A story this week outlined how the uncapped spending on the explosive universal private school voucher program ate up nearly half a billion dollars in the last school year. Read the story here.
At the same time, anti-public school lawmakers shortchanged funding for public schools by almost the exact same amount.
This shouldn’t be surprising to elected leaders in Columbus because they know the funding for vouchers comes from the same line-item in the budget that pays for public schools. A dollar more for private schools is a dollar less for public schools. The math really is that simple.
But the universal private school voucher program is much more insidious than it appears.
Backers include billionaire Betsy DeVos, who came to Columbus earlier this year to lobby for the scheme, and the usual anti-union, privatization crowd like the Buckeye Institute, Center for Christian Virtue, the Freedom Foundation and their funders like the Koch Family.
The voucher program is anti-union. The private schools receiving voucher money do not employ union teachers, staff, cafeteria workers, and others.
The voucher program hurts public pensions. The private school employees are not paying into the State Teachers Retirement System or any of the others, and this is costing the public pension plans conservatively more than $100 million a year.
The voucher program is anti-inclusive. Your public tax dollars are going to schools that apply litmus tests like family income, academic or athletic ability, disabilities, race, religion and other criteria to accept or deny students.
The real choice is in the hands of the private school operators.
The voucher program provides refunds and rebates to wealthy families and leaves the rest of us behind.
The vast majority of the students taking vouchers were never enrolled in public schools, and there are no income caps on who is eligible for a voucher. Millionaires, billionaires can get a voucher.
The end goal here is to create two systems of schools paid for with tax dollars: one for the haves and one for the have nots.
Keep reading our emails because we will have more information on the runaway private school voucher program.
