Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
The idea of America as a true "land of opportunity" is anathema to their ideal of a nation of "classes and orders" where every person knows their place and morbidly rich white men are in charge
A new report finds that DeSantis' Florida will, this 2022-2023 school year, move $1.3 billion in taxpayer money originally destined for public schools to private schools. This will gut the public school budgets across the state by roughly 10 percent.
Florida is not unique in this: it's happening all across the nation. Public education in America is in a crisis and has been for some time. It's a crisis Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to make worse.
In many ways today's conservative war on public education dates back to the 1950s when, in 1954's Brown v Board decision, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must allow Black children to sit in the same classrooms with white children.
This so outraged white conservatives that public schools were shut down altogether in some states and counties, and private, all-white "academies" were opened, many by religious figures, across the nation.
It was the beginning of a concerted, 75-year-long assault on public education.
The Republican war against public education moved from being purely about race to incorporating an ideological rationalization or excuse with the 1980 effort by billionaire David Koch to run for vice president on the Libertarian ticket.
Koch's platform said of public schools:
"We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended."
Thus was set the formula that billionaires from David Koch in that era to Betsy DeVos in this era used to push for the destruction of public (racially integrated) schools.
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*Privatize public schools through charter schools and by offering vouchers.
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*Withhold funding from public schools while pouring cash into these new, private entities.
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*Expand the nationwide propaganda campaign that public education is failing and/or is an instrument of an oppressive state.
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*As public schools become starved of cash, use that crisis to destroy their teachers' unions and ultimately to shut them down altogether.
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