My small city is getting a new Christan Nationalism school next year. The neighbors aren’t thrilled that the adults will all be in armed to the teeth at this school in the middle of a decent neighborhood. One of my kid’s friends is going there next year, and told the class that her dad is draining her bank account for the tuition. For an elementary school year education.
Another fun fact: private schools don’t have to take all applicants, so they regularly turn away students with disabilities or special learning needs.
I pointed that out to friends of a friend visiting from Ohio, after they told me how their state did a great thing, making vouchers available to all families in the state. I pointed out how the public schools need the ‘regular’ kids to help subsidize the special services needed by other kids. When the non-special needs kids aren’t there, funding for the specialists gets too expensive for public schools to be able to maintain. The lady clearly didn’t know what to say to that, and after a minute she just said how their children’s private school was too small to be able to have specialists like that. Not sure how that invalidates my point about accessibility of education for all students… It was too sensitive an event to voice that I don’t think public money should be going to institutions that are tax exempt churches. If churches don’t want to pay taxes, their organizations shouldn’t have their hands out for the public coffers. Simple.
gop constantly lowers rural healthcare access and education funding, which is then claimed as “underperforming schools” and used to rationalise the privatisation of education through charter schools. Those schools are paid for by vouchers. Eventually tuition will rise if these schools can gain majority away from public schools - this is done intentionally for two reasons:
To gouge those who will pay higher cost for education in short term
To provide an opening for, you guessed it, religious schools with the available funds to subsidize tuition and become the cheap/only school option, becoming all that the shrinking value vouchers will cover in some areas.
This both creates a pipeline to indoctrinate desperate families with religion they wouldn’t otherwise seek AND becomes a way to launder tax money directly into the church.
These peoplee are such a fucking cancer on decent society.
And if they can underfund schools to the point of dilapidation or causing the district to close and consolidate schools, the district will never be able to reopen the old buildings. The old buildings will fall behind on maintenance until they’re sold or demolished.
The cost to build a school to government standards is staggering. The cost to repurpose a closed down shopping mall or even a closed down school and bring things up to the barest civilian standards is way less. Hiring scab people who meet the minimum requirements to teach - way less than accredited educators that are part of the NEA and take pride in their work.
Once you hit the point of making public schools unmaintainable, the corporations or religious orgs just have to maintain until the buildings get shuttered and they become the monopoly. Then they jack up prices to the point that the school district cannot afford to build new buildings, turning a noble pursuit that bolsters our nation and national defense (a smart populous can defend itself and perform on the world stage), into one that will help drag the U.S. into being a third-world theocracy.
I legitimately don’t understand why nationalists don’t get this. Why they aren’t screaming in the streets about the embrace of capitalism and religion (which require coercion, disempowerment, and limitation of thought to thrive) over a mutually beneficial society and education? Stupid people don’t build strong nations. Poor, afraid, and unhappy people are merely trying to survive. They do not have the wherewithal to invest energy into their community, much less take pride in their nation.
Their idiotic ideas are undercutting their actual ideals.
Kinda sad. As a kid I was sent to private religious (Christian) schools decades ago. The schools’ final lesson to me was always expulsion. My parents told me I was going there because the public schools weren’t as good and I’d have better success as an adult with a private school education.
Expulsion was not the lesson the PR sold me as a kid. You do not want your children learning expulsion as a primary-survival tactic!
Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like had I only gone to public schools and had never been expelled, but there’s no use in crying over spilt milk. Just a few more years to go, maybe a decade if I’m lucky, and the nightmare of a fatally-flawed high-school education will finally be over. I got the last laugh though, they didn’t get my kids.
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