I keep notes here. Most of these are related to travel, work, or books.

What I Learned From - A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

12 Sep 2024activism

Their thoughts in A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jack Schneider, Jennifer Berkshire

Loss of education for everyone hurts everyone.
Protecting public schools is a great way to fight extremism.
Loss of education for everyone is an inequality driver. True: decent schools don't eliminate inequality but eliminating schools will definitely exacerbate inequality.
Phase 1 by the school-voucher-lobby is fund public and private (AZ). Phase 2 is cut one of those at a time and eventually fund neither (my analogy would be: it's like you can't pay your cell carrier bill and you switch to a carrier offering you a lower price, which then expires after 4 months. Maybe now you have no phone at all and you can't switch back: what you had is gone and a salesperson or ad campaign received credit for getting you to switch).
The pandemic, first two years of Biden admin showed the possibilities around poverty elimination.
"Land of equal opportunity" has ever been an unfunded slogan.
Misconception: expecting schools to fight poverty is unrealistic. That high bar, sets them up to be failures, right out of the gate. They do create opportunity.
What AZ is doing to their schools budget is heading them towards a cliff. The Grover Norquist cliff. The Milton Friedman cliff.

Possible cleavage point: Explain clearly that vouchers are not forever and they're not for everywhere nor everyone.
Pointing out that schools have not decreased poverty, is insincere, coming from folks who have no desire to fight poverty.

The authors were interviewed on the podcast New Books in Public Policy on the New Books Network. June 27, 2024.