What I Learned From - A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

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.

My idea #

• 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.

Podcast #

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

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