Why Are So Many Democrats Behind Backdoor School Voucher Expansion in Pennsylvania? by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/why-are-so-many-democrats-behind-backdoor-school-voucher-expansion-in-pennsylvania/

Democrats are supposed to be liberals, progressives.

That means upholding the Constitution and the Separation of Church and State.

So why are so many Pennsylvania Democrats sponsoring an expansion of the state’s de facto school voucher bill?

A total of 11 out of 84 sponsors of HB 250 are Democrats. The bill would expand the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs.

The Commonwealth already diverts $200 million of business taxes to private and parochial schools. That’s money that should be going to support our struggling public school system.

The new bill would add $50 million to each program for a total of $100 million more flushed down the drain.

Pennsylvania has a budget deficit. We’ve cut almost $1 billion a year from public schools. We can’t afford to burn an additional $300 million on private and church schools.

We expect Republicans to support this regressive nonsense. Especially in gerrymandered Pennsylvania, they’ve gone further and further right to please their Tea Party base and avoid being primaried.

But the few Democrats left in the House and Senate are likewise in districts that would never vote Republican. You’d expect them to get more and more progressive. Instead, even here we see them taking steps to the right!

Democratic sponsors of the bill are almost exclusively from the state’s urban centers – Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

They are:

Vanessa Lowery Brown (Philadelphia County)

Donna Bullock (Philadelphia County)

Dom Costa (Allegheny County)

Daniel J. Deasy (Allegheny County)

Michael J. Driscoll (Philadelphia County)

Jordan A. Harris (Philadelphia County)

William F. Keller (Philadelphia County)

William C. Kortz II (Allegheny County)

Joanna E. McClinton (Delaware & Philadelphia County)

Harry Readshaw (Allegheny County)

Mark Rozzi (Berks County)

These corporate tax giveaways are based on the premise that our public schools are failures and that students must be rescued from them. The Commonwealth has developed a list of approximately 400 “failing schools” and created a voucher-like system allowing students living near them to take public taxpayer money to go to private and religious schools. Students can also go to another public school in a different district, if they will accept them. However, few public schools take part in the program because school boards know it’s just another attempt to weaken their districts.

How does the state define a “failing school”?

Partially it’s based on standardized test scores. Districts with the bottom 15% of reading and math scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA) and Keystone tests are supposed to earn this label. However, the state has been notorious for including districts that actually are making academic progress.

Since low test scores are highly correlated with poverty, that’s the real indicator. If you live in a poor enough district, you’re probably eligible.

What about charter schools?

It’s funny you asked. Though they often have subpar test scores, they rarely are included on the state’s list of “failing schools.” They even exclude most of the state’s execrable cyber charter schools. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that students in every single Pennsylvania cyber charter school performed “significantly worse” in reading and math than their peers in conventional public schools. But somehow that’s generally not failing enough to earn you a voucher-like tax credit.

How can we tell that students at private and parochial schools are doing better than those in public schools?

We can’t.

The scholarship organizations have no auditing requirements and almost no reporting requirements. Moreover, private and parochial schools don’t have to take the federally-mandated standardized tests! So there’s no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison!

But here’s the best part. The EITC law prohibits state administrators from requesting any information related to academic achievement. You’re not even allowed to ask!

However, the law goes out of its way to remove regulations on how these tax dollars are spent. For instance, schools taking these tax credits can spend as much as 20% of the money to cover pure administrative costs.

Yet the public schools are still responsible for many of the costs of students living in their attendance areas but who use these de facto vouchers. For instance, there’s no limit to how far away an EITC student can go with their publicly-subsidized scholarship. But the student’s home district is legally obligated to provide transportation for up to ten miles.

Vouchers have been repeatedly defeated on every referendum held on the subject in the entire country. One of the reasons people have been up in arms against Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Education Secretary has been her support of vouchers.

What do voters have to do to tell legislators that they don’t want school vouchers – no matter what you call them? What do voters have to do to show that they support our public school system – a system that despite being underfunded and weighed down with corporate education reforms remains one of the best in the world?

