Arizona's Dismantling of Public Education

This is just not true. And the bible was a big part of public schools long before integration. Removing it is what led to Christian education.

But to say that religion should not exist in any private school seems very un-American to me.

Why? How far does that go? No religion classes? Religious history?

No. One religion should not be established by public schools as per the constitution., but that is as far as we should go.

 

We have no idea yet. They havent really gotten a full opportunity.

 

I have no issue with that

 

I don't believe in vouchers in any way shape or form. Here is why:

Privates school's historically only allowed kids who could pass their entry exam, so the great education numbers you see are eschewed because the kids are already bright kids and that helps numbers.

We tend to just be reactive and not proactive. So why don't we change that and spend that money on building more schools so we can have smaller classrooms which translates to a better learning environment. In Fl we passed an amendment to our constitution that we have smaller classrooms, the pubs manipulated it and now it is essentially non effective.

A lot of those private schools don't have to adhere to the mandated rules that a public school has to. Teachers aren't certified or if they are they were fired from wherever they came from. We don't know what they are teaching, we don't know how safe the building is, and we have NO idea if the kids are even learning at grade level. They don't have to take mandatory testing. My DIL is a 4th grade teacher, she is exhausted trying to get these kids up to speed when the school goes under in the middle of the school year.

Now my tax dollars are going to the rich who are getting a discount on their private christian school. The Catholic schools tried to raise the price of tuition 25% so the actual cost of tuition went down 25% for the parents, but they made more money. So an $8k/year tuition went up to $12k, but the parent only ended up paying $4k because of the $8k voucher. They said they'd be dumb to leave that money on the table. Luckily they are so big it was uncovered, but how many smaller schools are doing that?

Waste of tax dollars. The so called christians would be outraged if tax dollars went to private entities that were ineffective or just gave away money to people who could well afford it on their own. I'm good with PUBLIC school choice. I really thought when they started this, it was going to be a failure because private schools would have to adhere to the mandates public schools do. LOL @ me.

 

There is nothing wrong with having both public and private schools. I feel like people get sensitive about this debate, but if you have the resources, having choices is nice.

Private schools don't have to follow certain rules, so as a parent you need to do your research and think about what you're paying for - but I think choices are inherently good.

Where this becomes a problem is when states funnel resources away from public education into private education. I don't think that should be happening. If states want to raise funds (generally through additional taxes) to provide an income based subsidy for families to have a choice to attend private schools, that is up to each state. However, that funding should never reduce investment in public education.

What Republicans are doing here is literally defunding public education in order to raise up private education.

And don't lie to me and say that isn't a major republican initiative. The Project 2025 plan basically calls for the ending of the dept. of education, and the current house committee tried to cut 80% of title 1 funding back in 2023. So - republicans, this is why leftists get angry. Because most believe public education to be a cornerstone of our sometimes functional way of life. So when one political party is out to kill it, that'll make people upset.

The idea of school choice is great, but not when it is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Extremists Are Using Lies to Undermine America’s Public Schools: We Need to Take a Stand - for an example of why people are upset.

 

Nice rant on Christian’s lol…

Good to know my two youngest kids are not seen in such bad light since they go to a private school that is not Christian affiliated.

 

I'm talking about wasting my tax dollars on something that has zero mandates compared to public. As a result we don't know we are getting our money's worth, and THAT's what you got from it? k.

If a school is private and meets your kid's needs AND you can afford it, more power to you and I think that's great. Don't ask me to subsidize it.

If they allowed moving to another public school that is better, and paid for more buses to do so, I would support that.

 

We disagree. I acknowledge you have a fair point about how controlling private schools from raising tuition to levels that are likely not necessary. But parents should be able to use vouchers to send their kids to the school they feel is best for their kids. Not where the teachers union says is best for them.

 

They can, I'm just not paying for it. If I am, they are following the same rules that public schools have to follow. Provide for special needs kids, allow gay kids or their gay parents, teachers must have a degree to teach and have background checks, standardized testing, and building security. In addition, since they mostly are a for profit entity, they will need to submit a financial statement by a qualified CPA every year.

