Chicago Tribune reported late yesterday that Michigan school districts are scrambling to figure out what steps they have to take to lessen deep cuts coming in next fall’s education funding.
Districts face cuts of $470 per student, but they could shrink that by $100 if they meet several conditions still being worked out by legislators. The minimum per-pupil grant will slip below $7,000.
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QUEEN’S COMMENTS
Wake up America to what Republican plutocrats like Rick Snyder and billionaires like Betsy DeVos and David Koch are doing to dismantle public education in the USA and replace it with their school vouchers.
Notice that the per student grant (at least for the moment) that these pigs think is acceptable on a per pupil basis is under $7,000 a student.
This is the most that you could expect from a school voucher to parents to reimburse them for their child’s education–$7,000. Sounds like a lot of money, but it isn’t. In addition, don’t worry the pigs won’t stop their goal to dumb down the majority here. By the time they are through these school vouchers would likely be less than $3,000. Parents would be expected to make up the difference.
Use your gumption here.
REGARDING THE TABLE ABOVE : In regard to the table above, I don’t know where this group got their stats regarding non-sectarian cost. However as you can see from the Michigan example cited in this article, the average per student cost is no where near the inflated values represented for public school (non-sectarian cost). The group who created this table are promoting private schools as being less expensive than public schools which is totally false. In fact, the tuition for many private schools such as the one that Obama sends his children to far exceeds any tuition shown in their table even their inflated figures for public school costs–Sidwell Friends charges $30,842 per student per year.
For example, in the state of Texas, in 2008-2009, $39.6 billion was spent on basic education costs to educate 4.6 million students. This works out to be $8,000 a student which is still $549 under the quote in the table above for private school tuition. In Iowa the cost for the 2010-2011 school year for a regular education student is $5,768, which is the state cost per pupil. In Minnesota, the state average cost of public education was $6,236 per pupil.
AS FOR THE REAL COST OF PRIVATE SCHOOL TUITIONS? HERE IS A PICTURE FOR YOU:
Photo from Washingtonian – Nov 2009
As the old expression goes, the devil is always in the detail. This goes double in regard to the Republican plutocrats’ scheme to dismantle public education and replace it with school vouchers.
Using Michigan as an example, even at the current cost of approximately $7,470 per student (before the Republican cuts) that cost is more than $1,000 below the average cost of private schools which is at $8,549. However, when parents start to foot the bill for Secondary education for their children, they would need to be forking over a minimum of $3,000 per child per year. For families with three children, for example, this would mean $9,000 a year that they would have to find to cover the gap between a school voucher and the cost of a private school.
You know and I know that the majority of parents in the USA could not afford this burden. And you know what? The rich like Betsy DeVos and David Koch and their wealthy Tea Bagger Republicans as well as many of the Blue Dog and Corporate Centrist Democrats don’t give a damn.
Here is how George Carlin put the stance of the rich on public education (“owners” as he called them) :
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They are not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That is against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they are getting fked by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they do want? They want obedient workers. They want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And dumb enough to passively accept the increasingly shitter jobs with the lower pay, longer hours, loss of benefits, the end of overtime pay, the vanishing pension that goes away the minute you are ready to collect it. That will never ever be fixed. And now they are coming for your Social Security money. They want to give it to their friends on Wall Street.
