Flashback: When Elizabeth Warren Supported School Choice
“An all-voucher or all-school choice system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shake out might be just what the system needs”
Once upon a time, a certain Senator from Massachusetts wrote about the virtues of school voucher programs. But you’d never know that based on how Sen. Warren criticized newly minted Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos.
Writing to Secretary DeVos upon her nomination, Sen. Warren wrote:
“For decades, you have been one of the nation’s strongest advocates for radically transforming the public education system through the use of taxpayer-funded vouchers that steer public dollars away from traditional public schools to private and religious schools.
…
“But the actual evidence on how private voucher programs affect educational outcomes is mixed at best, in many cases reveals these programs to be expensive and dangerous failures that cost taxpayers billions of dollars while destroying public education systems.”
And then there was the not so thinly veiled charge of racism:
“These private voucher programs also have a racially charged history. Historically, private school vouchers have been used by some states to further racial and socioeconomic segregation.”
A favorite argument of anti-choicers which we explored here.
But back to the point — in 2004, Sen. Warren co-wrote the book, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke.
Then, she wrote:
So which is it? “An all-voucher or all-school choice system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shake out might be just what the system needs,” or vouchers are a scourge on public education?
It’s always a shame when ideology is used to torpedo solid ideas that would positively transform the landscape of the country.
[h/t AEI]
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A quick reading of “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke” pages 34-35 on amazon.com yields the knowledge that Liz Warren’s variation of vouchers is to allow you to move to an alternative public school within a defined locale, not to a private school.
In my area, there are 4 or 5 different school districts with wildly varying quality. People have their kids move in with an aunt to get into the better schools, so Warren’s idea would be embraced by more than a handful.
I’m not really sure how this solves the problem of the funds moving out of the original public school, which is the main argument used against vouchers. Moving from one public school to another would have to have ‘full payment’ move with it (due to state requirements), not the partial payment that most current voucher systems employ. So I see this as even worse in terms of dollars, but the unions might buy in since these are all dues paying members involved.
I kind of get the feeling that this was one of those “check-off boxes” that politicians think they need to do, but they really don’t have their heart in it.
Kind of like those coupons that can only be exchanged at the place you don’t want to shop, and only for merchandise you don’t want to buy.
Some bargain.
I very literally own virtually every book written on this topic and at its origination vouchers were a Progressive idea on how to invisibly get the behavioral science vision of education without parents recognizing what the schools had agreed to. This gives some of that history http://invisibleserfscollar.com/antithesis-of-the-briar-patch-school-choice-as-the-snare-instead-of-an-escape/
Just be very careful in assuming this is a panacea because it is not. Even the newest version, ESAs keeps calling for students, even homeschoolers, to commit to “high-quality assessments.” That melodious phrase is a defined term that does not mean what we might assume from our Webster’s. Instead it is tied to examoning what principles and ideas a student uses when there is no single correct answer. It certainly is not a test in any reasonable understanding of the word.
She’s anti-choice? Maybe she thinks the status quo is viable.
Welcome to the ambiguously progressive world of dichotomies.
In School Choice the dichotomies are only pretend and actually head toward the same vision with a slight difference in the rhetoric and rationales. For example, Ground Zero for School Choice is at the harvard Kennedy School of Government with its PEPG–Program on Education Policy and Governance. It’s where the Heriatge Foundation and I believe AEI join up with the Gates Foundation and others assumed to be on the Left. Most of the “ed experts” for the think tanks like AEI or Hoover are actually poli sci PhDs. Ed is how to implement their vision of political transformation grounded in Systems Science.
Rick Hess, for example, the current ed head at AEI, used to be a government prof at UVa who has always been tied to PEPG. Same with Jay Greene, now an Ed reform prof at U-Arkansas but previously a poli sci prof at the U-Texas Austin campus. Paul Peterson, who started PEPG and heads it used to be at Brookings, which always pursues the Rockefeller Foundation vision.
None of these theories actually work as parents are being led to believe. They all work though to quietly shift us to what Bela Banathy, a man who believed you could get a planned alteration of consciousness via education, described as the Systems View of Education.
Doe she have a good fry bread recipe?
Nasty, nasty Joke-ahontas.
Does this mean she was AGAINST Oklahoma land crab salad BEFORE she was FOR Oklahoma land crab salad…???
I have trouble keeping up with her.
Rags,
She is pro choice. She chooses to say whatever the time requires. After all, pandering today is different than pandering yesterday.
Rabid
Is there a good place to buy Oklahoma land crab in western Oklahoma? I’ve heard the café in Cache makes a good breakfast, but nothing about land crabs.
A political whore on the scale of Hillary Clinton.
Shrieking Crow speaks with forked tongue now.
Too bad none of the (R) Senators could seem to find this gem and read it to Lizzy during the confirmation process.
Just disband the DoE and let the local control take over, problem solved.
Why in every picture does Sen. Warren look like she’s just seen a rat?
Mirrors do that to some people.
I get some of these smarmy pols forgetting (or hoping no one finds) past comments caught on video or audio, but a BOOK?!? Warren speaks with forked tongue yet again. (And like someone else commented, it’s too bad a Republican committee member didn’t hit her with this, or even the nominee herself. How fun would THAT have been!)
The “face” of the
democratmarxist party.