Both candidates for education secretary major supporters of public funding of private charter schools. Public funding of private schools is backed by oligarchs, hedge funds, Silicon Valley tycoons, and others who stand to benefit financially from a massive influx of taxpayer dollars into private schools. The two candidates also are both stronger supporters of Common Core.
Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of closing the Department of Education and leaving education policy to the individual states. He promised to repeal Common Core.
Transferring mega-federal tax dollars to the pockets of hedge funds and oligarchs who back charter schools is the opposite of leaving educational policy to the individual states. Appointing a strong supporter of Common Core is not repealing Common Core.
In addition, MIchelle Rhee is married to Kevin Johnson, who has been plagued by accusations of sexual abuse.
I don’t think the super-wealthy are thinking of the few thousand a year subsidy their kids’ private schools may gain from that.
An average professional/ salaried taxpayer may justifiably dislike paying taxes in full for the public school system AND on top of that paying full unsubsidized price for the charter school attended by their own kids.
I agree that savings on individual tuition are peanuts for the super-wealthy. This is not my point.
I also agree that upper-middle class or middle class parents who send their kids to private schools may rightly object to paying taxes to fund public schools these parents do not use. This is also not my point.
My point is that billionaires are investing in charter schools. These billionaires stand to gain more billions if the government shifts mega-taxpayer dollars from public to private schools. You, the middle or upper middle class parent who uses private schools, will be given a small voucher to keep you quiet, but the bulk of the taxpayer money (including most of the taxes and/or private tuition you pay for schooling) is going to go into the pockets of the billionaires who own the charter schools, not to improving the quality of your child’s education.
Remember what happened with Common Core. There were 4.5 billion dollars of federal stimulus money for education in 2009. This was all TAXPAYER money. The Federal government told the states that to qualify for this money, the states had to adopt Common Core. The blackmailed states did so. Then most of that money went to computer equipment, software, and testing to implement Common Core. So the money ended up in the pockets of billionaires who own the computer and testing industries. The money did not go, for example, to hiring more qualified teachers or increasing teacher salaries.
It is very well known by anyone who knows anything about education that the most important element in education (after the family) is the quality of the teacher. To improve teacher quality, teacher salaries have to be raised. No one qualified is going to go into teaching given the current salary levels.
The fact that no one in government talks about raising teacher salaries is proof that no one in government is interested in improving education. The charter school exercise is just another way to shift money from the pockets of taxpayers to the pockets of the oligarchs. The losers are parents and children.
Even so, you don’t have to choose an oligarch-owned school, if they are pocketing the money and offering a poor product. With the wonderful free market, competitive (even non-profit) schools will spring up and provide a better and affordable education.
Forgive me for asking, but does this mean that tax dollars are shifted from public schools to charter schools, or does this mean that taxes will go up and families will continue to pay taxes for public schools but will have additional taxes for the charter school?
The idea that there can be wonderful private or public schools with teachers who are paid dirt is a non-starter.
To have a wonderful school, you need wonderful teachers.
To have wonderful teachers, you have to pay them competitive salaries.
At present, teacher salaries are not even close to competitive with salaries offered in other industries that hire the kind of people who would be qualified to be teachers. This is especially the case for STEM.
If all schools have poor quality teachers, free market competition is not going to improve the quality of education. At most, you will get to pick a school that has very bad teachers over a school that has egregiously horrible teachers.
You can’t make a great omelette with rotten eggs. You can’t make a great school with rotten teachers. It’s time for people to wake up and see that teachers are the eggs in the school omelette.
I have no idea whether taxes will go up, down, or stay the same.
The question of whether taxes will go up or down is a separate issue from the questions of how tax money will be spent or how much tax money will be spent. It is possible to increase the deficit to fund spending without increasing taxes right now.
My point is that if the government really wants to improve education, it should be thinking about how to encourage good people to go into teaching, not about how to privatize education so that oligarchs can get richer. For example, the ROTC encourages people to go into the military by giving these people a free education. The ROTC is a government program, not a private one. How about an ROTC program for future teachers? How about increasing teacher salaries? Why doesn’t anyone in government talk about the problem of low teacher salaries?
