Ed Reformers, if only the rich had more money!

It has always befuddled me the rights trickle down argument. That is if the rich have more money they will spend it and it will benefit everybody. We have had 30 plus years of it and all it has led to is unprecedented income inequality. If the rich had cats or newspapers instead of money they would be featured on cable TV shows like hoarders.

What’s my point? It’s education deformers like Robert Enlow president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice are still calling for education savings accounts (ESAs), which families can use to cover private school tuition, tutors, therapies, online courses – or a combination of those tools – and even college expenses for everyone regardless of income. Hey make an obscene amount of money? Well here is a few thousand more at taxpayer’s expense. That expensive private school just got a little cheaper.

Furthermore I guess it doesn’t matter to Enlow that study after study says kids who attend voucher private schools don’t do any better but facts and evidence rarely deter these guys from what their gut says or what their lifestyle demands.

http://www.redefinedonline.org/2013/12/my-schoolchoicewish-more-school-choice-less-

Later in the article he went on to bemoan high stakes testing saying parents did not choose private schools because of how well they did on them saying, Moreover, not one surveyed parent said “higher standardized test scores” were the main reason they chose a private school. Why then are we pushing schools down the standardized path?

But his answer is not to do away with them or diminish their importance; instead his answer is to give taxpayer money to rich people and to siphon resources out of public schools.

I want to make one more point. He then went on to say competition has been great for a number of industries, agriculture, transportation, power, communication and, most recently, computers and the Internet.

Isn’t agriculture practically owned by a few super companies and don’t we give out huge farm subsidies, didn’t taxpayers build the transportation infrastructure and bail out Detroit, aren’t most power companies (besides big oil) quasi-governmental institutions using tax payer funded infrastructure, communication resulted only after the government broke up a monopoly and they use citizen owned air waves and didn’t the government develop the internet and then just give it away? 

All of these entities owe much of their success to the tax payer and the government and where I am not saying our schools are problem free, ignore poverty and over test much, I am saying it's not the hapless boogeyman people like Endlow would have you believe. Once again facts and evidence rarely deter these guys from what their gut says or what their lifestyle demands