And when will Pennsylvania’s Democrats start acting like Democrats on the subject?

Pennsylvania: No School Property Tax for the Rich, Poor Still Pay by Steven Singer

Originally posted at:https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/pennsylvania-no-school-property-tax-for-the-rich-poor-still-pay/

Eliminating Property tax to fund public schools sounds like a great idea!

Until you read the fine print.

Because what Pennsylvania legislators are proposing won’t actually eliminate property taxes – unless you’re rich.

And it won’t ensure students get the funding they need.

And it will limit school boards’ local control.

But it will benefit the rich and big corporations, which is really the only reason we’re talking about it – AGAIN.

Let me break it down for you.

First, the bill being shopped around is called the Property Tax Independence Act or SB 76. It would get rid of all property taxes used to fund public schools and replace them with increases in sales and income taxes.

Somehow these increases would need to generate and additional $12 billion a year in revenue so that we can keep funding our schools at the present level. That’s some tax increase – and guess who’s going to pay the bulk of it – YOU.

Guess who’s not going to pay much of it – the huge corporations who used to pay property taxes on all those commercial, industrial, oil and gas properties.

This is a huge giveaway to big business, and it’s a substantial hike for regular Commonwealth citizens like you and me.

But that’s not all!

If you live in a poor school district, you’ll still have to pay property taxes. That’s right – if your district is in debt, you’ll still get a property tax bill to pay it off.

Considering that the state cut almost $1 billion in school funding for the past 6 years and that most districts have had to go into debt, increase taxes or both, you’re probably not going to see your property taxes go away anytime soon.

They might go down up to 40%. Or they might not go down at all. AND you still have to pay higher sales and income taxes.

But here’s the best part.

Pennsylvania has the dubious distinction of being the national leader in unfair school funding.

We spend 33% more money on our rich students than on our poor ones. That’s the greatest disparity in the entire country!

And that’s saying something in a nation where spending more on wealthy kids is the norm.

However, this new bill won’t do anything to change that. In fact, it will lock-in that disparity.

Rich districts that today spend $23,000 per student will still spend $23,000, and poor districts that today spend $8,000 per student will still spend $8,000. But instead of your tax dollars going to the kids in your community, they’ll go to the state to be distributed everywhere. This means folks living in poor neighborhoods will probably be paying higher taxes so that they can fund the wealthiest kids. Likewise, rich parents will probably pay less while the difference is made up from taxes collected from the poor.

Call me crazy, but that just isn’t fair.
Finally, it takes away a lot of the local control from your local school board.

At present, if your local district has needs, your board can meet them by raising taxes. But under this bill, the only entity that can do that is the legislature.

I know, I know – your taxes are already too high. But the issue is who is more suited to making that decision – Harrisburg or your own community?

This bill is nothing new. Legislators have been trying to sneak it through for years.

Back in 2015 it passed the House but was defeated in the Senate when the Lt. Governor cast the deciding ballot against it. In 2013, it almost passed as an amendment to another bill, but the nonpartisan Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office ruined it by projecting a $1 billion shortfall within four years if it were passed.

However, the makeup of the Senate has changed. Now we have two new members who campaigned promising to pass this legislation, so it might actually squeak through.

The bill is being shopped around by state Sen. David Argall (R-Schuylkill/Berks) who authored it along with the Pennsylvania Coalition of Taxpayer Associations.

This group claims to be a simple citizens organization made up of 87 nonpartisan tax-conscious advocacy groups. But a quick look at the names of these organizations includes multiple uses of terms like “patriot,” and “freedom,” and “liberty,” and “conservative,” and “tea party.”

Nonpartisan, my butt!

Moreover, the stated goal of the group is just to pass this legislation.

That’s not a group of concerned citizens. It’s almost a PAC!

The organization has even endorsed candidates – some of them noted progressive Democrats like state Sen. Andy Dinniman (D-West Chester) and James Brewster (D-McKeesport), who both voted for the legislation in 2015.

