Public Funding for Private Schools -- Why this is a Disingenuous Argument by Rhee and the Right

In response to the article above written by Michelle Rhee on the Huffington Post, I have to say that she really has no clue what she is talking about in terms of school vouchers and their benefit for children.  While she makes a nice argument in favor of putting "her kids" in private schools with vouchers if the public schools (such as many in DC) are so bad, touching the Mama Bear gene of all parents, the reality is that research has shown that the DC kids that went to voucher schools did no better on the same standardiz­ed test as the kids that continued to go to their local public school. Since voucher kids didn't do better on Rhee's highly prized standardiz­ed test (which she claims to be objective and the end all in proving achievement), we can conclude, then, that the only thing that vouchers did was to take money away from the public schools OR from the local government that subsidized the program.

In the case of DC schools, the federal  government subsidizes the voucher program there, which is probably why Rhee didn't mind vouchers when she was chancellor­. All it did was provide her with a way to have smaller class sizes without the cost. This leads me to the conclusion the Rhee, once again, is being disingenuo­us when she touts public funding for private schools since she never felt the consequenc­es of this anti-publi­c education initiative when she was in DC.   All that really happened is that our tax dollars are now being used to fund private schools and corporations, one more way for right wing politics to end our democratic system of education.   

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost