Crazy Hypocrites Operating Obvious Scams on Everyone.
That’s what I think the CHOOSE Act actually stands for, and it certainly lives up to the billing, with hundreds of millions—yes, HUNDREDS of millions—annually being sucked out of our perpetually underfunded public schools and handed over to scam artists, charlatans and zealots.
Last month, Rebecca Griesbach at al.com published a couple of stories detailing the textbooks and other materials that Alabama’s CHOOSE Act has allowed our public tax dollars—the tax dollars you and I forked over to pay for the education of Alabama’s children in the hopes of having a better educated society—and the absolutely insane propaganda, factual inaccuracies and religious bunk that those materials contain.
God bless Griesbach for suffering through the research into the piece, so the rest of us—except for some poor kids of misguided parents—don’t have to. What she found, while extremely troubling, was in no way surprising. Not if you’re at all familiar with the voucher programs in other states, where buckets of public dollars suddenly become available to people who are hellbent on injecting religion into absolutely every moment of life and completely uninterested in vetting anything.
In Alabama, for example, she found that out of 243 vendor applicants seeking to qualify to receive our tax dollars for the materials and services they provide, just 18 were denied.
If that sounds like an incredibly high percentage to be approved, it’s only because the apparent sole qualification for approval was being able to fill out the application completely. It certainly wasn’t based on quality of curriculum or even an adherence to basic facts.
One of the approved vendors has a zoology textbook that teaches kids that the earth is only a few thousand years old; that dinosaurs were “created on the sixth day” and shared the earth with humans.
Another vendor has works that are straight-up partisan political junk, teaching that homosexuality should be rejected, that evolution isn’t real and that Marxism can “short-circuit God’s design and result in human suffering.”
Swell, huh?
Now, let me be absolutely, 100-percent, perfectly clear on this: I don’t care if you believe all that I just mentioned above. It’s a free country. Believe away.
But public dollars shouldn’t be paying for that goofy BS.
But we are. Because right now, under the Republican-backed CHOOSE Act—which they pushed through the legislature without Democratic support—our tax dollars are propping up outright religious propaganda and factually inaccurate texts. Provably inaccurate.
We’re giving away $2,000 per student for home schoolers and $7,000 per student for private school kids. And we’re sucking it all out of the Alabama education trust fund, which is where the money that pays for your kids’ education at public school comes from.
Currently, we’re allowing up to $180 million annually to be stolen by these absolute crooks and con men, and in a year or so, the cap is set to come off. No income limits. No limits on funds. It is projected to swell upwards of $500 million annually.
Bye bye, reading coaches. Bye bye, science labs. Bye bye, summer programs. Bye bye, school field trips.
Teaching the kids that Jesus maybe rode a dinosaur was more important, apparently.
And by the way, I haven’t even brought up the sketchy private schools that are now raking in tax money hand over fist from this absurd program. Most of them do a far, far worse job educating the students who attend, but they aren’t held up to the same public scrutiny, so no one raises a fuss.
The truly sad part is that if anyone would stop for a moment and actually think about this system—where we give people money to not attend the schools we’re operating and instead pay a private business for a product we can’t definitively say is better—it’s the absolute dumbest system ever imagined.
I mean, here are the men and women of our legislature—the people who are in charge of running and funding the public schools in this state—slapping themselves on the back for labeling the product they’re in charge of as “failing” and giving away tax dollars to encourage people not to use those schools because they’ve done such a poor job.
Only a Republican brain could think that sounds right.
Every other thinking person in the world would look at the failing product—a product we’ve long determined is vital to our society—and figure out a way to fix the broken parts and restore public trust in the entities they’re paying for. Decent people would never leave thousands of children in “failing” schools while assisting those who least require help. Competent people would never retain a funding structure that didn’t provide more resources to the most impoverished communities’ schools, nor would they identify schools as failing and then do nothing to assist them.
But we’re not dealing with thinking, decent or competent people here. We’re dealing with people who are helping the con men and carnival barkers.
Or ones who received their education from the dinosaurs-are-six-thousand-years-old people.
