Contempt for public schools, but some in both parties support public money for private schools.

[madfloridian]

John Boehner is pushing to reinstate vouchers that let the public pay for students to choose which private school to attend.

I have not heard much coming from Washington about supporting public education, but this was just passed by a House panel.

House panel approves D.C. school voucher bill

A House committee approved a bill Thursday to extend the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, advancing a key priority of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that has long divided District leaders.

The program provides federal funds to help low-income District students pay for private school tuition. Democrats on the Hill moved two years ago to close the program to new entrants, only allowing current scholarship recipients to continue. But Boehner personally offered a bill in January to reopen the program to new entrants, and the measure was passed Thursday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on a 21-14 vote.

The tally was mostly along party lines: All Democrats present voted against the measure, while all but one Republican -- Rep. Todd Platts (Mo.) -- voted in favor.

Here is more about this effort. Joe Lieberman is one leading the way on this issue. Boehner is meeting with Catholic Bishops, and there are comments from the Catholic church in this next article.

House speaker lends legislative support to Catholic schools

This article is from January.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R–Ohio) showed his support for Catholic education and school choice on Jan. 26, announcing the introduction of a bill that would restore funding for school vouchers in Washington, D.C.

“There’s only one program in America where the federal government allows parents from lower-income families to choose the schools that are best for their children, and it’s right here in D.C.,” Boehner said in a morning press conference, announcing his plan to restore funding to the program along with Senator Joe Lieberman (I–Conn.).

..."Boehner is placing a high priority on his bipartisan effort to restore vouchers in the nation's capital. The D.C. voucher restoration proposal is the only bill he plans to sponsor during this session of Congress.

The previous evening, he had indicated his support for Catholic education by inviting several guests from Washington, D.C.'s Catholic schools, along with the district's Cardinal Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, to share the Speaker's Box at his first State of the Union address. The school representatives were involved with the Consortium of Catholic Academies, which benefited from D.C.'s school voucher program before its defunding.

Good for Americans United for taking up this issue. They ask how can a nation be so "broke", and still afford to give taxpayer money to religious schools.

Americans United Asks Why ‘Broke’ Nation Still Has Enough Money To Subsidize D.C. Religious Schools

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) keeps saying the country is “broke” – so Americans United for Separation of Church and State would like to know why he is determined to funnel $20 million in tax dollars to religious schools in Washington, D.C. Boehner is attempting to railroad the reauthorization of a controversial school voucher “experiment” in D.C. through the House.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today approved H.R. 471 on a 21-14 vote. The Boehner-sponsored measure could go to a House floor vote as early as next week.

“Speaker Boehner says we’re broke and have to slash federal spending,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Yet, he’s willing to throw $20 million at religious and other private schools.

Barry Lynn of AU has more to say.

Added Lynn, “This voucher scheme undermines public education and church-state separation, and I am disappointed that the House committee voted to fund it.”

..."“The D.C. voucher experiment has failed,” Lynn said. “It’s time to put the focus back where it belongs: on the public schools.”

One state senator from Indiana is really zeroing in what kinds of serious problems could arise from such a voucher program.

Public Funds For Fred Phelps?: Voucher Dollars Could Go To Religious Schools That Teach Hate

When it comes to school vouchers, Indiana State Sen. Brent Steele (R-Bedford) seems to get it. The Republican lawmaker doesn’t want to support an Indiana bill that would use public funds to send students to religious and other private schools. Steele is the first Republican legislator in the state to voice opposition to the proposal.

In a letter to every lawmaker sent out this week, Steele writes that he wouldn’t want his taxes to pay for students to attend a school run by the Westboro Baptist Church. Members of the notorious Topeka, Kan.-based church demonstrate at the funerals of soldiers, holding up signs with hateful anti-gay messages. The church’s protests are constitutionally protected free speech, according to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

“We just saw this week the Westboro Baptist Church is recognized as a religious entity that is protected,” observed Steele. “How would you like your tax dollars going toward educating their children being privately schooled inside their church? I don’t want my tax dollars used to raise a child who is going to want to kill my grandchildren because they are of a different religious belief.

“Once you start letting tax dollars go out to religious schools,” Steele continued, “you can’t make a determination which is the best religion or what is a proper religion.”

Not just vouchers. In Florida at least 8 religious schools, 7 of them Catholic, applied to become charter schools because they needed taxpayer funds to survive financially. Their plan worked. In fact issues such as this have been used all over the country to perform what some call a fundamentalist takeover of public education.

Raleigh, North Carolina - "We must eliminate public education as it is structured today and reinvent it in a new form," according to Roxane Premont, director of the North Carolina Education Reform Foundation (NCERF). If successful, the "new form" of public education will ultimately result in private religious schools paid for by taxpayer money.