To make it even more complex, the authors of the bill have a point. Property taxes are a terrible way to fund schools. They ensure that some districts will be better funded than others based on the local wealth of the community.

However, this bill does nothing to fix the inherent problems for children or poor and middle class communities. It compounds them.

Ironically, Gov. Wolf proposed a compromise solution two years ago with his first budget. He suggested reducing residential property taxes by $3.8 billion, targeting the biggest cuts for the neediest taxpayers and neediest schools. Moreover, he proposed increasing funding to the most impoverished districts so they could catch up to the well-funded ones.

But Republicans, who control both houses, refused to even consider it.

So here we go again. We have another Trojan Horse proposal. A good idea has been twisted and bastardized so that it serves the wealthy and private enterprise while doing irreparable harm to children and the poor. And even though it is an example of far right ideology, it has received bipartisan support.

Gov. Wolf is set to propose his new budget sometime this month. Sen. Argall is expected to reintroduce SB 76 during the subsequent budget negotiations.

It is a piece of zombie legislation that no matter how fetid and rotten just refuses to die. But this time, it just might bite us.

The DeVos Nomination: The Activist's Rosetta Stone by Dr. Michael Flanagan

#DumpDeVos The avalanche of resistance against the nomination of Betsy DeVos’ as Secretary of Education can be used as the Rosetta Stone for activists across the United States. Public education can be the one issue that unites the multitudes of protesters around the country. Win or lose this confirmation vote, the groundswell of organized opposition against DeVos is a positive for all other resistance movements. It is something to build on. It is a way in which we can begin to coalesce, to open up the lines of communication between disparate social and political constituencies. Whether the Republican Senators, many of whom were bought and paid for by DeVos money, confirm her or not, the pushback on her nomination has been crucial. She is the first nominee that every Democrat has declared to vote against. That in and of itself proves my point.  

As of the writing of this piece, the vote was 50 for and 50 against her confirmation. In that case Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, would cast the deciding vote. That has never happened in American history. Only nine cabinet nominees have ever been rejected by the Senate. The reason her nomination is so contentious is that teachers, parents and education activists have mobilized to resist DeVos, forcing an opposition that no nominee has yet faced. A million and a half  phone calls a day to the Capitol. It is unprecedented. From the minute DeVos’ name was mentioned, public school activists have been unrelenting. Through writing, calling, blogging, memes, rallies and marches we have shined constant and unrelenting attention on what a terrible choice she is. The outcry against her has been non-stop and has crossed political party lines. Conservatives, Liberals and Independents all clearly see her disdain for public education. We have not only been loud in our dissent, we have been organized.

In a country so deeply divided, with increasing protests for so many different causes, the DeVos opposition can be the unifying event we have needed. No matter your politics, everyone wants good schools for their children. Research shows that overwhelmingly people want those schools to be their own community public schools. Even those schools that the education privatizers try to label as failing, parents just want those schools supported.

Politicians and Wall Street want to pretend that the protests, boycotts, and calls for nationwide strikes are some media ploy. They do not want to acknowledge the historic amount of phone calls, emails and faxes to our legislators, which shows how motivated people are to fight for their children. There is even a GoFundMe account created to buy Senator Pat Toomey's vote, which as of the writing of this piece had reached $61,120. The goal was $58,800, or the same amount that Toomey received from DeVos herself. There will always be people whose bigotry and racism will never align with social justice causes. They are blinded by mainstream media fueled hatred and scapegoating. We can not move them on those issues, and it is futile to try. But even the people we most disagree with, want good public schools for their children. We need to identify the things that unite us, instead of allowing the billionaires, bankers, corporations and their political pawns to continue exploiting our divisions.

A million and a half phone calls a day in opposition to DeVos’ nomination speaks volumes. The legislators on Capitol Hill hear those phones ringing, just as they see the millions marching in the streets. They see the spontaneous protests, and the organization at the grassroots level, that can fill the block in front of Chuck Schumer, or Dianne Feinstein's houses at the spur of a moment. This is not about the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party. It is about the people filling our streets.

