By Randi Weingarten

Copyright newrepublic

is by no means alone; he’s just the guy who said the quiet part out loud. To be
clear, fascists and autocrats and far-right extremists don’t want to help all
students, nor do they want to strengthen public schools. They don’t want
students to learn about the painful parts of American history, and they don’t
want to level the playing field for children living in abject poverty. Their
goal is to exploit problems, not solve them. They want to divide us, otherizing
those who are different while casting pluralism as the problem. These
extremists try to pit us against each other and distract us so they can rig the
system for themselves. When the far right gets enough people to believe that
diversity is a threat and opportunity is a zero-sum game, they use the anger
and resentment they foment to defund and destabilize public schools.

private school vouchers. In 2022, Arizona became the first state in the nation
to enact universal vouchers, despite voters overwhelmingly voting to reject
them. Data from Arizona reveal the true impact of handing over taxpayer money
to private education. Vouchers go largely to the wealthiest zip codes in the
state. Three out of four students who received them were already attending
private school, which means those families could already afford private school
tuition before they got taxpayer money. Some private schools raised tuition
accordingly. Meanwhile, in 2024, just two years after universal vouchers took
effect, Arizona faced a massive budget “meltdown”—a $1.4 billion black hole
that nonpartisan researchers attributed mostly to vouchers.

are not a solution to fix education—in fact “they have not produced academic
gains for students,” reports Diane Ravitch, and, “if anything, such students
often lose ground academically.” But fixing education isn’t the point.
Vouchers—just like all of the far-right’s other attacks on teachers and public
schools—are a strategy to end public education as we know it. Indeed, as of
this writing, in the Phoenix area alone, 20 public schools have been shuttered
as Arizona’s privatization scheme has expanded.