It is lost on a lot of people that the majority of students in many states have little to no access to private schools, or there is a private religious school parents do not want their children attending. Every dollar given to private schools, religious or otherwise, is a dollar taken away from public schools that are likely under-funded to begin with. At the end of the day, Republicans hate public education.
They don't just hate public education. They hate ALL education. The levels of reality denial we see from them testifies to that fact. They want children, especially poor children, ignorant and indoctrinated rather than educated and empowered. They know that a good education is a powerful anti poverty tool, and they know that deep indoctrination is a powerful tool of control. At the end of the day, it is all about maintaining their power and control so they can keep those they see as less than under their thumb.
And, I don't understand why there isn't more outrage, via petitions, letters, etc., to demand Congress change the situation we are in re our educational system.
It's more to divert/steal the money from public schools to fatten the wallets of their donors. Some of the private schools are owned and managed by the private equities the real snakes and vultures leeching communities and countries for their insatiable greed.
It seems that the real reason for the bloated military budget is to fund the private armies=making obscenely rich oligarchs more obscenely richer.
Why is any government work as soon as it seems well funded lands into the laps of big corporations?
With rethugs it's always grift which is absolutely apparent from their fealty to the tiny feet of their orangecriminallyindicted lifelongconman.
All this clearly indicate that they want to privatize=pee2025 and be run, into ground by their cfoligarchs who will then vacation in luxurious places with the taxcuts and incomes from the ruins of America.
I'm originally from Kentucky, and I understand the value of the public school system. The article clearly demonstrates how removing public school funding would hurt the vast majority of Kentuckians while benefitting a select few. That, in itself, is more than enough reason to reject the proposed amendment.
This is simply another power grab by Christian nationalists to reshape America in their own warped image and to provide generations of subordinate workers and voters.
State sponsored religious indoctrination. A mediocre education for wealthy children and an almost nonexistent education for poor children. Couple that with the NSGOP support for relaxing and eliminating child labor laws and we see that they don't want to turn the clock back to th 1950s. They want to turn back to to the 1850s. And they say WE are the ones taking freedom away. The (pragmatically) two sides are NOT the same.
Wealthy children will be unaffected. Their parents currently send them to prep schools. If this passes their parents will send them to the exact same prep schools, but on the taxpayer's dime.
But by reducing the money going into the public school system and providing a financial incentive to poorer people to either homeschool their kids or send their kids to substandard schools, wealthy parents also "pull the ladder up after them." I.e. they reduce the competition their kids will face for high-end careers, because now middle- and lower- class Kentucky-ans will not get the education they need to compete for those careers.
It's worse than just sending them on the "taxpayer's dime". What has happened over and over when vouchers are passed universally is those schools raise their tuition by an amount almost totaling the amount of the voucher. Rich parents don't see much difference. Poor parents are still shut our of the private school. The schools may then offer tuition assistance to the students they feel deserve it thereby ensuring that their academic record looks better than the public schools giving them more fodder for next year and spreading the lies to other states.
Here in Arizona we have seen a growth industry in private schools popping up, usually with a name that includes words like "leadership" or "preparatory". These schools often hide their Christian Nationalist's agenda but they talk about "values" a lot. These are not non-profits either. They extoll the virtues of paying teachers more. But make no mistake, the CEO of the schools make a lot more.
Absolutely! The education of the population should be a priority of our nation. It is, after all, an investment in our future. A true conservative party would fund our education not try to destroy it.
Both of my local grand kids went to a private religious school. A high end school that regularly sends their graduates to the Ivy League. My grands are in their twenties now, and thoroughly hate the school they graduated from.
Troublesh00ter and I like to post this one on the subject of our government propping up religion and religion picking the pockets of everyone...
"When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, 'tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one,"
-- Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Dr. Richard Price dated October 9th 1780
We don’t have money enough to build enough public schools for all our children, so let’s give what money we do have to private schools that won’t educate all our children.
That makes sense. NOT!
