7/23/2008

Big battle coming with Teachers' Union in Florida

This is one place that teacher unions from across the country are going to be putting their money this year.

TALLAHASSEE -- The citizen panel empowered to put amendments before voters ended its first meeting in 20 years with a bang Friday, asking Floridians to defy the state Supreme Court by allowing tax money to pay for kids to go to private schools.

The proposal to allow the state to pay for private school vouchers was the last constitutional amendment -- one of seven -- the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission agreed to put on the November ballot.

If 60 percent of voters agree, the measure will undo a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that threw out the vouchers as unconstitutional. The vouchers were the brainchild of then-Gov. Jeb Bush, who wanted the state to pay to send students in low-performing public schools to private schools.

''The purpose of this amendment is to protect charter schools, to protect virtual education . . . and the alternatives that exist to the public school system,'' said Pat Levesque, who runs Bush's pro-voucher foundation and sponsored the amendment. . . .

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2 Comments:

Blogger Junkyard Sam said...

The Republican way is to break government and then point the finger at it and say, "See? Government doesn't work."

Ah, privatization & deregulation. Gotta love it, like the people in the building across the street that got trapped in the elevator during the Enron manufactured power crisis.

That wasn't as exciting as seeing local hospitals running on generators though. They said, "It's the environmentalists! They wouldn't let us build power plants!"

Later we found out they were shutting them down deliberately to CREATE shortages. This led to the outing of Davis. That's how we got Schwarzenegger.


MY POINT is it's the same story with schools. Underfund them. Break them. Create a no-child-left-behind program that takes money away from where it's needed the most...

Like every Bush plan - the voucher plan is destructive, designed to further bring down the public education system until it can be privatized...

Then we can have more Republican big monopoly control writing even more of our textbooks... changing and rewriting history to their liking.

Then all of America will be like FOX news.

Great.

7/24/2008 6:22 PM  
Blogger Mike Gallo said...

Here in WI, WEAC (the teacher's union) is still fighting our voucher program, even though it has been hugely successful thus far. I hope Floridians realize this is only the openening salvo in the battle to fix our public school system.

Is Sam being satirical? The tone is almost too perfect to be serious...

7/24/2008 7:35 PM  

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