Vouchers rear their ugly head

February 7, 2006

In 2001, when the White House decided it would work with congressional Dems on No Child Left Behind legislation, Dems made one thing perfectly clear: no vouchers. Just about every possible reform measure imaginable was on the table, but there was simply no way Dems would support a federal plan that used public funds to subsidize tuition at religious and other private schools when there are still so many public schools that need assistance.

As it turned out, Bush didn’t even put up much of a fight. For the White House, vouchers were more or less a bargaining chip that was easily discarded through the course of negotiations. Some of the president’s far-right supporters had hoped to use NCLB to help privatize education though vouchers, but the reality was, the president’s heart was never in it. Vouchers, for the most part, have been a non-entity ever since.

That is, until now.

Woven through the budget are several initiatives favored by social conservatives. For instance, the Education Department budget, while proposing to eliminate 42 programs, revives an effort to create vouchers that would subsidize tuition for private or parochial schools.

Chances are, this is just a sop to the far-right base. The White House has to realize that vouchers are unpopular, both with the public and with most lawmakers.

But if the president is serious, it’ll open a whole new round of fights. Keep the context in mind — Bush is proposing a voucher program for private schools while cutting federal support for public education.

It’s probably not going to go anywhere — congressional Republicans are skittish enough this election year — but if this becomes a real debate, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on.

Want to slap a Christian in the face?

I am not speaking about ALL Christians of course.
Just the ones that want to use YOUR tax money to further THEIR religion.

Those are the ones that are fun to slap.
And I mean slap hard.
Red welt hard.
SLAAAAPPPP!!!

Here’s how:

Create a religion (and a religious school) based on the Devil. Petition for US government funds to help poor people in the name of your religion. Campaign for vouchers so you can train people to believe in your particular brand of religious deviltry. Force the governemnt to treat your devil worship on equal footing with the Jesus blowhard’s gobbledygook. After all: your religion is just as good.

I can’t think of a smackier smack to a Christian face than forcing Christian tax money into funding devil worship.

In other words:
These uppity Christians are asking for the mixture of govt & religion…

I say… give ’em the devil to choke on…. shove the Lord of the Flies right down their unholy Christian throats…

  • I think it should be encouraged.

    Call the Republicans’ bluff.

    Throw it back in their faces. Don’t let them run away from it.

    Hey, GOP, great idea! Make the taxpayers pay for every nutcase whacko religious school teaching unreality while slashing the impoverished public schools still further. Hoohah! Hooray for George Bush’s voucher system! Let’s all hear it for the Grand Oil Party’s education program!

  • Yet we cannot get them to povide vouchers for housing purposes here in New Orleans. Vouchers would allow many to move back to the City and surrounding area and into the currently exorbitantly high rental properties that survived the storm. Lots of places are available, but prices have been driven way up.

  • I don’t think I am so much opposed to vouchers per se as I am by the underlying motivations/assumptions Republicans have.

    First, I sometimes think Republicans think vouchers are the magic potion to “fix” education. “Fixing” education is a large and complicated problem not likely to be solved by gimmicks. Nobody wants to sit down and have serious talks about the problems of education because that would mean facing the fact that both sides hold ideas/assumptions that need to be discarded and both sides have ideas/assumptions that need to be included even if they are held by the other side.

    Second, what would happen if private schools suddenly got an influx of poor (and often minority) students? Of course this is not likely to happen because how much of the tuition would be covered by the voucher? Not all for sure, and in a bid to continue to keep “them” out, likely to be even less.

    Third, would they be so enthused if the voucher was for a muslim student to go to a muslim school that might be more, shall we say radical, than the Christian right and the conservatives like? I mean what would happen if vouchers met the war on terrorism?

    Of course the voucher gimmick is not likely to go away anytime soon because it’s such a GOP obsession. And the GOP in it’s current incarnation is not too big on the reality thing – unless it is the one they make up themselves.

  • I live on Long Island and, for decades, have tried to figure out why the schools in poor neighborhoods in NYC and Long Island are so uniformly bad. I’d I’d be willing to tyr anything to make them better but from what I’ve read, charter schools and vouchers are simply not the answer.

    Remember Edison Schools? It was publicly-traded and offered stock options to Miami teachers. Big names in education like Benno Schmidt and Joan Ganz Cooney along with one of the famous NY black ministers, either Floyd Flake or Calvin Butts. The same minister was on the White House education advisory board.

    I checked the other day and Edison was taking private and bought out by a company named Shakespeare something (see the SEC website). Before going private, Edison was accused of financial malfeasance.

    What about the $50 million that Jeb Bush handed out in vouchers that no one could account for?

  • Oops! Of course, I meant that Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale, Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of Sesame Street and, as I just checked, the Rev. Floyd Flake, former US representative and pastor of the Allen African Methodist Episcopal church in Jamaica, Queens were all on the board of Edison Chartered Schools. Search the SEC website for “Edison Schools”.
    Edison was founded by right winger, H. Christopher Wittle.

    Take a look at the rest of the board of directors, too. See DEF 14A – Other proxy statements – 10/28/2002 under “Edison Schools” when searching the SEC Edgar database.

    The directors are the best and brightest and Edison Schools was still screwed up. Now just who do irate parents complain to?

    BTW, Anyone interested in the history of Edison’s association with the Philadelphia school district might want to check on the the hefty grant that Tom Ridge’s administration handed out to “study” privatization in Philadelphia.

  • koreyel,

    I know plenty of well-meaning Christians who are honest in their faith but despise being associated with the wacko religious right crowd that always seems to grab the headlines with their bizarre opinions and interpretations of the Bible. It makes them feel their religion is being hijacked. Just like most Muslims wish they could dissociate with the radical extremists who use Islam to justify murder and violence. So I would ask, for their benefit, (I say they because I admit I’m non-religious- I don’t know and I don’t care), to be sure to draw the distinction between the majority of Christians among us who share our values and the wackos, the theocrats, the American Taliban, the James Dobsons, the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells, etc. They don’t deserve to have the use of the name “Christian”.

  • Across the boards, Bush is out to trash governmental services so they can be discredited, then privately owned, operated and generating profts for political contributors. Coming soon Halliburton/Blackwater Elementary Schools… well armed beefy teachers in tattered classrooms without electricity or water.

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