I can’t believe that I am this much smarter than the average person, but apparently I’m smart enough to see this con and others aren’t. I hope the people of Kentucky are smarter than these jackasses trying to steal from them.
Well, you are not alone in thinking that! I'm in Arkansas and it's like they are proud of being ignorant. This is the Confederate diaspora in the 21st century. Our current governor is only there because of her car salesman-turned preacher-turned politician grifter father.
Ah yes! The one the public has never seen! But it's ok to let your uneducated children marry, have children of their own, and work in dangerous meat packing plants as long as they worship as they are told. We didn't get our reproductive rights on the ballot because the SOS & others kept changing the rules. Moving is not an option--voting all these lying Republicans out of all offices is mandatory in all southern states if we want to move ahead with the rest of the country. Peace 💙
I still say it is quite a coincedence that Ol' Mike knew a kiddy-diddling highway patrolman, to introduce Josh Duggar to for "counseling" (on how not to get caught)
Both of them are in jail, now for their molestating crimes. I swear he shares their sick "hobby" It also explains why his kids are such awful human beings.
So true! There's a reason the car dealerships, school boards and preachers in southern towns are still living like they did when they set up this system back in the early 20th century: wealthy whites rule and everyone else be damned. Voting BLUE!
It's only somewhat a con. Voucher systems give some parents exactly what they want. I.e. an all-white school, or a school where their kids won't learn evolution or sex ed, or maybe a school where their kids will be taught there is no discrimination, flouride in toothpaste is a plot by Jews and antebellum slavery benefited the slaves.
All of which should be a crime. Children have the right to a well-rounded fact-based education. Parents have an obligation to see that they have that. Even when it contains facts that make parents uncomfortable.
The entire purpose of voucher laws is to loot the public school system of dollars. The GOP doesn't believe in the common good. It believes in greed. And all those hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are just lying around going to schools without anyone getting a cut? Absurd! So they come up with ways to funnel that money to their friends and donors and churches.
The secondary purpose is to keep children from getting educated out of fundamentalism and conservativism.
“Common school system”. Does that mean only commoners attend public schools? The hoi polloi? The “noblemen” apparently don’t need it but will accept the generosity of the religious thieves who would destroy what’s left of an already tenuous school system.
We are very close to reviving serfdom. The poor will receive even less education than they are now, creating an elite, educated class. The thing is all these middle-class families who think their children will be in the elite will find they can't flip burgers without help from the computer. Honestly, it's nearly that bad now in the fast-food industry.
I have been told by more than a few people that omnipotence being limited by (for example) logical concerns is a very serious idea taken very seriously by very serious philosophers.
Not being a serious philosopher (or indeed, any other kind of philosopher), I am of the opinion that if you mean all-powerful, you should say all-powerful, and if you mean not all-powerful you should probably just say VERY powerful. But then, I'm a drafter, and we're known for being pedantic.
I think so. You'd hardly spend years of your life getting a degree in theology if you didn't take it seriously I would have thought. Even in NZ it's relatively expensive. And there aren't many job openings for theologians either except maybe in academia? Certainly not here, might be different in the elsewhere. Of course there are those like convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza who pretend to be theologians of some sort, not very successfully from what I can see.
Had he been real, Jesus would've been short and had dark skin/kinky hair. Little doubt that the Rethuglikkkans would ignore THAT Jesus. They want tall, blonde haired, blue-eyed Jesus.
How about ... 𝗡𝗢!!! It's bad enough that Kentucky ranks 34th in education currently. Allowing a voucher system to provide "choice" would likely hammer their public schools that much harder and cause their status to slip even further down. They've been in Ohio since 1996, and I suspect the only reason why my daughter's education wasn't compromised is because Solon, Ohio is a relatively wealthy community with considerable property taxes funding a highly ranked school system. I would imagine there are communities in the Bluegrass State that are as fortunate. There are likely many more that AREN'T.
