Getting schooled, publicly and privately
The culture war-to-vouchers pipeline
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Maybe I’m just in the bargaining phase of grief, but I’m almost glad that Joe Manchin put a plug in the head of Build Back Better once and for all. The agonizingly protracted negotiations over the vast majority of the Democratic agenda had dragged on for nearly a year and had produced little beyond a few books’ worth of insidery Hill process gossip and regular embarrassments for the rest of the party. It was awful to watch, this constant reminder that these two cynical sociopaths controlled our fate.
It was pretty clear by last fall that Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were never going to agree to some big bill that would actually help people that didn’t donate heavily to their campaigns; at least we can now finally move on to focus on… well, it’s slim pickings at the national level, because those two were enabled by constant bungling by party leadership and underhanded maneuvers by snakes like Josh Gottenheimer.
Failing to pass voting rights protections probably doomed Democrats for at least half a decade, assuming democracy lasts that long. We’ll still work hard to get good progressive Democrats elected, but should this fall’s midterm elections go as expected, I’m at least looking forward to a new generation of leaders taking over from those in control of the party now. There will be ideological battles within the party, but the approach to politics will at least be more modern than that of a president that tries to give federal judge nominations to anti-abortion conservatives as a personal favor to Mitch McConnell.
The ideological battle within the Republican Party, which really began in earnest with the Tea Party, was very clearly won by the far-right zealot fascist crowd. They’re a group of total sickos, but they’ve also mastered how to seamlessly connect their cultural cynicism and goal of completely ending the idea of using state power for the public good.
Tonight, Natalie Meltzer is going deep on how the GOP’s cynical moral panic over race and gender in the classroom has supercharged conservatives’ decades-long, racist campaign to kill public education.
The silver lining is that the public still really wants to invest in public schools, but it’s essential to be able to spot this stuff from the jump.
by Natalie Meltzer
On June 24, as protests erupted over the Supreme Court’s decision to gut abortion rights, lawmakers in Arizona passed a historic law that eviscerated another right: public education.
The state’s Republican lawmakers that day muscled through a universal school vouchers bill that will divert hundreds of millions of dollars from public education. Under the new law, any family that chooses not to send their child to public school will receive $7,000 for educational expenses.
Vouchers for the 30,000-40,000 students who are already in private school or home-schooling will siphon upwards of $180 million from the state’s general budget — and the program will encourage even more students to switch from public to private school, draining the state’s education fund. This comes just a year after the conservative state Supreme Court threw out a successful ballot initiative that would have raised taxes on the wealthy to invest heavily in public schools.
"The Republican universal voucher system is designed to kill public education," tweeted former Arizona House Rep. Diego Rodriguez. "OUR nation's greatness is built on free Public schools. The GOP goal is to recreate segregation, expand the opportunity gap, and destroy the foundation of our democracy."
The movement is spreading, too, especially in a few states.
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