Last year when Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos—a zealous, billionaire advocate of taxpayer-funded private school vouchers—to be his Secretary of Education (even though DeVos knew next to nothing about public education), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker probably thought he’d won the lottery.
Walker presides over the oldest, largest and most expensive system of taxpayer-funded private voucher schools in the nation. Wisconsin’s voucher program, founded in 1990 to serve 300 students in seven Milwaukee community schools serving mostly poor, black kids at a cost of $700,000, has been aggressively expanded by Walker to pay for more than 35,000 students attending mostly private religious schools statewide at a cost of nearly $300 million a year by 2019.
When DeVos and Trump promised a $20 billion national program to support private voucher schools, Walker sat back and waited for the millions to start rolling in. It’s not going to happen. That enormous financial windfall for voucher schools is as dead as Trump’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure program that was supposed to be repairing Walker’s lousy, Scott-Hole-filled roads by now.
Draining Resources from Public Education
It’s increasingly possible this could be the beginning of the long, slow death of private school vouchers that could finally stop draining financial resources from the overwhelming majority of students attending public schools. It’s the silver lining behind an incompetent president appointing unqualified cabinet members to try to ram through unpopular, destructive public policies.
The U.S. Senate confirmation hearing over DeVos’ nomination as education secretary turned into a major public embarrassment. DeVos was unable to answer basic questions about educational issues. Senators from both parties didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when DeVos defended guns in schools by declaring that, in Wyoming, “there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.” Despite a Senate majority of Republican lackeys, Vice President Mike Pence had to cast a tie-breaking vote to confirm her appointment.
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So far, most congressional Republicans have absolutely no shame in continuing to support Trump despite the steady stream of embarrassing disclosures about his dangerous irrationality and instability, but they try to stay as far away as possible from publicly embarrassing Trump appointees such as DeVos. That includes refusing to act on her pet project of throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at private voucher schools.
Instead, DeVos has exposed the split that has always existed between Republicans who want an increase in government giveaways to their well-off campaign contributors who send their children to expensive private schools and the hardcore, Trumpian Republicans who simply want to slash every government program in sight.
No Access to Voucher Schools
Many of Trump’s rural and small-town Republican supporters in Wisconsin are painfully aware they do not have any access to those private voucher schools that are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Walker. They know those hundreds of millions are coming from their own local public schools—where the great majority of children throughout the state are educated.
That’s why State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers is in the right place at the right time as the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor. He’s a real champion of public education running against Walker who desperately —and laughably—has started calling himself “the education governor” despite cutting more than a billion dollars in public school funding, demonizing teachers as enemies of the state to destroy their bargaining rights, salaries and benefits and forcing every school district to make drastic cuts in local educational programs.
Walker seems to think voters aren’t smart enough to remember all those years of draconian education cuts since he partially restored educational funding for the election year. But, during those years when Walker was eviscerating state school funding, literally hundreds of local school districts throughout the state voted to increase their own local property taxes by billions of dollars to make up for those cuts. Voters don’t forget that sort of thing.
In the most recent statewide election poll by Marquette University Law School in which Evers and Walker were tied at 46%, voters favored more state spending on education over reducing property taxes by a 61%-32% margin. The three most important issues for voters in the election were jobs and the economy, education and health coverage—bunched at 24%, 22% and 19%, respectively. Walker has major political vulnerabilities on all three.
After nearly three decades of Republican expansion of private school vouchers in Wisconsin, a Democratic governor committed to public education would never be able to immediately end the program. But a growing number of Republican voters are catching on that, like many other programs advocated by their party, private school vouchers benefit only a privileged few rather than the vast majority of school children statewide who attend public schools.
Democratic politicians have known that for a long time. With Republican politicians beginning to join them, it could be the beginning of a long, slow process of dismantling private school vouchers.