And yet, rather than work to enhance funding for public schools, Kentucky is looking to shoot themselves in the foot. As Dr. Peter Venkman would say, "Tasty pick ... BONEHEAD!"
This is SOP for conservatives everywhere. Staff something of funds so that it can't work. Claim it doesn't work, so you have to privatise it. Any public system, doesn't matter what it is – from railways to schools.
I'm sorry to say that my native state of Wisconsin, once the most progressive in the nation, got the country started down this regrettable road back in 1990. Milwaukee Public Schools faced a whole lot of problems, and parents there — including many who normally inhabited the left end of the political spectrum — despaired of the public-school system ever solving them. So they asked the state legislature to authorize an EXPERIMENTAL program of letting a LIMITED number of their pupils attend private schools with a public subsidy. The experiment was supposed to run for 5 years, and testing was supposed to indicate whether the voucher kids ended up performing better than their public-school counterparts.
Short story: No, they didn't, but by then the program was entrenched and had a strong constituency arguing for its continuation. Not only did it get continued, it got expanded, first to Racine, then to progressively more students in those 2 districts, and finally statewide. Now public schools are left struggling with revenue limits, tax caps, constantly shrinking state aid, and massive uncertainty as to how many students they may have to serve from year to year and sometimes from month to month.
It was the classic example of the camel's nose in the tent. And now practically every state in the nation has camel poop all over their public-school tents.
Tests, standards, meeting similar requirements. Budget rules saying voucher money can't be taken from public school budgets, rules preventing private schools from simply raising tuition in response. Rules preventing private schools from 'student-shopping.' There are, frankly, many many safeguards and regulations that States could implement to make their voucher systems work at least meh.
Conservative Republicans have worked tirelessly to avoid all of them.
Rather than that, why not get rid of private schools as fulling a parent's obligation to educate their children? If parents want to send their kids for additional schooling (or indoctrination), do it in addition to public school.
Seems excessively coercive. The state has an interest in educated citizens and in using tax dollars on things that benefit the public. It's unnecessarily authoritarian to restrict citizen choice beyond what is needed to fulfill those interests. So standards all kids must meet? Those make sense (and we haven't even reached that yet!). Public schools which get all kids to those standards? Also makes sense (and again, we're not even to that point yet). Preventing and forbidding people from doing stuff on their own time and dime which gets their kids to that same standard? Not exactly a 'free country'.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg to have some rich family get their kid across the diploma line on their own. So long as they pay their taxes and the kid meets the diploma requirements.
Nothing in my proposal prevents parents from getting extra education for their kids. It's no more coercive than requiring a child go to school until 16 regardless of their parent's wishes. It is defending the rights of the child.
As to picking my pocket, it does. Additional cost of oversight of these private schools to ensure they are teaching the standards, following anti-discrimination laws, and not abusing children. All of which we know happens because a lack of oversight has seen many of these come to light after years of wrong doing,.
The rights of the child are defended so long as they get a good education. Dictating *how* should be limited to what is necessary to achieve that, with freedom of citizens to do what they want restricted only as much as needed to achieve that.
That's maybe a bit hypothetical. More empirically, I don't think *any* western country has ever come to the conclusion of "no private schools, only private after-school tutors" is necessary to achieve the goal of educating all kids. If you have an example, let me know. AFAIK, not even the most socialized modern western country goes as far into state controlling K-12 education as you are suggesting. Which makes it really difficult to view that sort of system as 'necessary for the good of the children.' Maybe the USSR did that and China under Mao did that? Those aren't exactly role models to follow. As I said, that sort of system seems excessively authoritarian.
It costs money to educate a kid in school - floor space, teachers, resources, etc. So long as the cost of the government oversight of the kid in the private system is in the ballpark of that, it's not picking your pocket, you're just paying about the same amount for the same result in a different way.
The main sticking point of voucher schools, as I see it, is conservatives doing everything they can to undermine 'for the same result' while also doing everything they can to avoid paying into the public system. But a kid getting an equivalent education at a private school for about the same per capita student spending is certainly not impossible to achieve, nor do I see any reason to forbid it - only 'well regulate' it.
