As if West Virginia’s legislative GOP supermajority had relocated to the island of Dr. Moreau and set up shop in subterranean laboratories, it has concocted a zoo full of educational systems.
Among their results are micro-schools, pod schools, home schools and other species they assure us will lead to mastery of trig functions and uses of literary allusion.
A recent mutation that bubbled up from their mad scientist bunkers is the Hope Scholarship.
As reported by the Gazette-Mail’s Roger Adkins, citing data from the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy’s Kelly Allen and Sean O’Leary, the Hope Scholarship is a torpedo aimed at sinking the ship of public education. This monster redirects $4,489 per student from public schools to private schools, every year, for the 6,000 students who have so far made the switch, a total of $21.6 million next year alone.
In some of these schools, there are few if any standards to ensure that instructors even understand when to use “there” and “their” and “they’re.” There are no requirements that Hope-funded schools are accredited or that the schools register with any state or local entity. And there is little in the way of student assessment to determine whether children are learning.
The schools are not even required to conduct background checks to screen out pedophiles.
Hope Scholarship money is already being funneled to at least 20 religiously affiliated schools in West Virginia, some of which require religious instruction and that students attend their worship services. Evangelicals will be delighted, until Hope Scholarship dollars begin flowing to a school operated by Islamic imams.
Instead of solving our shortage of about 1,700 fully qualified public school teachers, our Legislature recently turned its exertions to placing “In God We Trust” on every schoolhouse, and to fretting over trans kids’ restroom habits, along with permitting representatives of “patriotic” organizations to recruit students within the schools, and to permitting the teaching creationism as if it were scientific theory.
I do not discount some positive legislative efforts such as a bill that would make it easier for teachers to remove troubling students from the classroom (occasionally needed but too often overused), and another bill aimed at supporting pregnant students and students who are parents.
The Hope Scholarship tends to favor families of means because its $4,489 falls nearly $2,000 short, on average, of the tuition costs at the state’s private schools. If nothing else, it would be preferable that Hope Scholarship cash that is taken from public schools would remain in West Virginia. But Allen and O’Leary reported that more than $300,000 in Hope funds have gone to schools in other states.
To justify its actions, the supermajority tosses us rhetoric about “freedom” and “choice,” high-sounding values which they abandon at the mention of anything they don’t like, such as abortion.
Sadly, we seem to be gradually edging closer to the Republicans’ implicit goal, the transformation to the private sector of the once-solid public school educations that have sustained our society for decades. West Virginia’s GOP supermajority is drafting our children into its crusade against quality education and funding the fight with their taxpaying parents’ dollars.
