The Privatization of Public Education is Failing Our Kids
Serving 14 years in the Wisconsin state house before coming to Congress, I had a front-row seat to witness the growth of the nation’s first and largest taxpayer-funded voucher experiment. Our state was an unfortunate leader in the current march toward corporations and wealthy individuals privatizing our public education system.
Wisconsin now has more than 31,000 students statewide enrolled in its voucher plan, even though approximately three-quarters of the new students receiving that public money were already attending private schools. Now they are just doing so on the taxpayer’s dime. States across the country are bankrupting our public education system by draining funds from public schools that
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The GAO’s report found some taxpayer-funded voucher schools do not have a set of minimum XX criteria for the teachers tasked with educating our kids.
Public schools are rightly required to educate all our children. Yet many voucher schools, according to the report, are able to cherry-pick which students they prefer. They could refuse to take in a child who might cost more to educate, such as a child with disabilities. Advocates for people with disabilities, including the ACLU and Disability Rights Wisconsin, have raised concerns that Wisconsin's school voucher program, either tacitly or explicitly, allows voucher schools to discriminate against students with disabilities in their admission policies.
Worse still, many of these programs cannot even meet the basic needs of students with disabilities who do enroll in their programs, leaving students and their families struggling to find appropriate educational services which would have been otherwise guaranteed in a public school.
The GAO also confirmed that taxpayer-funded voucher schools can mandate religious requirements for students as a part of admissions