"It was the classic example of the camel's nose in the tent. And now practically every state in the nation has camel poop all over their public-school tents."
It is lost on a lot of people that the majority of students in many states have little to no access to private schools, or there is a private religious school parents do not want their children attending. Every dollar given to private schools, religious or otherwise, is a dollar taken away from public schools that are likely under-funded to begin with. At the end of the day, Republicans hate public education.
They don't just hate public education. They hate ALL education. The levels of reality denial we see from them testifies to that fact. They want children, especially poor children, ignorant and indoctrinated rather than educated and empowered. They know that a good education is a powerful anti poverty tool, and they know that deep indoctrination is a powerful tool of control. At the end of the day, it is all about maintaining their power and control so they can keep those they see as less than under their thumb.
The creation of a permanent American underclass is an age-old Republican dream. It starts with giving kids inferior educations.
Sarah Huckabee Slanders is on it!
And, I don't understand why there isn't more outrage, via petitions, letters, etc., to demand Congress change the situation we are in re our educational system.
Well, the Democrats are coming for your guns and Bibles so you don't dare vote for one. Mind-numbing stupidity is the main reason.
It's more to divert/steal the money from public schools to fatten the wallets of their donors. Some of the private schools are owned and managed by the private equities the real snakes and vultures leeching communities and countries for their insatiable greed.
It seems that the real reason for the bloated military budget is to fund the private armies=making obscenely rich oligarchs more obscenely richer.
Why is any government work as soon as it seems well funded lands into the laps of big corporations?
With rethugs it's always grift which is absolutely apparent from their fealty to the tiny feet of their orangecriminallyindicted lifelongconman.
All this clearly indicate that they want to privatize=pee2025 and be run, into ground by their cfoligarchs who will then vacation in luxurious places with the taxcuts and incomes from the ruins of America.
They've been trying to privitize it, and steal the money, since I've been alive and the same with ths Post Office.
Mandatory:
Tax the damned churches, already. They want taxpayer dollars? Then they have to pay to play.
Or simply stipulate a single condition to receive gubment welfare: objectively demonstrate your god exists. That'll shut 'em down quick.
This can't be stated often enough or loud enough. Uppercase and bold, multiple exclamation points.
I'm originally from Kentucky, and I understand the value of the public school system. The article clearly demonstrates how removing public school funding would hurt the vast majority of Kentuckians while benefitting a select few. That, in itself, is more than enough reason to reject the proposed amendment.
This is simply another power grab by Christian nationalists to reshape America in their own warped image and to provide generations of subordinate workers and voters.
🎯🎯🎯
State sponsored religious indoctrination. A mediocre education for wealthy children and an almost nonexistent education for poor children. Couple that with the NSGOP support for relaxing and eliminating child labor laws and we see that they don't want to turn the clock back to th 1950s. They want to turn back to to the 1850s. And they say WE are the ones taking freedom away. The (pragmatically) two sides are NOT the same.
Wealthy children will be unaffected. Their parents currently send them to prep schools. If this passes their parents will send them to the exact same prep schools, but on the taxpayer's dime.
But by reducing the money going into the public school system and providing a financial incentive to poorer people to either homeschool their kids or send their kids to substandard schools, wealthy parents also "pull the ladder up after them." I.e. they reduce the competition their kids will face for high-end careers, because now middle- and lower- class Kentucky-ans will not get the education they need to compete for those careers.
It's worse than just sending them on the "taxpayer's dime". What has happened over and over when vouchers are passed universally is those schools raise their tuition by an amount almost totaling the amount of the voucher. Rich parents don't see much difference. Poor parents are still shut our of the private school. The schools may then offer tuition assistance to the students they feel deserve it thereby ensuring that their academic record looks better than the public schools giving them more fodder for next year and spreading the lies to other states.