For far too long under the Obama and Bush administrations public school teachers and parents have been ignored by both political parties. Those same political parties have in fact abandoned the entire nation and want the people divided in order to maintain their power and privilege. We are all watching how they vote on these cabinet positions. We will remember who stands up and represent their constituents, and who does not.

Unfortunately, Betsy Devos will likely be confirmed. Most politicians will vote for the money, instead of for the people. I understand that it is political “suicide” to cross party lines, but what we, the people who oppose DeVos, are showing them, is that we do not care about political parties anymore. We want leaders of courage and character. Not pretenders full of rhetoric and alternate facts. It is time for politicians to stop worrying about funding their next election, and start paying attention to the revolution that is literally happening right outside their homes.

Teachers and parents who support public schools have long been on the losing end of the education reform movement. We have years of experience being sold out by our representatives. It is for that very reason we were able to marshal such concerted opposition to DeVos.

Education activists have had all too much practice tilting at windmills. As a teacher and parent of a public school student I know that neither political party has my best interests at heart. They are both anti-teacher and pro-privatization. That has been made perfectly clear. Public school activists have been organizing and waging resistance against terrible education policies for years, except we have been fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. Many of us had voted for Obama, and it was his policies that were destroying public education. It is hard to fight against someone you supported, but who enacted policies that were destroying your public schools and profession. With the nomination of DeVos, the gloves are finally off. Now the organization and determination of education activists is on full display. The love we have for our children is so much more powerful than political party loyalty. It is primal. Every bear will protect its cubs, and millions of parents and teachers are ready to go grizzly on every senator who supports Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Good luck with the confirmation vote on Monday senators, you are going to need it. #AGrizzlyAteMyHomework

I Was Fired Today!

By Michelle Strater Gunderson, Chicago Teacher 

Our school system is falling apart, and what solution do Rahm Emanuel and his appointed school CEO, Forrest Claypool have? Firing us for four days.

It might seem as an extreme statement, but that is essentially what we are experiencing. Chicago teachers have been furloughed for four days, and today is one of them. Our work is no longer needed for these days, we are not entering our buildings, and our work has been put on hold in a point in time where the work of our city’s teachers is needed more than ever. We have been fired.

I love my job dearly. I actually live and breathe teaching.

For several years I have taught the inclusion classroom for our first grade team. This means that children with special needs and general education students are taught in the same classroom with the variety of specialists and supports needed for everyone to learn. In room 114 at Nettelhorst we work with one special education co-teacher, 3 teaching assistants, a speech therapist, and an occupational therapist. We have additional help from our school psychologist and social worker. This is a huge team of people, but it is required to make sure that everyone learns.

So what do we do on these days of professional development, like the one that we are losing today? We plan, we talk, we envision the work our students can and should be doing. These days are necessary for establishing the working platform that guides the lives of children. Losing these days is no small matter. It hurts us all.

Taking away this day and the pay that accompanies this work is wrong. There are those who would argue that teachers are professional salaried employees and should do whatever it takes to do our job. There will be others who say that schools should run like businesses. I know of no business venture that survives and flourishes on the amount of free labor our school system depends on from its teachers.

We all grade papers in the evenings, create lesson plans on the weekends, and attend countless meetings. But there is certain work that cannot be done unless given the time and space to work together. Without this time, the furloughed planning time we lost today, we have now been asked to do the impossible – create a learning environment dependent on the cooperation and collaboration of almost a dozen people. My classroom is like a ballet, with the people coming in and out of it to dance their part, and now we have had no time for rehearsal.

I refuse to take this lying down. I will join with others protesting the decision to furlough teachers on professional development days. I will join my fellow workers in the city in refusing to upload grades and lesson plans into the school system’s electronic platform. And as a trustee of the Chicago Teachers Union I was one of the leaders who encouraged a no confidence vote of Forrest Claypool.