...The first step in the proposed plan is to establish charter schools, which are, according to Premont, "public schools that operate independently of local school district jurisdiction and operate much like private schools."

According to NCERF literature: "Charter schools will provide a pool of independent schools that can readily be converted to private schools to meet increased demand for private education once voucher laws are passed. Charter schools that are converted into private schools will be initiated by those persons who want religious education.

"With charters the money goes directly from the state to the charter school. With vouchers it goes directly to parents who then take it to the school."

So vouchers or charters, one or the other. A ruse to destroy public education? Public schools and the public school teachers are so vulnerable now after the last two years of concentrated assault on them.

Wouldn't be hard to do that right now.

[Mybrokenchains]

1. +1 for pointing out idiotic hypocrisy

[madfloridian]

3. It's pathetically obvious now.

There is no doubt of their mission.

[bluestateguy]

2. Just wait until radical Muslims set up their own school and demand voucher money

Or for that matter, any Muslim school at all. Watch these conservatives have a cow.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. I've used that argument against prayer in school

You want to let those Muslim kids stop six times a day and pray? I guess we can forget about teaching them to read. We won't have time.

[LooseWilly]

5. When so many legislators go through private schools, public schools must look like "ghettos" to them

... and with that delusion firmly in place, maybe they really believe that charter schools and religious schools are a "better" alternative...

Ehh, who'm I trying to kid? Using public funds to send more kids to religious schools will allow the "educating" of more kids to believe in things like the "immorality" of... abortion, same-sex marriage, socialist policies to ameliorate the suffering of people left out of work due to union busting and out-sourcing... and whatever other things that it might be profitable to have the public believing are "immoral".

For the benefits of the child, of course...

[WinkyDink]

7. It has NOTHING, NADA, ZERO to do with any education WHATSOEVER. It's about LOOTING.

Absolutely everything for the last decade, and maybe longer, has been to that purpose.

I'd like to hear major examples otherwise.

[Jakes Progress]

6. grover norquist has satisfaction

in a job well done every time he reads a DU post that promotes charters and privates and especially when he reads a post from a DU'er that slams the unions and the teachers.

The neocons have invested a lot of money in getting their message out. From some of the posts here (and from our president's plans) that investment is starting to really pay off.

[madrchsod]

9. in his wildest dreams old grover never thought...

a democratic president would be the one to do it.

[Jakes Progress]

10. I'm sorta thinking that was their plan.

They knew that Democrats would never let teacher be attacked and unions busted by a republican. So they had this election where your only choices were a senile codger and a hillbilly tart or a good looking, oratorical wizard with a cool story. The good looking wizard just happened to be a corporatist and a congenital compromiser. We got taken.

Sure I know that sounds a little tin-foil hat like. But it explains things better than any other explanation for why we have a popular Democratic president presiding (and encouraging) the privatization of our American schools and the vilification of teachers, a formerly strong Democratic constituency. This way not only do the neocons get their tax funded corporate schools, they bust up and disgruntle a huge group of formerly Democratic voters.

[LWolf]

12. I didn't want to think so, either, but it was clear early on in

the primaries that Obama, if elected, would. When asked, in the infamous FOX interview, what Republicans "got right," were "better" at than Democrats, what did he say? Education.

[madrchsod]

8. vouchers never cover the full cost of education.

children who attend a religious school with a voucher are pressured into joining the school`s religion. that pressure comes from not being able to attend daily religious services or other religious related functions. another is the pressure the parents feel because of their child`s problem in school.

my wife and i went through this for three years. we had to pay,no vouchers, until our son became a catholic then it was free. this all started when our school system started tracking students from kindergarten. my wife walked into school to find our son and several others sitting at their desks in the hallway. my wife "inquired" and the teacher told her that these boys were "bad" because they were tracked from first grade as "trouble makers". we went all the way to the school board who eventuality killed the tracking program.

[madfloridian]

13. No, they don't cover that much....but they surely do take money from public schools.

That's awful about those kids sitting in the hallway and that tracking program. Not fair, each kid should get a new start every day.

:hi:

[madfloridian]

11. Lieberman and Susan Collins say funds may be cut for DC if not passed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/16/AR2011021603277.html

"U.S. Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman and Susan Collins sternly told District officials Wednesday that Congress probably will cut funding for city schools if efforts to revive a federal voucher program for students are not successful this year.

At a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Collins (R-Maine) stressed that they and House Republicans are making the renewal of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program a chief priority. The senators issued their warnings to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D), whose testimony created a rare public split before Congress between a District mayor and council chairman.

Lieberman, head of the committee, said he and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) consider the voucher program, which allows students to use federal money to attend private schools, central to school reform efforts.

"I think the extra funds that come to D.C. . . . will be in serious jeopardy if the opportunity funding is not in this three-part program of public and charter schools," Lieberman said."

[madfloridian]

14. Kick