Here in Arizona we have seen a growth industry in private schools popping up, usually with a name that includes words like "leadership" or "preparatory". These schools often hide their Christian Nationalist's agenda but they talk about "values" a lot. These are not non-profits either. They extoll the virtues of paying teachers more. But make no mistake, the CEO of the schools make a lot more.
The education of our children should never be thought of as an industry or business.
Absolutely! The education of the population should be a priority of our nation. It is, after all, an investment in our future. A true conservative party would fund our education not try to destroy it.
Public education was a priority of the founding fathers. The current Republican party cares nothing about the public.
Both of my local grand kids went to a private religious school. A high end school that regularly sends their graduates to the Ivy League. My grands are in their twenties now, and thoroughly hate the school they graduated from.
It's always projection with those of a limited imagination.
Troublesh00ter and I like to post this one on the subject of our government propping up religion and religion picking the pockets of everyone...
"When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, 'tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one,"
-- Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Dr. Richard Price dated October 9th 1780
Old Ben was a smart cookie. Too bad the evangelicals only like his picture.
Only in green.
They'd like him even less if they knew he was a Deist and not a Christian. Here's what he said in his own Autobiography...
goodreads.com/quotes/341572-my-parents-had-early-given-me-religious-impressions-and-brought
And a libertine, the ladies of the french court loved him! And he was a nudist, though he called it "air bathing."
"But officer, I'm not flashing. I'm not exposing myself. I'm air bathing. It's legitimate, really."
Newton is a cookie. Ben is a stove.
👍👍👍
We don’t have money enough to build enough public schools for all our children, so let’s give what money we do have to private schools that won’t educate all our children.
That makes sense. NOT!
I can’t believe that I am this much smarter than the average person, but apparently I’m smart enough to see this con and others aren’t. I hope the people of Kentucky are smarter than these jackasses trying to steal from them.
Well, you are not alone in thinking that! I'm in Arkansas and it's like they are proud of being ignorant. This is the Confederate diaspora in the 21st century. Our current governor is only there because of her car salesman-turned preacher-turned politician grifter father.
The one with the infamous overpriced lectern ?
Ah yes! The one the public has never seen! But it's ok to let your uneducated children marry, have children of their own, and work in dangerous meat packing plants as long as they worship as they are told. We didn't get our reproductive rights on the ballot because the SOS & others kept changing the rules. Moving is not an option--voting all these lying Republicans out of all offices is mandatory in all southern states if we want to move ahead with the rest of the country. Peace 💙
I still say it is quite a coincedence that Ol' Mike knew a kiddy-diddling highway patrolman, to introduce Josh Duggar to for "counseling" (on how not to get caught)
Both of them are in jail, now for their molestating crimes. I swear he shares their sick "hobby" It also explains why his kids are such awful human beings.
So true! There's a reason the car dealerships, school boards and preachers in southern towns are still living like they did when they set up this system back in the early 20th century: wealthy whites rule and everyone else be damned. Voting BLUE!
It's only somewhat a con. Voucher systems give some parents exactly what they want. I.e. an all-white school, or a school where their kids won't learn evolution or sex ed, or maybe a school where their kids will be taught there is no discrimination, flouride in toothpaste is a plot by Jews and antebellum slavery benefited the slaves.
It is 100% a con, it’s just that there are parents that are in on it.
We have a winnah!🎯
All of which should be a crime. Children have the right to a well-rounded fact-based education. Parents have an obligation to see that they have that. Even when it contains facts that make parents uncomfortable.
The entire purpose of voucher laws is to loot the public school system of dollars. The GOP doesn't believe in the common good. It believes in greed. And all those hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are just lying around going to schools without anyone getting a cut? Absurd! So they come up with ways to funnel that money to their friends and donors and churches.
The secondary purpose is to keep children from getting educated out of fundamentalism and conservativism.
Spot on I'm afraid.
“Common school system”. Does that mean only commoners attend public schools? The hoi polloi? The “noblemen” apparently don’t need it but will accept the generosity of the religious thieves who would destroy what’s left of an already tenuous school system.