Also forgot, teachers must be visited and observed in their classrooms to see if they are "affective".

How about that?

 

They are paying for it as well. Which is why they should be able to send their kids to the school that is best for their kids. Who is to say what rules are the best? I am not saying it is one way or the other. But to just blanket say public school rules must be followed insinuates they are somehow the right. When they may be wrong.

I have no issues with earmarking funds for special needs.

End of the day. The government spends money than ever on education. We should be helping parents get their kids to the school that beat helps them and their situation.

 

We couldn't be farther apart on this issue. If the rules aren't right then change them, otherwise if you're getting the money, you're getting the same rules. We are always reactive instead of proactive. How do we make public schools better? Some are performing way above any private school. Why? Instead of working on that, they throw money around and mix church and state along with wasting money on "schools" that really aren't schools.

I don't know where you live, but the Orlando Sentinel had a week long expose' on a several month's long investigation into the voucher schools in Fl. It was eye opening. I suspect other states are the basically the same.

 

Yeah, for the sake of tokenism

 

We are far apart on it. I have no issues with wanting certain expectations. But the one size fits all approach is inefficient and ineffective for many. Unfortunately the teachers union does not care about this. They want to hoard without concern for individual circumstances.

 

Thanks for sharing that piece. This bit should sound familiar to members of the Too Hot community:

policymakers should be focusing on how to strengthen public education and support students’ success and well-being, by expanding pre-k, addressing shortages of teachers, nurses and guidance counselors, increasing access to AP classes and career technical education pathways that lead to well-paying careers, and better equipping schools to teach critical thinking skills and address spiraling rates of youth depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Instead, politicians following Rufo’s playbook are doing the exact opposite. They are banning library books, textbooks, and news services that help students learn to identify misinformation. They are demanding teachers remain neutral on, or worse—teach both sides of—Nazism, slavery, lynching, and other historical atrocities. And they are encouraging lawsuits against teachers and school districts that teach thorough and accurate history. They are marginalizing and dehumanizing LBGTQ students and teachers and same sex families and barring students from receiving mental health services and lessons that foster their social and emotional development and well-being.

I appreciate what Diane Ravitch wrote in her blog one year ago:

dianeravitch
February 3, 2023 at 10:24 am
I try to imagine the world, our society, if the privatizers get their way. Kids will be sorted by race, religion, and ethnicity, never interacting with anyone different from themselves. The homeschoolers will know only what their parents know. No professional teachers needed. A dumbed-down, divided society, where ignorance is widespread.

 

"Junk articles" must equal anything that disagrees with our resident Dental Office Manager's preconceived opinions! Fortunately, science doesn't work this way. And of the intellectually curious, there is plenty to read. I apologize for the last link. Wrong one. I meant to post links like this one, or this one, both showing closing schools reduced the spread of COVID and saved lives. The second one is interesting, because in Taipei City, Taiwan, the study showed school closures had the biggest effect on older kids, and people over 65. Why people over 65? Because many kids live in multi-generational homes in Taiwan, and closing schools stopped the kids from getting COVID and infecting their elders in the home. Not as common in the US, but also not unheard of, as over 6.7 million kids live with a grandparent, and over 2 million have a grandparent as the primary caregiver.

Now education is important. Extremely important, especially in my household. I'm third generation college grad, and both my wife and I hold advanced degrees. There is very little I'd put above the education of my kids. One of those is the health and well-being of the educators. They have a very difficult job and have to navigate parents, administrators, politics, the public and large, and more. COVID made their jobs even harder. Because now, not only did they have to deal with the parents who didn't care, they had to deal with selfish parents who treated these highly trained professionals as expendable and demanded they put their own lives at risk to teach their kids! The result was a 10% lift in teachers who thought about retiring overall, and a 34% increase in teachers 55 and older. I don't know about you, but I would prefer more experienced teachers at the school. Even if my kid doesn't have one, the younger teachers can benefit from the experience of the older ones. You can even say forcing many of these teachers to retire could be the cause of generational damage!

