They're trying to loot public education in Wisconsin.
And they're trying to take advantage of families like mine, with kids like my daughter, to do it.
At issue is AB110, misleadingly dubbed "The Special Needs Scholarship Program Act" --misleading because it's actually a voucher program. AB110 (bill text in PDF here) would allow families of children with special needs to take the taxpayer dollars being used to educate their child in public school, and spend them to send their child to private school instead. Any child with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) at a public school would be eligible, regardless of income.
Here is part of what the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction had to say about the bill in their testimony on Tuesday:
This bill strips special education students of due process rights and rights to services. It allows for the segregation of students based on disability. It will devastate funding for public education in select districts. It will result in the largest expansion of private school regulation ever seen in Wisconsin and, at the end of the day, no one will have any data to show if it resulted in a better education.
And where did this terrible idea come from? Immediate source: ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, where conservative state legislators sit down with the big corporations to draft secret model legislation for state legislatures to copy and enact, as soon as they've got Republican majorities. (For a startling introduction to ALEC, check out Prof. William Cronon's awesome, even-handed, fire-storm-producing blog post: Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere?)
If you go to the Education Model Legislation Section of the ALEC site, you'll find a "Special Needs Scholarship Act" link under the heading "School Choice." Clicking on the link won't get you much joy, since the model legislation itself is only available to members. However, this is one where the proof is roaming free. You can download ALEC's Special Needs Scholarship Program Act model legislation directly from an organization called the Alliance for School Choice, which has several other ALEC drafts online as well.
Still further, still deeper, among the "they" who are looting my daughters' future here (both my kindergartener with special needs and my third-grader without), is the mildly-named American Federation for Children (AFC). You can read an AFC press release with their effusive support for this bill over at WisPolitics.com, if you've got the stomach for it.
You may have read about the AFC without realizing it, if you read teacherken's recent Recommended diary about Rachel Tabachnick's must-read piece on Alternet. The Tabachnick article is a chilling investigation called "The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working With the Religious Right to Kill Public Education." After painstakingly delineating the links between the DeVos family and the appalling corporatist / Dominionist assault on public education, Tabachnick reveals this little gem right at the end of the article (emphasis mine):
Betsy DeVos has announced that Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker are scheduled to speak at the National Policy Summit of the American Federation for Children on May 9.
The more I learn about the extent of the unholy alliance between corporate interests, the religious right, and conservative legislators, the more overwhelmed I feel.
AB110 is a minor piece in their puzzle, and you almost have to know about the big picture to get why it's so appalling. The spin on AB110 is seductive, to the point that they've even gotten Democrat Jason Fields (Milwaukee) to co-introduce it. The surface-appeal is designed for families whose children's special needs aren't being met in their public schools. The drastic and chronic underfunding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which is the federal mandate that guarantees every child a free and appropriate education regardless of disability, has put our public schools in a no-win situation. The underfunding has happened both at the federal and state level. At the federal level, the funding has generally been less than half of the promised amount. [Update: as teacherken points out today, stimulus funds were used to bring funding up to the promised level -- for one year only, and that year is waning.] In Wisconsin, the proposed budget flat-funds special education, such that the actual percentage-aids would drop from the current 27.9% to 24.5% by the end of the biennium.
Our local tax bases have had to strain to make up the difference somehow, and some districts of course do better than others. With the Walker budget's draconian general education budget cuts (to the tune of almost a billion dollars across the biennium), the squeeze will be even worse -- and Walker's budget even limits the extent to which school districts can make up his cuts on the local level.
So what does AB110 propose? Chip away further at the public schools by letting the funding flow to the private schools... who aren't required to abide by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act! Yes, that's part of the con. As outlined in an excellent piece by Disability Rights Wisconsin, called Special Needs Scholarships: Myths and Facts about AB110, "AB110 does not even require that private schools which accept special needs scholarships have a single special education teacher or therapist on staff!" Further, "using a special needs voucher to attend private school means that parents and children give up ALL their state and federal rights to special education."
Beyond that, the private schools aren't required by AB110 to take any particular child. They can choose to cherry-pick, not to take children with more serious issues -- say, for example, my cherished daughter, who in kindergarten is pre-verbal, does not use the toilet, and has sensory and related behavioral issues in context of her autism and epilepsy. (By the way, her public school has done an awesome job this year, and she's made a great deal of progress. I hope we are still able to say that in the future, as the effects of the Walker education-looting come to fruition.)
As the Myths & Facts document acknowledges, so must I point out that there are indeed some satisfied parents in states where this kind of voucher is already a reality -- Ohio and Florida being the most frequent comparisons. However, if you listen only to the AFC propaganda, you'd be tempted to believe that the support is overwhelming and nobody ever has a bad experience, which would be far from the truth. Per Disability Rights Wisconsin, "The truth is, just as in our current public schools, some parents in Florida and Ohio like their special needs scholarship programs and some do not and have returned their children to public schools after finding out that private schools provided little or no special education for their children."
Alas, in the current flood of ALEC legislation that the Walker administration is ramming through before they lose the state-senate majority in the July recall elections, this bill is getting almost no attention. Its public hearing on May 3 was almost entirely overshadowed by same-day committee deliberations on the heinous Voter ID bill, SB7 -- which, by the way, would also have a disproportionate effect on people with disabilities! In both cases, though, people with disabilities are a minority whose voices are often not heard under the best of circumstances. And these are not the best of circumstances.
Folks in Wisconsin, when you make your contacts to your state legislators, with what is rapidly becoming a laundry-list of bills to oppose, please add a word against AB110! Click here to remind yourself of your legislators' contact information...
We also need to hit the streets again. The next big demonstration is coming up Saturday May 14, the We Are Wisconsin rally, with events starting at 2:30pm.
But even before then, my family is taking a Mother's Day trip to circle the Square this afternoon, with whoever else might be out there. I think I'm going to make a new sign:
ALEC:
Looting
Education
Continuously
Our biggest response to the piratizing, though, must come at the ballot box -- first in the July senatorial recall elections, and then when we recall Scott Walker himself.
Scotty, we're coming for you!
And then they came for the children,
Hard to believe but it's true
Schools and good health
might take from their wealth
So tell me what are you gonna do?
Scotty, we're coming for you!
-- The Kissers
Major tip o' the proverbial hat to alizard for the privatizing/piratizing pun that appears in the diary title.