We are very close to reviving serfdom. The poor will receive even less education than they are now, creating an elite, educated class. The thing is all these middle-class families who think their children will be in the elite will find they can't flip burgers without help from the computer. Honestly, it's nearly that bad now in the fast-food industry.
One thing Christians keep demonstrating about their god - he sure needs a lotta help for somebody omnipotent.
Then again, maybe he's just got that limited omnipotence I've had argued at me from time to time...
Actually, it's a millenia old typo, it's omnIMpotent.
Thanks. Im am borrowing this.
Limited omnipotence. Is that like jumbo shrimp?
Limited omnipotence is an oxymoron.
I have been told by more than a few people that omnipotence being limited by (for example) logical concerns is a very serious idea taken very seriously by very serious philosophers.
Not being a serious philosopher (or indeed, any other kind of philosopher), I am of the opinion that if you mean all-powerful, you should say all-powerful, and if you mean not all-powerful you should probably just say VERY powerful. But then, I'm a drafter, and we're known for being pedantic.
Ah, but is it taken seriously by theologists?
Is ANYTHING taken seriously by them?
As in "should we seriously think about this"?
I think so. You'd hardly spend years of your life getting a degree in theology if you didn't take it seriously I would have thought. Even in NZ it's relatively expensive. And there aren't many job openings for theologians either except maybe in academia? Certainly not here, might be different in the elsewhere. Of course there are those like convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza who pretend to be theologians of some sort, not very successfully from what I can see.
It’s like “religious ethics”.
If he's really omnipotent and refuses to help, that's not "limited omnipotence". That's god being an asshole.
goodreads.com/quotes/8199-is-god-willing-to-prevent-evil-but-not-able-then
"I was prayin' last night when an angel took the line.
He said 'I'm gonna have to put you on hold for a time.'
I said 'Hold like hell! Lemme talk to the boss.'
He said 'Sorry (sorry) sinner, it's the boss's day off'.
And I realized then that the wages of sin
Was two bucks an hour and work weekends."
- The Rainmakers, The Wages of Sin
Yet more Christian grooming being forwarded by the GQP, who don't even know the teachings of their own imaginary messiah, much less follow them.
Which imaginary messiah? Regular Jesus or Republican Jesus?
Had he been real, Jesus would've been short and had dark skin/kinky hair. Little doubt that the Rethuglikkkans would ignore THAT Jesus. They want tall, blonde haired, blue-eyed Jesus.
European Colonization Jesus.
Republican supply-side Jesus also.
DJT
Trump is an imaginary messiah. Unfortunately for America, he physically exists.
How about ... 𝗡𝗢!!! It's bad enough that Kentucky ranks 34th in education currently. Allowing a voucher system to provide "choice" would likely hammer their public schools that much harder and cause their status to slip even further down. They've been in Ohio since 1996, and I suspect the only reason why my daughter's education wasn't compromised is because Solon, Ohio is a relatively wealthy community with considerable property taxes funding a highly ranked school system. I would imagine there are communities in the Bluegrass State that are as fortunate. There are likely many more that AREN'T.
And yet, rather than work to enhance funding for public schools, Kentucky is looking to shoot themselves in the foot. As Dr. Peter Venkman would say, "Tasty pick ... BONEHEAD!"
This is SOP for conservatives everywhere. Staff something of funds so that it can't work. Claim it doesn't work, so you have to privatise it. Any public system, doesn't matter what it is – from railways to schools.
To government.
I'm sorry to say that my native state of Wisconsin, once the most progressive in the nation, got the country started down this regrettable road back in 1990. Milwaukee Public Schools faced a whole lot of problems, and parents there — including many who normally inhabited the left end of the political spectrum — despaired of the public-school system ever solving them. So they asked the state legislature to authorize an EXPERIMENTAL program of letting a LIMITED number of their pupils attend private schools with a public subsidy. The experiment was supposed to run for 5 years, and testing was supposed to indicate whether the voucher kids ended up performing better than their public-school counterparts.