My stance is personal. I ask you to join me. I was fired for today.

Time to Unite and Fight Like Hell!

By Jamaal Bowman, NYC Principal 

I have many friends and colleagues that I admire and respect who work for charter schools. I have no doubt that they love children and would give their lives to transforming our highest need communities.

My friends and colleagues have no problem working in charter schools partly because far too often, because of the convoluted bureaucracy, public schools get in their own way. As a result, many children have suffered. This is not the public-school norm; as the propaganda machine of privatization would lead us to believe. Through their control of media and political influence, a new “common sense” has been created. Public schools are failing, while charter schools are thriving. The reality is, on average, public and charter schools perform about the same on achievement tests.

From the moment I began to pursue my school building leadership license, I knew I wanted to lead a public school. I don't know why, but charter schools felt very corporate and elitist to me at the time. After my residency at an Achievement First charter school, my presumptions were just the tip of the iceberg. Not only were charter schools corporate and elitist, but they were also abusive.

At my Achievement First residency, breakfast and lunch were silent for children. Hallway transitions were also silent. In classrooms, students had to use specific hand signals to ask questions and use the restroom. In my professional opinion as a certified teacher, school counselor, and building principal, these policies are child abuse. Achievement First is not the only charter school that implements these so called zero tolerance policies. The same practices are applied at schools like Democracy Prep, and Success Academy charter schools.

Some conservatives might read this and think it is okay to treat children this way because kids are “out of control” and need order. From my perspective, I wonder why children in white communities are not treated this way, while a black child’s pedagogy has to revolve around some form of oppression; especially considering most of the charter organization’s leadership is white.

Another important point is the fact that charter school environments seem to be abusive to teachers as well, as teacher attrition at charter schools is tremendously high.

Since my time at Achievement First, I've learned an awful lot about the political and financial incentives associated with the charter school movement. I've learned that this movement is not about charter schools and student learning, it is about the privatization of America and a pedagogy of oppression for the masses. Charter schools in general are non-union entities, and not only are they exceedingly unregulated by the state and thus prime for corruption, their teachers do not have the ability to collectively bargain -- which is the bedrock of any healthy democracy.

Teacher unions are arguably the strongest remaining union in the country. If they are defeated, America will be fully privatized and our democracy will officially be an oligarchy. There are many who would argue that democracy is already dead in America as we have elected a corporation, Donald Trump, into the presidency. Judging by president-elect Trump’s initial moves, he is following the conservative playbook, and his choice for education secretary is no different. Trump, like his conservative base, wants to privatize and control all of the institutions, people, and resources of our country and the world.

Just look at our economic divide and all that has contributed to it. Wall Street took control of the housing market through mortgage backed securities, and collapsed the economy; while a percentage of the 1% gained enormous additional power and wealth in the process. Citizens United’s unlimited investment in elections, tips the scales of our democracy in favor of the wealthiest. Lobbying by the wealthy over the last forty years has created policy, like reversing Glass-Stegall, that has made the banks our masters and us the economically enslaved. Bank CEO’s along with oil tycoons, are the richest and most powerful individuals in the world.

Now they are coming for our schools; the last domino to fall in the global privatization equation. Once they take over public schools and destroy the teacher unions, we will be a racist oligarchy led by the wealthy elite. This is Donald Trump’s mission and plan.

I wonder how the blue collar hard right (alt-right) Trump supporters perceive their place in the privatization equation. Will all the new jobs go to them, and allow them to sustain their place in a class system above certain “undesirable” groups? Do they care about the core of our democracy; freedom, being taken away, or are they more concerned with their ability to oppress Blacks, Latinos,Jews, Asians, and Arabs?

Back to charter schools for a moment, for the charters that perform well, not only is their curriculum linear and narrow, they have also implemented a system to ensure that only the savvy parent with the right social capital could handle the rigors of the charter school application and enrollment criteria. I would also like to see some of the data of the students before they transfer to the charter schools. Were they at or near “proficient” on state tests? The point here is, charters do not work for all kids and parents.

