Theft You Can Vouch for 0
John Romano, in the Tampa Bay Times, has concerns about the Florida school voucher program. Here’s a nugget–follow the link for the rest:
In theory, this is a commendable attempt to break the cycle of poverty. In practice, it falls short.
Why?
Because, after more than a decade of micromanaging public schools to ensure uniform accountability across the state, legislators are zealously pushing an agenda to hand over your tax dollars to private schools that are completely immune to accountability.
I will be charitable and consider that the first sentence in the excerpt above is a concession to his writing for an audience in Florida. Someone who knows the ancestry of school vouchers knows that there are no legitimate reasons for taxpayers to fund private schools directly or indirectly.
Consider the history of private schools in the South. Few existed prior to the 1960, and the ones that did tended to be boarding schools; they were the province of the well-heeled who could afford them. Then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and private schools sprang up all over the South; two appeared where I grew up (one still survives).
And, surprise! all their students were white. In the parlance of the day, these “private schools” were referred to as “seg academies.”
Contemporary efforts to divert public money to private schools are the descendants of the seg academies, all dressed up in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. Today’s rhetoric is more sophisticated and the color-separation is not so obvious, but underlying the voucher movement is a desire on the part of some to resegregate the schools with as much segregation as they can manage without being noticed.
Regardless of the cover story, attempts to divert public money to private schools are always attempts to favor the privileged while subverting the education of the rest.
Everything else is smokescreen.
