*Once most primary and secondary schools have collapsed and only private schools are left, begin to dial back money available through vouchers, so poor people must use special "cheap" schools designed just for them.
*Over time cut back voucher funding and amounts so, just as Reaganomics has done with our colleges, low-income people have to borrow from banks to send their kids to good schools.
This is not a new model: Reagan began the process with colleges, from substandard junior colleges for low-income people to throwing average Americans who wanted to attend a good college into a $1.8 trillion debt hole.
It's not even a unique model just for education: we're halfway through it with Medicare. George W. Bush introduced the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003, and now half of American seniors are on these private plans.
Once they've destroyed Medicare altogether (probably within a decade) the "good deals" available to people buying into the private Advantage plans will evaporate and America's elderly will be right back where they were in 1964: on their own.
In 2018, in an effort to stop creeping privatization of public education, voters in Arizona got a ballot measure up and overwhelming voted to reject an expansion of vouchers and charter schools in that state.
In response, three months ago the Republicans in control of that state's legislature passed the nation's first statewide voucher program, shoving their ideal of privatized education down the state's voters' throats. It's a cruel scam but an effective one.
The strategy is simple. Once public education is destroyed, over time the vouchers will be cut back to represent a smaller and smaller fraction of the cost of private education. Parents will have to cough up more and more, just like what happened with college tuition between 1980 and today.
As mentioned, conservatives have already used this model they're inflicting on our public schools on college education.
In 1980 state and federal government paid about 80% of college tuition, so individual tuition was very affordable. The norm from the 1940s to the early 1980s was that a student could pay for their college tuition with a part-time job in the summer.
This was because, before the neoliberal Reagan Revolution, college was considered part of the commons. Thomas Jefferson started the nation's first entirely free college "- the University of Virginia "- and Abraham Lincoln was equally proud of the free and low-tuition colleges he started. As the state of North Dakota notes:
"Lincoln signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, giving each state a minimum of 90,000 acres of land to sell, to establish colleges of engineering, agriculture, and military science. " Proceeds from the sale of these lands were to be invested in a perpetual endowment fund which would provide support for colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts in each of the states."
Fully 76 free or very-low-tuition state colleges were started because of Lincoln's effort and since have educated millions of Americans including my mom, who graduated from land-grant Michigan State University in the 1940s, having easily paid her minimal tuition working as a summer lifeguard.
Today, 80% of college tuition is paid for by students themselves, creating a massive, nationwide student debt crisis. Only roughly 20% of tuition is now covered by state and federal funds and, if Republicans had their way, even that would be gone.
As state after state increases their voucher programs and amplifies their support for charter schools, we're beginning to see the exact same dynamic at play for primary education. This is intentional: it's the explicit goal of the GOP.
Parents are already starting to borrow money to pay for their children to go to elementary and secondary school: today it's 10% of parents going into debt for their young children's education. Within a decade or two it'll probably be closer to the 68% of students attending private universities who have student debt.
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