The weapon of choice for public Ed privatizers is standardized tests. High stakes standardized tests, forces schools to implement a test prep curriculum. Test prep learning involves the rudimentary learning of isolated information, with little to no opportunity for understanding concepts, connections, big ideas and complex systems. This method of schooling creates a populace that’s cognitively compromised, and vulnerable to oppression. Creativity, evaluation, authentic problem solving, collaboration, agility, initiative, and leadership, all skills necessary to thrive in a healthy democracy, are absent from the standardized testocracy as the brilliant Jesse Hagopian (you have to watch his Ted Talk) refers to it. Ironically, the schools where the privatizers send their children, do not administer annual high stakes standardized tests and implement innovative curricula and pedagogy.

The same standardized testing weapon was also very popular during the eugenics movement. That movement was designed to "prove" that certain races and groups of people were inferior and thus it was okay to oppress, neglect, disenfranchise, and reject them. The strategy goes as follows: mistreat and oppress a group, underfund their institutions, put guns and drugs into their communities, then give them a test to show how much they don't know. Create anguish and a low sense of self-worth over time and the people will beg for you to come and save them -- enter charter schools, de-unionization and the privatization of America.

They want to control us. They want to disempower us. They want a dictatorship. And now they have a conservative republican president, a republic senate, and a republic house, with a conservative republican Supreme Court judge on the way. The conservative oligarchy has risen, will the rest of us put aside our differences, unite, and fight like hell to save ourselves and our country?

PA Legislature Plans Taking Away Teachers’ Sick Days by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/pa-legislature-plans-taking-away-teachers-sick-days/

Dear Pennsylvania legislators:

So now you want to take away teachers’ sick days.

Sabbatical, sick days, bereavement leaves – the Senate Education Committee voted 7-5 to strip them from the law and make teachers bargain for them with their districts.

So the next time I get sick, you don’t want to guarantee I can take the day off. If my mother dies, you don’t want to protect my right to attend her funeral.

The full legislature still has to vote on it, but that’s pretty cold.

Which brings me to my first question: Why do you hate public school teachers so much?

Seriously. What did teachers ever do to you? Did we give you a bad grade when you were kids? Did we give you detention? What did we ever do to earn such animosity?

You obviously must have something personal against teachers.

It’s understandable. Even though the majority of Pennsylvanians voted for Democrats, most of you are Republicans. You have gerrymandered the state so that you artificially have the majority, and as such you must espouse the most radical positions possible. Otherwise, you’ll be primaried by someone even farther right – a Tea Partier, a plutocrat, an anarcho-capitalist, a fascist.

We see the same thing playing out nationally. Hello, Donald Trump!

So it’s no surprise that after stripping public schools of almost $1 billion every yearfor the past five years, after tens of thousands of teachers have been laid off, after you’ve given away millions of dollars to private corporations to run fly-by-night charter schools or through tax credits to religious schools – well, it’s no surprise that you feel the need to continue the war on teachers.

It’s paying off for you big time.

Not so much for our school children. They have had to deal with increases in class size, narrowing of the curriculum, reductions in extra-curriculars, cuts in tutoring – just about every deprivation imaginable.

I wonder – do you realize that every attack against teachers is also an attack against students? Making sick teachers come to school won’t improve kids’ educations. Forcing educators to choose between work or seeing their loved ones off to their final resting places won’t boost test scores. Do you understand that or do you just not care?

Follow-up, if I may: do you realize that most public school teachers are women? Does that factor in at all? Which do you hate more, the gender of most teachers or the fact that we are unionized?

Oh, and Pennsylvania School Boards Association, don’t think we’ve forgotten you. We know you requested this mess, Senate Bill 229. Instead of standing with your teachers to fight for fair, equitable, sustainable funding, you’ve decided to ask the legislature if you can stiff teachers to make ends meet. We’re there for your kids everyday, and this is how you thank us. That’s gratitude.