@reformedman
Sorry about the double link and also other errors in my post. I tried to edit the post but the edit function did not work. Here is the correct link about the cheating scandals:
Not sure how I feel about Michele Rhee as Secretary of Education, but she did make progress as Chancellor of the DC Public Schools - which is no small thing. She left to go private sector and I’m not sure how much that experience has helped her should she move the Education Dept. But she’s well versed in the way of bureaucracies coming out of DCPS
@Plotinus I work in a public school in a state where the governor hates public education. Public schools now are financially strapped with a 2% tax cap. I was just wondering if tax money will be funneled from the public schools, thus making them even more strapped.
Michelle Rhee’s tenure in DC has been plagued by reports that she suppressed evidence of cheating and that this in turn was followed by a cover-up. What kind of progress would this be?
Haven’t read any of the links, OP, but it drives me crazy that we don’t tap people who are sort of the unsung heroes of whatever field they’re in. It’s like the same people always percolate to the top.
Maybe that’s just a perception and not reality. Still.
I don’t know the answer to this either, but the two candidates for Secretary of Education are strong advocates of public funding of charter schools and school vouchers, so you connect the dots…
@Plotinus I live in a DC suburb and am very aware of both the state of DCPS and what Michele Rhee did - and didn’t do - while Chancellor. I stand by my comment that she did make progress, in a VERY difficult environment.
It’s a scheme to funnel tax dollars to religious schools.
I’m a parent who sent S to a Catholic prep high school and I happily pay my school tax every year and always vote to approve my school district’s budget. I am strongly opposed to my school tax dollars going to any private k-12 school.
I thought Trump ran on the promise to rescind Common Core and to return control of education to the states. The US Department of Education was supposed to be downsized or even eliminated.
How does the promise to rescind Common Core and return education to the states square with candidates for Secretary of Education who are very strong advocates of Common Core and public funding of private charter schools?
Trump called Common Core a “disaster”. So now it is great?
They also had the option of attending their local public schools like everyone else. They just opted out of doing so much like someone choosing to make the choice of buying a Rolls-Royce over a Honda Civic would have done.
Paying taxes for adequately funded public school is not only for the benefit of ones own kids, but also for the benefits we all derive from having educational opportunities for everyone.
Not always.
You could also end up with the situation where institutions with dubious academic rigor flourish…such as the for-profit college phenomenon, the educationally abysmal former segregation academies in the south like the one my Mississippi relatives attended for a year before they/their parents wised up and left for better options, etc.
This very issue is one reason why in many other nations, it’s the publicly run K-12 schools and colleges which have the best academic reputations whereas the private schools for the most part are regarded as “second choice/schools of last resort” for students who can’t cut it academically.
In fact, the very term “private schools” in some of those societies have similar negative connotations usually reserved for lower-tiered directionals/public school districts here in the US.
I’m not a teacher, although I am married to one and have several in the family. I can not honestly hold forth on the merits of vouchers et al. But our own idiosocratic shibolliths aside, it should be beyond doubt that our public education system, as currently structured, is failing huge swaths of the population. Trump was elected as a change agent, and it would be unwise to assume that this will not extend to federal education funding. Personally, I would like to wait and see what happens rather than simply resorting to the same old “if we just throw more money at the NEA things will get better” attitude of the past forty years.
Maybe just as importantly, and like it or not, vouchers and charter schools are immensely popular among the very poor, particularly in the cities. Support for such therefore serves the dual goal of furthering Trump’s efforts to chip away at the monolithic democratic voting block that is currently low income minority urban dwellers, and it pulls money from the pockets of the NEA and ATF, thereby reducing the capital available to the democratic party.
I can second this. In many countries in Europe, private schools are for academic failures or rich kids who want to rub elbows with their peers while not studying too much. Private school coddle the students so as not to lose their tuition. In public schools, standards are much, much stricter. You either cut it or get failed.
Even in New York City, the schools with the most demanding academic programs are the public specialized high schools, such as Hunter College HIgh School, Stuyvesant, etc…
Several Stuy classmates had siblings who were attending the local private or boarding schools because they didn’t score high enough on the entrance exam or opted to leave because the academic pressure was too much for them.
Conversely, I knew several other Stuy classmates who opted to leave the private school environment of K-8 to attend because there was little/no handholding and in a few cases, precisely because of the sometimes sink or swim academic environment.
That’s not to say that’s all a good thing…especially considering I sometimes wondered about the sanity of those having the last motivating factor.
Incidentally, Eva Moskowitz is a Stuy alum. Class '82.
