Remember what problem "school choice" was supposed to solve

Betsy DeVos, whose only "qualification" to be Secretary of Education is bankrolling the school choice movement

I’ve been watching bits and pieces of the RNC and one theme that keeps coming up over and over again is how “school choice” (aka taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools) is the greatest thing ever for Black and Hispanic kids across the country. And the corollary that Democrats want to “trap” these students in “failing,” “dangerous” public schools.

But everybody’s conveniently avoiding the question “why are these students otherwise ‘trapped’ in these bad schools?”

The answer is systemic racism.

If People of Color weren’t red-lined into only living in certain places, they’d be evenly disbursed across the country and would be just as likely to live in a “good” school district as anybody else. School choice would still be a thing because of fundamentalist Christian dominionists looking to proselytize and cash more tuition checks and right-wingers generally looking to bust teachers’ unions… but it wouldn’t be a “Black issue.”

And if Republicans in state and the federal government didn’t blatantly discriminate against the urban areas their corporate funders hollowed out with outsourcing and automation, maybe public schools in those areas would be better funded. Not to mention how all the “wrap-around” issues of generational poverty, food deserts, and racism in who gets arrested and how they get charged and sentenced impact student success.

So speaker after speaker at the RNC hails “school choice” as a “solution,” while they all deny the existence of the very problem it was ostensibly created to solve: systemic racism.

I just needed to point out this bit of cognitive dissonance.