Now, back to the original topic. Vouchers are good in theory, but in reality, they do little to nothing to help those that may need it most. And end up helping those who already are advantaged. The average house price in Paradise Valley is $3.4 million, because it includes many of the estates in the hills on Camelback Mountain where you see stars/athletes with homes worth north of $10 million. There are homes less than $500k in the area, and some apartment complexes as well that aren't cheap, but more affordable for middle to upper-middle class persons. These of the people who take advantage of the ESA so they can afford tuition at Phoenix Country Day School (located in Paradise Valley). The single mother living in West Phoenix, 45 minutes away in rush hour traffic still can't afford PCDS, even with the ESA. Nor do they have access to transportation to get their kid to/from PCDS on a daily basis; and Phoenix has notoriously bad public transportation, as it grew post WWII with the automobile.

I can assure you, there is nothing like PCDS in West Phoenix for these kids to attend. The private and charter schools in this area are no better than the public schools for the most part. ESAs do nothing to help these kids. And removing monies from public education only hurts them. But unless you make ESAs needs based, what can you do? And if ESAs are needs based, is that fair?

Last but not least, this is the current Arizona Superintendent of Public Education, Tom Horne. Like I said before, he looks like a turtle. I'd say he's as smart as the average turtle too, but I wouldn't want to insult turtles.

 

What truth? There are zero facts and figures to that. Just a series of statements you’d apparently prefer to be true.

I’m sure there were plenty of schools that predated desegregation, but just because some previously existed doesn’t change the overall trend that new ones were created and enrollment surged across the board. It also ignores the obvious motivating factor for many of those people who magically found a new religious faith after their public schools were integrated.

Some key facts and figures:

• Private school enrollment surged 48% in the South in response to desegregation
• Mississippi was still fighting desegregation into the 1970’s, challenging the IRS non-discrimination rules, Bob Jones University fought its race based admissions case until 1983!
• By 1980, the South’s share of private school enrollment had gone from 11% to 24%
• At these schools (so-called segregation academies), 70+% of students attended schools that were at least 90% white

A History of Private Schools and Race in the American South

There has also been research that Charter school movement has caused a further surge in “resegregation” in recent years, i would suspect also in the south and Midwest, though I’m not sure it’s broken down like that…

 

Don't agree with vouchers and reducing public schools for many of the same reasons posited on this thread. If you ask where does the tax money come from, most often it's going to be property tax. Sometimes a sales tax referendum.
If your property taxes are about 10K a year, probably about 20% of that goes to schools - maybe. So you get a 2K dollar voucher. That doesn't cover anything since most private schools (religious or not) are 15K to 20K per year so those vouchers aren't covering the cost of private schools. And if you can afford to send your kid (or multiple kids) to private school at 20k per kid, you aren't worried about the voucher in the first place. And it's so small that if you couldn't afford it before, the voucher isn't enough to cover it anyway.

 

No one is debating that the south did many horrible things in this regard. I was speaking in general.religion was in public schools and its removal is what led to many faiths starting their own schools.

Did Mississippi have racist motives? Of course they did.

 

Yep. Brown v. Board of Ed. was decided in 1954, the year before i was born but i was 17yo before i shared a schoolroom with a black child in a city in Ga that took pride in their good race relations. And as segregation began to happen suddenly several of my friends started attending (non-religious and religious) Academies. We all knew why.

 

Ah, yes. Forgive me. Sometimes I naively believe in that whole one-set-of-rules-for-all ideal of a liberal democratic society. So when organizations hire or promote women or minorities over others measurably more qualified by the standards of the trade or when Hollywood, say, remakes old stories just replacing the original characters with women or minorities (Black Spiderman, Black Wonder Years, Black Revenge, etc), why that's just diversity, equity, and inclusion. But when private schools recruit to give gifted underprivileged students better opportunity or to bring in more athletic talent, why that's just tokenism.

Gratitude for your instruction.