It’s what we get for being one of the last workforces to be unionized. We have the temerity to demand fair treatment. You can’t just do whatever you like with us, you have to actually sit down with us at the bargaining table and talk.

Legislators, we know it’s something that infuriates your base. No, I don’t mean the people who vote for you. I mean your real base – the corporations, millionaires and billionaires who pay your real salaries – the unlimited and shadowy campaign contributions that, let’s be honest, are really nothing less than legal bribes.

We shouldn’t be surprised that you have prioritized taking away legal protections for teachers’ sick days. It is quite in line with what you want to do to the profession. You no longer want highly qualified teachers making a middle class income who then can stay in our schools for their entire careers. You want lightly trained temps who use teaching as a stepping stone to a job that pays enough to live.

After all, if we afford teachers the status of professionals, they might actually be able to jump all the other hurdles we’ve put in front of them and educate the poor.

That would be terrible.

Despite all the standardized testing, Common Core, value-added measures, budget cuts, and constant propaganda about “failing schools,” they might actually teach these kids to think. That’s the last thing you want.

A thinking public might see how much you’re screwing them over. They might actually rise up and fight. They might refuse to accept the status quo that you are so desperately trying to protect.

That’s you’re real endgame. And though it makes me sick, I suppose I will no longer be able to take off.

I’ll just spend the day, coughing and wheezing with the children.

Yours,

Steven Singer

The Gadfly on the Wall

BATs Beware! A FOXX is Loose!!

The House of Representatives recently released the names of the new members of their Education and Workplace committee.

As you can see, the new Chair of the committee is Representative Virginia Foxx from North Carolina, and she is exerting her voice as a proponent of school choice quite loudly.

Recent releases from the committee include:

The Power of #SchoolChoice

Foxx: School Choice Provides Real Hope and Opportunity

But school choice is not the only thing that we have to look forward to from Representative Virginia Foxx.

She is also a believer in right to work!

 

In 2015 - 2016 she sponsored H.R.615 “National Right-to-Work Act.” She has made statements to announce her beliefs, questioning the needs for unions. Of course, it comes as no shock that she supports Andrew Puzder for Secretary of Labor.

Now she is the chair of the House Education and Workplace Committee.

But what exactly does this mean?

(The following words are not our own, but we found them to be quite succinct in their answer on a question form recently.)

In both the House and Senate, the primary privilege of being the Chair of any Committee is the ability to set the agenda. That is, they determine which legislation will be brought up for consideration and/or passage, as well as which topics will receive Congressional attention in the form of informative hearings. Committee Chairmen have a number of tools at their disposal to obtain their preferred policy outcomes. The best of these are (1) the ability to determine who from their party will be on their Committee (they have a large say, though possibly not final); (2) the ability to produce a "Chairman's mark" of any legislation the Committee considers, which can generally be used to render changes made to bills by Subcommittees pointless, as well as to remove and/or add provisions the Chairman doesn't or does like; and (3) the ability to reward or punish Committee members in various manners.

In simpler terms, the items she wants to have a vote on, will get introduced for passage.

First up - already a House Resolution H.R. 610 - to distribute Federal funds for elementary and secondary education in the form of vouchers for eligible students and to repeal a certain rule relating to nutrition standards in schools.

Basically, what passage of this would do is give the Secretary of Education the funds to create a national voucher program. This bill comes to the floor with a complete strategy that includes marketing techniques to give money directly to parents and make sure that no child goes hungry. Of course, we don’t want any child to go hungry. But to tie the two items together is a strategy that lawmakers do to pass an item that will receive push-back by tying it to an item that can be potentially good.

Of course, there is also a bill in the Senate S.235 to expand opportunity through greater choice in education, and for other purposes.

If Betsy DeVos is confirmed. This would enable all of HER dreams to come true:  Choice and Vouchers will be a part of the national education program.

Join BATs on Sunday at 7pm (EST) for a live Facebook chat about vouchers and school choice.
https://www.facebook.com/BadassTeachersAssociation/