What's Behind "School Choice" Week?
Taking a look behind the curtain
National School Choice Week is coming to a close. It may well include passage of a universal school voucher scam in Tennessee.
Peter Greene takes a look at what’s behind the “school choice” movement - in Tennessee and across the country.
Here, it should be noted that Gov. Bill Lee has supported dismantling Tennessee’s public schools since long before he was the state’s Governor.
Even though as early as 2016, Bill Lee was extolling the virtues of school voucher schemes and even though he’s a long-time supporter of Betsy DeVos’s pro-voucher Tennessee Federation for Children and even though he has appointed not one, but two voucher vultures to high level posts in his Administration, it is somehow treated as “news” that Bill Lee plans to move forward with a voucher scheme agenda in 2019.
Anyway, back to Peter’s look at the national movement for school choice and the dream of “getting government out of schools”:
The MAGA/Heritage Foundation vision of government is simple. Government should protect private property (from threats domestic and foreign) and it should support private enterprise and the free market (except when powerful private enterprises demand to be protected from the free market). Government should not be in the business of helping people or trying to make their lives better-- they should take care of that themselves. It very especially should not be in the business of trying to lift people above their proper station in life, particularly people who aren't straight christianist white men. Mind you, they have no objection to those people getting to a better place if they do it the Right Way (by their own bootstraps and following the rules laid out by the people at the top of the ladder).
Government should be small. Unless it can help big business get bigger and make more money. To the extent that government uses public funds (taxes) to help all people, well, that’s money taken away from big business.
Greene contends the current regime - and school choicers generally - offer a new take on a very old idea: feudalism.
The Trumpian/Heritage vision of government seems to be a modern riff on feudalism, where the rich and powerful make the rules and clear away the Deep State, which seems best defined as folks who are inclined to follow the rule of law rather than the rule of what I say goes, and where all the lower classes are forced to contribute to the church. A public education system aimed at providing a good education for all students, no matter the background, has no place in a feudal system.