No Apologies Coming: They Know Exactly What They’re Doing
Universal Vouchers Are Achieving the Far Right's Intended Goals
An email last week from Cleveland.com asked the following:
“When is the last time you heard an Ohio politician acknowledge screwing something up?
We’re all human. We all bumble. And, I like to think, most of us have the self-confidence to acknowledge errors and learn from them…”
OK. I agree with all this. Politicians certainly seem hesitant to apologize for mistakes, which they (and the rest of us) certainly make.
But then came this as the example:
“Lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine changed the rules on school vouchers this year with a goal many find laudable, to give students in under-performing school districts a chance for a better education….Once the rules went into place, however, the vouchers were overwhelmingly grabbed by people in good districts, like Rocky River.
Did lawmakers [] admit they got it wrong, that the rules they created did not help the people they say were their targets? Again, we asked.
“The answer is no.”
What??
I’m sorry.
This is unacceptably poor journalism.
It isn’t the truth.
Worse, it contributes to the misinformation, and the false narrative about what the universalization of vouchers is all about. It’s rehashing the old, misleading sales pitch without explaining what’s really happening.
And what’s happening is so much worse than a “mistake.”
The Deeper Motivation: Privatize ALL Public Education
The goal the legislature had in mind when they “changed the rules” was not “laudable, to give students in under-performing school districts a chance for a better education.”
If you watch and listen to the key leaders closely, and watch the big-dollar backers pushing this stuff all over the country (Devos, Koch, ALEC), that is clearly NOT their goal.
It’s not the goal in Ohio. It’s not the goal anywhere in the nation where this is happening.
Their clear goal is much bigger and far more sweeping than that. Far more dangerous.
I’m in the middle of reading a book—“A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”—which makes it plainly clear how deep, how radical and how much broader the goal actually is. I highly recommend it for anyone just learning about this voucher calamity:
What is the driving goal of all this?
It’s to undo much of our nation’s history, where public education has been treated as an essential public good.
As the book describes: public education is “the most pervasive and deeply rooted entitlement program” among Americans under 65—“a public service that can be utilized by anyone.” Most Americans remain deeply committed to this vision of public education. Many states, like Ohio, even include language in their respective constitutions that spell out this vision of education as a public good—so deeply felt that it’s a legal requirement every politician in Ohio (and other states) takes an oath to provide.
But on the far right, today, the goal is to upend that vision. It’s to transform education into a private good, traded in the private marketplace like any other product. For them, “government schools” (as Donald Trump unsubtly described them in his presidency) interfere with the private market model they want to achieve.
To see how far they want to go, just read from the writings (quoted in the book and this blog post from 2014) of Andrew Brenner, a former Ohio State rep (where he chaired the education committee) and now state senator (where he now chairs the education committee) who has led the charge on Ohio education “policy” throughout his tenure. Brenner wrote in 2014: “our public education system is already a socialist system. [sic] and has been a socialist system since the founding of our country.”
His approach? “The free-market system works for cars, furniture, housing, restaurants, and to a lesser degree higher education, so why can’t it work for our primary education system?”
So what does Brenner propose?
“We need to do something that was done about 25 years ago in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc: sell off the existing buildings, equipment and real estate to those in the private sector. The private sector includes our existing teachers, superintendents, management and everyday taxpayers… Bust up the education monopolies and do not settle for the lowest common denominator. Privatize everything and the results will speak for themselves.”
Brenner may be more honest and open than most, but this is basically the vision animating DeVos, ALEC, the Koch Brothers investments, and others all over the country. Make education a private, free-market system.
And here’s the worst news: although this vision of education goes back decades, for most of that time, it went nowhere because it proved so unpopular with everyday Americans who strongly support public education, then and now. Politicians largely wouldn’t implement it, and when given the chance, voters rejected it at the polls.
But in gerrymandered statehouses that face no accountability back to the public, the concept is now experiencing its heyday via the wave of universal vouchers sweeping the nation. Those vouchers are perhaps the most important tool to accomplish the radical vision described by Brenner above, and that wave is being backed by huge amounts of campaign dollars thrown in by the forces described above (and are being used to attack Republicans in primaries who refuse to go along).
But more steps are also in the pipeline: so-called Education Savings Accounts, public support for building new private school buildings, and the like.
All of this to achieve the free market vision for education .
It’s Common Sense
But even if you haven’t read these well-researched books or Brenner’s blog posts, it’s still blatantly obvious that the “goal” articulated by Cleveland.Com is not what’s driving what’s happening now.
Common sense makes clear that their recent steps serve the exact opposite goal of “giv[ing] students in under-performing school districts a chance for a better education”—but serve the precise goals Devos, Brenner and others are pushing for.
To be specific: the changes the statehouse has inflicted on Ohio got rid of the restrictions that limited the scope of vouchers to any narrowly tailored goal such as that.
That’s right, they eliminated income restrictions entirely.
They also do not require that voucher claimers went to a public school, or a poorly performing school, or that the school they use the voucher for is a better school.
They ELIMINATED all such restrictions.
Those were the changes!
The results—an explosion in vouchers, used almost entirely by those already in private schools, and who could already afford those private schools—are exactly what they intend, and exactly what you would expect from the changes they made.
So of course they are not going to apologize, and they won’t for a minute change the new lack of rules.
Getting rid of those rules was their big victory. They are critical steps to the broader vision they hope to implement.
No More Sugarcoating the Truth
The sad irony of all this is that it was Cleveland.com reporting that did such a wonderful job exposing the outrageous attack on public education in their original story (remember, they’re the ones who proved that almost all vouchers are being used by families already in suburban private schools).
To then whitewash the clear intent of the politicians in Ohio—and to bolster the surface-level narrative being used all over the country to sugarcoat the true goal—does a disservice to that outstanding reporting.
None of this is a “bumble.” The outcomes are not a “screw-up,” nor “errors [to] learn from.”
Just as Husted’s ECOT was not some innocent mistake—but egregious pay to play, continued through years of failure, until it got busted .
Just as the Governor’s takeover of the state school board is an aggressive, anti-democratic move to bring all these intentional and destructive decisions behind closed doors, and further out of the hands of voters to stop, or even weigh in on.
There will be no apologies or mea culpas.
Because this is a deadly serious, full-out attack on education as a public good—long sought by fringe elements of the right, but now possible due to how undemocratic gerrymandered red states have become.
Whether journalists, politicians at any level, activists, or everyday citizens, we all need to explain it clearly, and plainly, including the underlying motivations.
Most Americans will be appalled.
And then we must do all we can to fight back.
Thank you David Pepper! This egregious theft of public funds needs to be made more known. I post your column on Spoutible.com
Read Jess Piper's substack "The View From Rural Missouri" to hear first hand what all this means. Their education system is being decimated as well, the same way.