When we look at Arizona, we get a preview of what an ESA voucher scheme (like the one we have in Tennessee) does to local schools.
Instead of investing in local public schools to meet students’ needs and ward off school closures to ensure equal access to quality neighborhood schools, Republican state lawmakers voted to force through universal ESA vouchers, which are now draining a massive $1 billion a year to instead pay for private, for-profit models that pick and choose students.
The latest edition of the Trump Presidency is about control – about achieving compliance with a radical view of how America should be and doing so by any means necessary.
The bottom line: It’s about fear. When children learn to fear the state, they learn that compliance minimizes pain.
Governing by fear is how dictators get and maintain a grip on power. You may dream of a better way, but you don’t actively seek it because you’ve learned: The state shuts down any unauthorized ideas.
As Anne Lutz Fernandez notes:
A new report on US immigration policy and mental health confirms what should be obvious: mass deportations are deeply harmful to children in migrant and mixed-status families. And when masked men grab a parent from the school car line or the corner coffee shop, all students in that school or neighborhood are subject to trauma and made to understand: The state can make people disappear. It is to be feared.
Tennessee now has a big, universal school voucher scheme.
ESAs, they’re called.
And, in other states, similar programs have been susceptible to fraud.
If you don’t live in Arizona or have any kids going to school there, you can still get access to that state’s voucher funds.
A man from Florida gained access to the state’s ESA voucher funds by indicating he had children in school in the state. Of course, he didn’t – these ghost kids, though, netted him as much as 25,000.
I’ve written a bit before about the coming age of schools without human teachers.
Peter Greene takes a deeper dive into AI-based schooling and comes away with a lot. Particularly this salient bit:
And how the hell are students supposed to feel about being required to get their grade by chatting with a bot? What would they learn beyond how to talk to the bots to get the best assessment? Why should any student make a good faith attempt to speak about their learning when no responsible human is making a good faith attempt to listen to them?
The Big, Terrible Bill included lots not to like, including the creation of a federal school voucher program.
While conservatives tend to be proponents of state-level voucher schemes, some are raising concerns over the Trump scheme:
Though attractive on the surface, this generous credit effectively removes the burden of K-12 funding from the state and transfers it to private SGOs. This undermines states like North Carolina, who did the difficult work of reforming their education funding model to ensure dollars follow the student.
As we saw in the last administration, given enough leverage, the federal government will always try to turn funding into a cudgel to promote its social policy goals.
Donald Trump and his buddies at the Heritage Foundation are seeking to remake American public education in the image of Christian Nationalism.
The Trump administration has launched a partisan “patriotic” education coalition that includes US ED and more than 40 partner groups, all of which are closely aligned with the president’s MAGA movement — including Prager U, the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, America First Legal, Hillsdale College, ALEC, the Goldwater Institute, and more — to create civics programming for public schools across the nation. Many of these organizations are involved in efforts to stop teaching civil rights material, oust school board members who believe in teaching social justice, ban books, and whitewash history lessons. In the US ED press release, Turning Point USA claimed to be “more resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students…
President Trump’s education budget includes big cuts for public education – including more than $100 million in cuts to Tennessee schools.
They also want to cut $4.5 billion from funds for afterschool and summer programs, technology and digital literacy, mental health services, rural schools, literacy instruction, new teacher training, emergency preparedness, magnet schools, services for unhoused children, arts education, American history and civics education, family engagement and more.
Republicans in the U.S. House seem willing to do Trump’s bidding – including by cutting billions in federal dollars that typically flow to public schools.
Unlike the Senate version, which did not cut K-12 funding, the House version slashes $12 billion in school spending (a 15% cut) — including $4.7 billion in cuts to Title I, which funds the nation’s most vulnerable students, constituting a 27% cut to low-income students. Democrats offered amendments to restore the proposed $4.7 billion Title I cut, but all Republicans rejected them.
Policymakers love to tout the results of various standardized tests to prove whatever it is they’d like to prove about schools.
The reality is a bit more complicated – but also, rather simple:
That’s the one actual lesson of NAEP; the dream of data-informed, data-driven decision making as a cure for everything that ails us is just a dream. Data can be useful for those who want to actually look at it. But data is not magical, and in education, it’s fruitless to imagine that data will settle our issues.
East Nashville-based Episcopal School of Nashville will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a Fall Festival:
The celebratory, community-wide Fall Festival will be held on September 21 from 12PM-4PM at the school’s campus located at 1310 Ordway Place in Nashville.
The free event will feature games, local food trucks, face painting, giveaways, a bounce house, and more.
