Rss@dailykos.com (laura Clawson) · Friday, December 02, 2016, 6:10 pm
The rhetoric of “school choice” is all about building a pipeline to send public dollars to private coffers—and Mike Pence’s Indiana is an example of how that pipeline can send public dollars to churches. At Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer details how a school voucher program expanded dramatically under Pence is sending hundreds of millions of public dollars to private religious schools:
Out of the list of more than 300 schools, I could find only four that weren't overtly religious and, of those, one was solely for students with Asperger's syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders, and the other is an alternative school for at-risk students. [...]
Indiana's choice law prohibits the state from regulating the curriculum of schools getting vouchers, so millions of dollars of the state education budget are subsidizing schools whose curricula teaches creationism and the stories and parables in the Bible as literal truth. Among the more popular textbooks are some from Bob Jones University that are known for teaching that humans and dinosaurs existed on the Earth at the same time and that dragons were real. BJU textbooks have also promoted a positive view of the KKK, writing in one book, "the Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross to target bootleggers, wife beaters and immoral movies."
Under Pence, the families getting vouchers don’t have to be low income, so the claims that “school choice” is about helping poor kids are shown to be false, and vouchers can even go to families whose kids were already in private school. It’s a massive give-away to churches and other religious institutions, at the expense of public education.
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