Why do Republicans attack public education? Follow the money.
Why do Republican attack public education? Follow the money.
Fascism flourishes when people are ignorant. – Umberto Eco in ‘Fourteen Signs of Fascism’
Follow the money to understand how billionaires get Republicans to defund public schools. Public education is defunded. Students’ graded drop. Teachers are underpaid. Billionaires fund groups to disrupt school boards and censor what can be taught.
Republicans benefit from dark money donations to impose fascism. Billionaires get more tax cuts from Republicans and bamboozle a less educated public. Private schools owned by billionaires like Betsy DeVos get more federal funds that should have gone to public schools. Billionaires get richer while the public gets duped.
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Profiting from destroying public education
“The United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on primary school education. There are massive profits to be made if privatized entities can skim even a few percent off the top. Those profits, in turn, can be used — with the Supreme Court’s blessing — to legally bribe elected officials to further gut public schools and transfer even more of our tax dollars to private schools and their stockholders.” – Hartmann Report
- Private schools are most likely to be segregated by race and class, which appeals to the bigoted base of the Republican party.
- Most public school teachers are unionized, and the GOP hates unions.
- While public school boards are our most basic and vigorous form of democracy, private schools are generally unaccountable to the public.
- Whitewashing America’s racial and genocidal history while ignoring the struggles of women and queer folk further empowers straight white male supremacy. The Hartmann Report
Betsy DeVos: the billionaire Republican destroying public education
Billionaire DeVos attended a private Christian school in Michigan and sent most of her children to private Christian schools; she has had little exposure to public education. She became a champion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools and vouchers that enable families to take tax dollars from the public education system to the private sector. She has proposed billions of dollars in cuts to her own department, hitting class size reductions, after-school programs, full-service community schools and student loan forgiveness.
“Here you have someone whose job it is to help students, 90% of whom go to public schools in America, and to help students in higher education navigate through their student debt or try to mitigate it. She’s failed on both accounts. Instead, she’s tried to defund and dismantle public education and make it harder for us to help kids in public education,” said Weingarten. – The Guardian
Republicans cut public education funding
- Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, cutting the nation’s federal education budget by 18.5%.
- George W. Bush continued the tradition, proposing an 8% cut to education and welfare budgets.
- Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos then proposed cutting 12% or $8.5 billion out of the federal education budget, while allocating over $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to flow into the money bins of their private school cronies.
Republicans’ war on education is part of their push for fascism
Republicans’ war on education is meant to cement the GOP’s grip on power. The Republican Party has escalated its war on education on its march to becoming a fully fascist institution. Most of this is done under the guise of fighting “critical race theory. The GOP has twisted “critical race theory” into a conspiracy theory used to scare white people into supporting a full-blown assault on the teaching of history or literature in public schools. – Salon
American Federation of Teachers
The AFT is dedicated to the belief that every person in America deserves the freedom to thrive, fueled by opportunity, justice and a voice in our democracy. This freedom is achieved through an economy that works for all, including the ability to form a union; great public schools and affordable higher education; healthcare as a right; retirement security; the right to vote and civil rights; a vibrant democracy; and safe, welcoming and healthy environments and communities.
The AFT and its members advance these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through members’ work. Teachers care, fight, show up and vote.
Take Away: Support public education and demand that teachers be paid fairly
Deepak
DemLabs
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