Universal Vouchers are not universally loved

Hobbs, Mayes and Arizona's destructive, reckless, radical experiment

At the same time Gov. Katie Hobbs is dismayed that universal vouchers are bankrupting the budget and the Republicans are feigning surprise, because they don’t give a damn if it wipes out the state’s treasury, Arizona’s Attorney General Kris Mayes is turning her attention to Arizona’s radical, reckless, and destructive experiment with universal vouchers.

Mayes pointed out to Tom Horne, the antediluvian giant lumbering sloth that occupies the State Superintendent of Education’s cave, that his beloved vouchers scam is funding private schools that are unregulated when it comes to protecting kids with disabilities. His precious white flight academies aren’t protecting kids from discrimination based on a child’s religion, gender and sexual orientation. His private sector schools, unlike your battered, maligned and constantly attacked public schools can keep their educational records private. 

These matters concern Attorney General Kris Mayes because she is charged with enforcing the law. As any sentient observer can observe the American Republican Party has no respect for law and loves grifters, scams and the lairs who lie to them. As a great capo once said, “A fish rots at the head.”

Superintendent of Education Tom Horne shot back some babbling response from the Ice Age at the same time two top administrators of the bold, radical, budget bankrupting experiment quit, proud as peaches of the gigantic growing money pit they had wrought, which robs public schools to subsidize the abandonment of our public school system by the wealthy.

Now don’t get me wrong, all my boomer pals, if you want to send your beloved Pugsley to Ashram High or St. Butter Churn’s Academy and abandon your country’s public education system go right ahead but do not pick this taxpayer’s pocket to do it. Got it? Seems fair to me.

For years Republicans said the problem with public education is that all we progressives want to do is throw money at the problem.

By their diagnosis the problem with Godless public edcuation wasn’t ballooning unmanageable classroom sizes or their unfunded mandates or their absurd onerous regulations or their idiotic curriculum mandates or the lousiest teacher pay west of civilization or our state’s God forsaken crumbling schools.

Ballooning classroom sizes and teacher pupil ratios don’t matter. Ask any Reoublican lawamker who never taught a day in his life. If fed up teachers are jumping ship they can be replaced with any yutz who meets Arizona’s new standards which are: (1.) The ability to stand at the front of a room. (2.) The ability to mouth their mandated curricula like a ventriloquist’s dummy. And (3.) The willingness to take a vow of poverty and live in a burrow in the nearby shire.

Take it from any Republican who never spent a day in a public school classroom there are no real problems with public education that a little competition can’t cure. The problem with you progressives is all you want to do is to throw money at the problem.

Not we Republicans. We have the answer to all of public education’s problems. You taxpayers are going to fund Universal Vouchers so you and your neighbors can abandon public education and send your darlings to the private madrassa or mensa nursery of your choice. We are such bold thinkers! Our answer is revolutionary! Our answer is Republican genius at its best! Our answer is to throw money at the problem.

And lots of it. In fact, we’re willing to bankrupt the state to reshape education. And when we say “reshape” we mean “dismantle”.

We’re delighted to reshape the ruins of public education into a potpourri of unregulated private schools in the name of freedom.

We’re delighted to reshape the ruins of public education into multitudes of God-fearing religious schools where mythology is taught as fact and kids can pray, God dammit, in the name of freedom.

We’re delighted to reshape the ruins of public education into school systems whose records will remain private, which is a polite word for secret. We love secrecy. We love secrecy as much as we love all the dark money pouring into your state to fund our “noble” and “innovative” plot to dismantle public education.

And we’re delighted to see to it that public educators remain subject to all the diabolical regulations we have devised that would drive any sane educator to madness and to a teaching job in any other state in the Union that gives a damn about the future. And now, thanks to us, you don’t need a college education to teach here in America’s outback. Makes sense. What fool with a college degree would want to teach in this sandbox where educators are insulted, assaulted, beaten, whipped, scolded and scalded nearly every single day by our divisive, deranged and deluded politicians ?

And all they really want to see in your public school classrooms are American flags, no banned books, Bibles, kids reciting pledges, portraits of President Trump, no masks and more locked and loaded guns than crayolas.

So what if Republicans underestimated the cost of subsidizing the thousands of Arizonans who want to abandon their public education system and have all of us pay to have their Bible scholar taught at home in a barn loft?

What? Their estimate wasn’t even close? Hm. Whaddya know…

What? The cost is nearly a billion dollars? And do you have a problem with that, you banned-book-reading America-hating registered Communist Godless Marxist enabler of pedophiles?

I guess more Republicans should have studied math instead of firearms safety at Jesus Almighty High.

What? We’re leaving Arizona with a shortfall of $300,000,000.00?

How much? Golly. Gee. Shucks. Arizona is in the hole for three-hundred million dollars. Oh well. It’s just your money. Prayers and thoughts, bean counters.

And one more minor detail. Who is benefiting from public education’s Universal Voucher wrecking ball?

Are the friends of legislators who are investors in private schools benefiting? Shocking. How could that be? Note: See Arizona’s private prisons systems for another success story of profiteering that will make you retch over the age old story of cronies getting rich.

Are the unhinged rich donors who love our radical lawmakers and hate public education benefiting? Shocking. How could your rich neighbors steal your money from public education’s poor box to supplement sending their dearest Karens and Kens to Saint Egregious?

Who isn’t benefiting?

Public education.

Those who favor accountability from education.

Educators. (The ones who are left.)

Kids with special needs.

The poor trapped in underfunded public schools the system continues to rob.

The list goes on.

For too long public education has been starved and maligned by those who would divide Arizona’s children into self-segregating school systems teaching God knows what. Send your precious pupils to Faber Preparatory or to St. Superstitious, with my blessing, on your nickel, not mine and keep your thieving hands out of the treasuries of America’s public schools.

Will this program devised to gut public education become untouchable? Will it become a financial benefit like Medicare or Social Security that politicians will be afraid to cut? I say pluck the teat from the mouths of the public school haters now.

You, the voters, tried to shut this down. You saw this for what it is and you voted against this blood sucking parasitic system poorly disguised as reform. You were ignored by Arizona’s right-wing freak show and their ringmaster, Governor Doug Ducey, the Koch brother’s pet chucklehead. Instead of respecting majority will they chose to serve the Bizarre Right and now Count Dracula is running education’s blood bank and sucking it dry.

Some will applaud our Governor’s lamentations. You are too late of lamentations, Katie.

I will cheer and follow closely our Attorney General’s focus on Universal Vouchers.

But for this shameless shill for public edcuation it’s not enough. Shut this slush fund down for those who would abandon our schools and bankrupt us.

Lift up public education. Now.