School choice my ass. A several thousand dollar tax credit will never pay the way for most of our children’s way into a $30,000 a year private school. Sure, it will subsidize private education for the rich, like Chris Christie, but it will do nothing for the rest of us who can’t afford the additional $20,000 a year for the rest of the tuition. If you can’t afford the rest of the private tuition then you won’t get any credit, but our collective taxes will go to subsidize those who can afford to pay.
This has nothing to do with choice. It is all about subsidizing private school for the wealthy and profitizing the schools the rest of our children go to. That was not a misspelling of privatizing. DeVos is pushing “[A] filthy, moneyed kiss to the charter school industry at the expense of the kids who’ve been victimized by those schools’ unaccountable inconsistency,” concluded an editor at the Detroit Free Press in September. It’s all about the profits that are NOT being earned by the rich off the education of our children.
Today there is no profit for the rich and powerful in the public school system.
Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States amounted to $620 billion in 2012–13 and the bloodsucking rich don’t get their Vig of 10% of that.
DeVos wants to make sure Vig is paid.