Hartmann Report - Republican politicians and the rightwing billionaires who fund them want a nation of uneducated, compliant serfs in their workforce, not a nation of well-educated union-conscious people who are willing to strike to get better pay and benefits. Which means Job One is to get America’s kids out of the clutches of those evil unionized teachers. Education, after all, is a liberal value. The conservative vision is “quality education for the children of the wealthy, while ending child labor laws for all the rest.”
And they’re getting their way. Florida and Arizona are well on the way to destroying their entire systems of public education with statewide private school voucher programs available to every child. This June, Oklahoma approved the use of public-school taxpayer funds to pay for kids’ attendance at a private Catholic charter school: it’s the first explicitly taxpayer-funded religious school in modern America and a clear violation of America’s founding principle of the separation of church and state. Meanwhile, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation gutting that state’s prohibition on child labor. Now 14-year-olds can skip school and go straight to work at their local slaughterhouse. Eight other Republican-controlled states have similar legislation pending.
Last year, DeSantis’ Florida moved an estimated $1.3 billion in taxpayer money originally destined for public schools to pay for private school vouchers. This gutted public school budgets across the state by roughly 10 percent. Florida is not unique in this: it’s happening in Red states all across the nation. Public education in about half of 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.
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