The Cost Of Kansas Private School Vouchers Will Likely Skyrocket And Defund Public Schools

So I can imagine private schools would run out of room and have build more space to handle new students which makes tuition go higher, while public schools have too much space making them inefficient and have to close.

Thanks to Trump, the rich get a big piece of the pie and the middle class and poor have to pay for their pie and the ice cream topping.

Just another step toward the primary mission...

It's fine, new judges will be placed to invalidate the state constitution, then it can be changed so that education is no longer a right and we can just make all the poors can be sent to the mines.

Everyone knows the children yearn for the mines

I agree with your sentiment that people should experience consequences, but that's not the real problem here, which is that once you enact some big program like this, it creates a new lobby/constituency to keep it in place so you'll never get rid of it. Here, you're creating a constituency of at least tens of thousands of people who get a benefit of thousands of free dollars every year through a kid's K-12. That's a huge incentive to want to stop this from going away. And it's not GOP legislators will rush to get rid of this even if GOP voters feel some pain. Once this is enacted, it's probably gonna be in place probably permanently.

And they don't want DEI kids to be in schools. These wealthy people at these schools will not accept poor, non-white kids or disabled kids. I think every single person in this country realizes that MAGA means going back to a time when only white, Christian men had rights. There is literally no other explanation based on his EO's.

THIS.

Thank god my kids can smell the bullshit stupid nonsense

RIGHT.

I cannot wait to be sued by the hospital right before it closes up shop!

That is what they are banking on. Take the statewide tax revenue to fund a handful of private schools for the new right wing elite, exclusively.

None of the people proposing this live out in the little towns. See how they handled rural Kansas health care in the last 20 years as an example. Hint: they destroyed it.

It's not just if you live in cities, it's the families that are not wealthy. We are dumbing down our children at the cost of the wealthy.

The regular people in the cities don't want this either. It's the "unschooling" crowd and the wealthy that benefit from this. They're the only ones that want it.

Right? It's almost as if this all illustrated in a certain "Project" that most people in our state never bothered to read.....

Isn't private school tuition already like college tuition anyway, where most (mid-upper income) people pay full price and lower income people get some amount of discount based on income? To your point, the overall tuition goes up, but the needs-based discounts are just less and that system stays in place. It's all about maximizing revenue, baby! :)

Don't worry, the next step here is probably giving public school money to homeschoolers in addition to private schoolers...

We voted this shit down super hard

Kansas doesn't have public referendums where voters get to propose and vote on issues, so unless a KS Constitutional amendment is required to implement vouchers, the legislature can just pass the law itself to implement it, which is what's being proposed right now.

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So you believe that people who cannot afford private schooling shouldn't be educated, thus increasing the racial and poverty gap of education. These vouchers are not going to get the poor into private schools and private schools can be discriminately selective of who attends. And you know very damn well that republicans will not ban discrimination because banning discrimination is "DEI". The voucher system will not be a 100% payment to attend these schools nor will it block discrimination of who they allow to attend. You want to reduce that poverty to wealth gap, you fund education properly, not force them to pay to be indoctrinated to some "Christian value" purpose private institute.

If public schools were so great...

We should really start there, because all public schools are not great across Kansas, due to the long history of the legislature under-funding schools, particularly in areas with lots of low-income and special needs kids like KCK - which was argued in many lawsuits going back to the 90's, most recently in the lengthy Gannon series of suits, where the KS legislature was ordered by the state supreme court to properly fund schools, which it's still not complying with.

And if the state claims to not have the tens of millions of dollars required to be spent on special needs kids, how can legislators credibly argue we have the over a hundred million dollars available to spend on private schools? That only makes sense if your goal is to ultimately de-fund public schools.

Also, if you're in support of vouchers, how do you reconcile the fact that private schools now allowed to accept public money can choose to toss kids with behavior problems, or refuse to serve special needs kids? "Not our problem", they all say, leading back to the requirement that the underfunded public schools must serve these kids. There's no apples-to-apples comparison between public and private schools anyway, when private schools are full of relatively wealthy kids, and the schools can pick and choose which kids to serve or not - unlike public schools.

If you want to send public money to private schools, you should at least argue for holding the schools to the same requirements for serving all kids if they're willing to accept public dollars. I think you'll find that many private schools would then refuse to take public dollars because serving low income and special needs kids is more of a challenge than they want to take on.

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Vouchers do not give families more choice in education. They do not fully fund tuition at basically any private school plus private schools do not offer transportation or free/subsidized lunch or before/after school care the way public schools do meaning that in reality vouchers are really only a tax cut for people who can already attend private school. 

What's worse is that vouchers take money away from public schools and gives it to schools that may not be acceedited and are free to exclude people based on their socio-economic status, religion, gender/orientation, or skin color.

My guy, with vouchers it's ASSURED that your zip code will determine education opportunities. Public schools have failed as a whole? Yeah, might as well get rid of all attempts to educate the entire populace.

Your problem, similar to how conservatives struggle, is a staggering lack of imagination. You cannot imagine it being WORSE than it already is. Don't worry, you won't have to imagine soon.

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