Nevada’s state legislature turned Republican majority in the last election (See? Your vote in off-cycle elections MATTERS!). While it only meets every two years (the idea being there’s little bad a legislature can get accomplished in a 120-day session every two years) this last meeting may have put the final nail in the coffin of public schools in Nevada. Is this coming to your state?
I have long felt like a Cassandra about the issue of Charter Schools. Members of my own family have their kids in one (it’s one of a dozen subjects we don’t discuss). This is, quite simply, the Corporatocracy’s baby steps into monetizing schools. The Right has long bemoaned the “left-leaning” public school system that teaches things like “facts,” “science” (evil-ution!), and “history.” And then—horrors!—those damn lefty teachers are union thugs or want a living wage!
Study after study shows that these Charter schools—with their unregulated teachers being paid less than their compatriots—are almost always failing to do their job. Result? We have a less-educated populace unprepared for today’s workplace, and woefully ignorant of geography, civics, and a balanced world-view.
One can imagine The Simpson’s Mr. Burns rubbing his bony hands and muttering, “Perfect.”
Nevada has a particular problem. We are just above Mississippi in education. I have long advised friends with school-aged children not to move here. Only 44% of Nevada’s kids graduate. (Nevada also has the third highest teen pregnancy rate, and suicide rates). Nevada comes out at the bottom of almost every testing score there is.
The state legislature has refused to deal with the problem, year after (every other) year. Nothing gets better. Companies won’t move here because a) their execs have no schools for their kids and b) our native workforce is uneducated. Yes, we just landed the Tesla gigafactory, but there’s no guarantee we’ll get the actual jobs, and they’ll pay no taxes for 10 years.
Naturally, a lot of folks here yank their kids out of the underfunded public schools, leaving a patchwork of Charter and religious schools, and homeschooling.
[I’m going to make myself really unpopular: I am really, really against home-schooling. Few people are up to the task of actually educating a child. There’s a hell of a lot of effort involved in teaching a child not just facts, but how to reason and set themselves up for life-long knowledge-acquisition. Plus, kids miss a valuable part of their formative years socializing. Yes, you can take Timmy to soccer and Lacy to dance class, but they miss interacting all day with their peers. This isn’t to say some people haven’t succeeded in home-schooling (and I’ve met some). Just that few are up to the effort needed.]
It’s pretty clear to me Bill #302 is an ALEC-backed piece of legislation. AlterNet links this bill directly to Jeb! Bush's Foundation for Educational Excellence. It's a doozy.
Starting this year, each family that yanks a kid out of public school will be given a $5000 voucher—regardless of their income. The school district will actually lose that amount of funding when the child is removed to another educational venue.
[Don’t start me about the ramifications of state-funding going to religious organizations, or I’m likely to be hammering my keyboard until Tuesday.]
You read that right. The state will take funds away from the underfunded school system to pay kids not to attend public schools.
But wait—there’s more!
The children who will receive this voucher must attend public school for 100 days before being removed.
That’s right: the underfunded schools must host kids in over-crowded classrooms for 100 days. The schools must feed, teach, and monitor kids who won’t be around by Christmas break.
Can you imagine how the kids will behave, knowing they won’t have to put up with the teachers and students in just a couple of months? Where’s the incentive to even bother to learn?
And don’t get me started on the underpaid, over-worked teachers who have to put up with these brats!
Taxpayers get a double-whammy: paying out for these leave-in-100-days-kids; and having them soak up resources of those who will stay in the public schools. Where will the money to pay for this come from? Because Nevada doesn’t have a state income tax. It’s all from property taxes. But I guess it will come out of the Libertarian Fairy Dust we’re so famous for funding our state with.
And what happens to the children at the Charter or religious schools whose classes will be interrupted by a flood of kids who haven’t been in the same study-system at the end of the first semester?
Believe it or not, parents of these voucher children are actually mad that their children have to attend a public school for 100 days. Yes, they're mad they have to do something to get something!
Who makes up this caca?
There isn’t anything I can do to fix this right now, besides make damn sure we yank out Republican state senators and replace them with sensible independents and Democrats. But what I can do is make sure you in other states are aware this can happen in your state.