Voucher School Disaster just Tip of the Iceberg, unstoppable with Republicans in control of Government.

It’s always easier to destroy something than to do the hard work of thoughtfully creating something better. Take the myth that public schools are “bad.”

Once that criticism took hold, it was easy to appeal to the insecurities of parents, who were no longer familiar with recent innovations in our classrooms and teaching. Profit driven investors and con artists bestowed “choice” onto parents, who now felt empowered. Parent’s who panicked over intentionally failed schools via No Child Left Behind testing, were sold on the success of highly selective private schools. Forget about improving existing schools, it was much faster going someplace else. 

  

Now we've got every flimflam artist in the country, along with the declining enrollment at religious school, promoting feel good slogans like “empowerment” and “choice” as the easy answer.

Well, how easy is this to understand:

jsonline: A husband and wife running a private Milwaukee voucher school that abruptly closed last month — after accepting a total of more than $2.3 million in taxpayer money — now live in a gated community in Florida by the beach, records show. Records show Taron and Rodney Monroe started a new private Christian school this year in Daytona Beach. While the school in Milwaukee was running on fumes, they were telling Florida friends they had experience getting government grants for religious schools. Now the Monroes, who lost their five-bedroom house in West Bend to foreclosure, have disappeared. For the past year, the Monroes have been living in a house with a private pool in Palm Coast, Fla., that sold in 2009 for $409,000, according to records. "I haven't seen them since before Thanksgiving," said Bill Vigue, a pastor with a Christian radio show who worshipped with the Monroes in Florida.

The $2.3 million is lost forever. Taxpayer money shouldn't just pay for one school year, it should also be an investment in a schools future and development, which private for-profit schools don’t give a rats ass about.

This “choice” BS has even blocked elected officials from overseeing and saving taxpayer money, thanks to our “taxpayer watchdogs” in the Republican Party:

John Johnson, DPI spokesman, said Wednesday that the department's authority over voucher schools, which are all private and predominantly religious, is limited. There's nothing in state law that allows the DPI to take action against a private school because of low academic performance or because of a school leader's personal finances, Johnson said.

Remember how Republicans complained the unions prevented bad teachers from being fired? That apparently was never the issue, since they’re just fine with giving bad schools filled with bad teachers taxpayer cash in the name of “freedom and liberty.” Oh, and short term profit. Just for fun, let's attack Common Core too.