Cashing In On Kids

Because if you can't make a profit off the little buggers, why bother "educating" them at all?

Think Progress:

School privatization laws crafted by corporate interests have been introduced in nearly every state in the first half of 2013, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. 43 states and the District of Columbia are considering school legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the umbrella organization that pushes state laws catered to business interests on a myriad of topics.

CMD’s report, “Cashing In On Kids,” details 139 separate ALEC-designed bills promoting for-profit education in the states and D.C. this year alone. Three states have considered school voucher programs, and 10 have taken up another ALEC measure that funnels public dollars to private schools via tax credits. Three states have considered the “Virtual Schools Act,” which spends taxpayer money on an online education model “few educators think is appropriate for young children.” So-called “Parent Trigger” laws designed by ALEC and the conservative Heartland Institute have come up in 12 states.

School vouchers do not generally raise student achievement, according to a Center on Education Policy review of years of research. CEP noted that even though most of that research has been funded by the for-profit education industry, it fails to make a convincing case for the superiority of privatized education. If kids are not benefiting, who is?

“Cashing In On Kids” notes that Wisconsin taxpayers have sent nearly two billion dollars to for-profit, religious, and online schools since Milwaukee became the nation’s first school vouchers city in 1990. School voucher programs in Florida, Georgia, and Oklahoma have sent taxpayer money to schools that teach creationism. In Louisiana, almost none of the private schools receiving voucher funds have maintained the separate accounts for public dollars which the law requires, making it impossible to audit their use of the funds. Just two schools have been properly audited, and one of them relies on uncertified teachers and “plopping students in front of televisions to watch lessons on DVDs.”

For-profit school companies exercise substantial political influence, not only at the state level through ALEC but via federal campaign contributions. The Center for Responsive Politics reported on Monday that the Chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), got $116,000 from the for-profit education industry in the second quarter of 2013 alone. CRP data show the industry spent over $1.7 million in the 2012 elections, and over $7 million since 1989, on direct campaign contributions in congressional races. The industry spent more than $40 million lobbying Congress since the early 2000s. Restore Our Future, the super PAC dedicated to electing Mitt Romney during last year’s presidential election, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from for-profit higher education companies.

 Four ALEC Kids-Are-Cash bills are ready to be introduced into the Kentucky General Assembly:

KY	Environmental Literacy Improvement Act	HB 269
KY	The Great Schools Tax Credit (Scholarship Tax Credit) Act	HB 66
KY	The Next Generation Charter Schools Act	HB 76
KY	The Special Needs Scholarship Program Act	HB 155

Ignore the lying titles: these are bills to destroy public education, privatize all schools and turn poor kids into ATMs for the Koch brothers.

But even ALEC's depredations are enough for some repugs.  From Wonkette:

http://wonkette.com/523024/lets-not-educate-our-kids-anymore-suggests-genius-utah-senator

As we are sure you know, those laboratories of democracy have been very busy lately forcing women to have children against their will. But one Republican state senator from Utah is quite a multi-tasker! Because he has also found time to call for an end to mandatory education, looking to the Victorian era of Dickensian workhouses as a model for the state to pattern itself after:

A Republican state senator in Utah is calling for the end of mandatory education in the state.

State Sen. Aaron Osmond (R-South Jordan) wrote on the state Senate blog Friday that mandatory education in the state has forced teachers and schools to take on parenting responsibilities. Prior to the mandate taking effect in 1890, he wrote, education was “an opportunity” and parents were more engaged.

Definitely, we should look to pre-1890, when the country was in the throes of a largely unregulated Industrial Revolution, when setting political, legal, and social standards for children today. So in addition to scrapping the mandatory education requirement of the 1890s, we should also get rid of the child labor laws that are a product of the 1890s, because why let children go to school when they could be learning the dignity of work instead?

Anyway, the solution to our current woes, says Osmond, is to move all decision-making to local communities. (Unless the local communities make a decision that the state doesn’t like, in which case, the governor can veto it, because “the state” is still a meaningful construct when it is useful to those in power.)

Osmond called on parents to decide whether or not their children should go to school, and asked for exploration into how much time children should be in school. He wrote that the state should not mandate 990 hours a year of education, and instead should let local school districts make the decision.

No way anything could go wrong there!

Last word to Wonkette commenter AngryBlakGuy:

...and in other news the state of Utah has closed all of its hospitals and instead will open FAITH HEALING clinics! As a side note: as a compromise with democrats, women will be able to "pray away" their pregnancies as an alternative to abortions!