education Budget and Senate Education Committees. We oppose these bills because they move further from the original premise of the tax credit scholarship scheme by expanding student eligibility from those who qualify for free lunch (the Kansas proxy for at-risk) to those who also qualify for reduced-price lunch, and eliminates the requirement that students come from one of the 100 lowest-performing elementary schools. The expansion does not increase accountability of schools receiving the scholarships...
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