Short story: No, they didn't, but by then the program was entrenched and had a strong constituency arguing for its continuation. Not only did it get continued, it got expanded, first to Racine, then to progressively more students in those 2 districts, and finally statewide. Now public schools are left struggling with revenue limits, tax caps, constantly shrinking state aid, and massive uncertainty as to how many students they may have to serve from year to year and sometimes from month to month.
It was the classic example of the camel's nose in the tent. And now practically every state in the nation has camel poop all over their public-school tents.
Tests, standards, meeting similar requirements. Budget rules saying voucher money can't be taken from public school budgets, rules preventing private schools from simply raising tuition in response. Rules preventing private schools from 'student-shopping.' There are, frankly, many many safeguards and regulations that States could implement to make their voucher systems work at least meh.
Conservative Republicans have worked tirelessly to avoid all of them.
Rather than that, why not get rid of private schools as fulling a parent's obligation to educate their children? If parents want to send their kids for additional schooling (or indoctrination), do it in addition to public school.
Seems excessively coercive. The state has an interest in educated citizens and in using tax dollars on things that benefit the public. It's unnecessarily authoritarian to restrict citizen choice beyond what is needed to fulfill those interests. So standards all kids must meet? Those make sense (and we haven't even reached that yet!). Public schools which get all kids to those standards? Also makes sense (and again, we're not even to that point yet). Preventing and forbidding people from doing stuff on their own time and dime which gets their kids to that same standard? Not exactly a 'free country'.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg to have some rich family get their kid across the diploma line on their own. So long as they pay their taxes and the kid meets the diploma requirements.
Nothing in my proposal prevents parents from getting extra education for their kids. It's no more coercive than requiring a child go to school until 16 regardless of their parent's wishes. It is defending the rights of the child.
As to picking my pocket, it does. Additional cost of oversight of these private schools to ensure they are teaching the standards, following anti-discrimination laws, and not abusing children. All of which we know happens because a lack of oversight has seen many of these come to light after years of wrong doing,.
The rights of the child are defended so long as they get a good education. Dictating *how* should be limited to what is necessary to achieve that, with freedom of citizens to do what they want restricted only as much as needed to achieve that.
That's maybe a bit hypothetical. More empirically, I don't think *any* western country has ever come to the conclusion of "no private schools, only private after-school tutors" is necessary to achieve the goal of educating all kids. If you have an example, let me know. AFAIK, not even the most socialized modern western country goes as far into state controlling K-12 education as you are suggesting. Which makes it really difficult to view that sort of system as 'necessary for the good of the children.' Maybe the USSR did that and China under Mao did that? Those aren't exactly role models to follow. As I said, that sort of system seems excessively authoritarian.
It costs money to educate a kid in school - floor space, teachers, resources, etc. So long as the cost of the government oversight of the kid in the private system is in the ballpark of that, it's not picking your pocket, you're just paying about the same amount for the same result in a different way.
The main sticking point of voucher schools, as I see it, is conservatives doing everything they can to undermine 'for the same result' while also doing everything they can to avoid paying into the public system. But a kid getting an equivalent education at a private school for about the same per capita student spending is certainly not impossible to achieve, nor do I see any reason to forbid it - only 'well regulate' it.
Most of the costs you mention are already being paid for public schools.
It is to protect the rights of the student. Since when has separate "but equal" ever been a good thing?
"It was the classic example of the camel's nose in the tent. And now practically every state in the nation has camel poop all over their public-school tents."
Your imagery is very apt and to the point.
Idiots gonna ideate.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d332d175b3978a2c7f520ed74c26edf6e6bfd74e101811ed926020f15932f9b4.jpg
Somebody understood the assignment. Somebody else did not.
https://i.imgflip.com/2jiddr.jpg
Oh, snap! :D
A lot of community notes on Twitter (i.e., a lot of fake news on Twitter).