ECCA Is Not The Center

I wish folks were paying more attention to the Educational Choice for Children Act, a federal school voucher program and tax shelter program. I've written about it (here, here and here), pointing out that it provides virtually no oversight or accountability (but plenty of tax dodging opportunities). But mostly it's being ignored.

Granted, there are plenty of possible futures to be alarmed by. But this bill, probably aimed to slip through the reconciliation process, would quickly force tax-payer funded school vouchers on every state in the union, whether they want them or not.

And when people do write about ECCA, they say really dumb things.

Take Juan Rangel. Rangel rose to fame and fortune running the UNO charter school chain in Chicagoland, and had a good couple of years before the truth about nepotism, fraud, and shameless self-dealing emerged. The SEC got him for fraud. He got sued by his former second-in-command. And yet, somehow, he is now the CEO of the Urban Center and on LinkedIn calling himself an "Experienced leader with a demonstrated 34+ year history of working in the non-profit industry." 

And the Chicago Tribune was willing to give him some space to make his case for ECCA, making the singularly odd argument that "embracing school choice will move Democrats back to the center."

Nope.

Rangel makes the usual arguments-- school choice gives families freedom, and the "usual criticism" comes from teachers unions. 

He cites the usual choicer-run polls that show the public just loves the idea of school choice. He does not mention the three states that soundly defeated voucher measures in the last election. 

What a tragedy, he opines, the Illinois Democrats allowed that states voucher program ride off into the sunset. That was the naughty teachers' union's fault. The decision, he says, "not only ignored public sentiment but also harmed the very communities Democrats claim to champion." Which is baloney-- the voucher program was a model of outsourcing discrimination to religious schools that rejected students for all manner of offense. Like most voucher programs, it was not there to serve poor communities, but to serve private schools who rejected anyone who didn't fit their preferred beliefs or who couldn't afford the school, even with the vouchers. 

Rangel's main beef is that Democrats are more interested in an alliance with teacher unions than they are in going along with conservative interest in school choice. Because school choice is bipartisan, but Dems are being partisan to oppose it. Which I guess is something that might make sense in Chicago. But if opposing choice is what a partisan Democrat would do, how can choice be bipartisan? 

But Rangel is one of the Reformster Democrats, folks like Rahm Emanuel and Michelle Rhee who are nominally Democrats but really love the conservative school privatization policies so much that they have little love left for public schools and none at all for the teachers who work in them. How this tribe can keep arguing that a bill that is exactly what Betsy DeVos always wanted and which will now be championed by Trump and comes with the stamp of approval of far right thinky tanks--how exactly is ECCA centrist?

But I guess this is going to be a feature of the next four years-- nominal Democrats talking about "compromise" and "reaching across the aisle" when what they actually mean is "give in to what those folks want." This seems like a bad plan, but then, we haven't had Democrat leadership standing solidly on the side of public schools in hardly ever, so if they want to listen to Rangel, whose credentials in education leadership are just super-impressive, it wouldn't be a huge change of pace. But, boy, would it be nice to have at least one political party that didn't think supporting public schools was a radical position.