Schools Matter: Privatizers Seek to Breathe Life into Dead DC Voucher Program [View All]

[tonysam]

A bad penny always returns:

With the bloom off the segregated corporate charter schools as the ultimate tool for crushing public education, the privatizers are ginning up the old standby option, school vouchers. Right-wing princess, Betsy Devos, daughter of the Amway fortune and sister of Eric Prince (of Blackwater Christian Crusader fame), has launched a new website, the American Federation for Children (get it?), in an effort to breathe life once more into corporate vouchers in DC (again), a program that would give corporations a dollar tax write-off for every dollar given for a voucher.

A clip from the AFC's latest press release aimed to garner support for Lieberman's amendment to a Senate Bill to reauthorize the FAA (you may ignore the Press Release's claim that Lieberman is offering an amendment to an entirely unrelated House Bill):
__

The Obama Administration’s own “What Works Clearinghouse” has validated the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) research on the OSP. The evaluation of the program shows that students who were offered vouchers to attend private schools scored higher on reading tests compared to students who were not offered vouchers. These gains were equal to three months of additional learning.
__

And on cue, too, is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, printing their own fabrications this morning about the IES study, whose PI was none other than Patrick Wolf, Endowed Chair of School Choice (no, that's not a misprint or a joke) at the education school that Walmart built at the University of Arkansas. Quoting Wolf:

More