Johnny Can't Read, But BushCo's Making A Mint
How Privatized Schools Rip Off The American Taxpayer
by Tamara Baker

Nov. 17, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- You've gotta hand it to the Republican Senate. The boys (yes, there are a few girls, but they're not running things) have chutzpah.

Or rather, gall.

Right now, they're gearing up to enact yet another portion of their Grover Norquist privatization twofer: screwing the taxpayer while providing inferior services -- all in the name of "reform" and stamping out the "gummint" which they gleefully and inaccurately demonize.

Here's the deal: the GOP Senators, led by our favorite "Kitty Kervorkian," Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), want to force a vote on funding their pet school vouchers projects -- even though their overall track record after the past decade has been inferior, in terms of money and teaching, to that of the public school systems they want to replace.

What's more, they want to pilfer the money for all this from the pockets of our public school teachers.

They want to force the Senate Democrats to make a Hobson's Choice: either fund our failed school-privatization programs, or we'll shut down the government.

Oh, yes: this is all happening even as Bush's brother Jeb has raided the pension fund of Florida's teachers so he could bail out his friend Chris Whittle's dead-in-the-water Edison Project, which since its 1992 inception has:

a) never turned a profit,
b) tended to cost more than the public-school systems it replaced, and
c) on average did a worse job than the public schools at educating the youngsters.

As the National School Boards Association's spokesperson Joan Wodiska "The voucher proponents have been reduced to hiding vouchers into a large, omnibus spending package because they couldn't pass the matter in the Senate. This shouldn't be railroaded into law."

No, it shouldn't.

Time to contact your Senators and tell them what you think of the GOP's wasting our tax dollars on this disastrous boondoggle. You know what to do.