Thread by @mrobmused

Vouchers are deeply unpopular with the American public. It takes “rebranding” and #alternativefacts to get voters to approve these measures, and even then, vouchers aren’t effective in terms of student learning.
eclectablog.com/2017/02/privat…

Rather than being a tool of positive social change and student empowerment, vouchers are a key factor in increasing school segregation. Vouchers are helping to create a caste system in American education; a system of separate yet unequal schools for our nation’s children.

While vouchers offer the promise of public dollars to help students attend the “private schools of their choice,” they provide more “stick” than “carrot”, and could prove not just unhelpful, but dangerous to those that accept them.

Far from being any sort of “silver bullet” in terms of educational equity, students who have used vouchers to attend private schools score worse on measures of academic achievement than their public school peers.

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, two billionaires who never attended a public school, never sent their own children to public schools, and never taught in a public school, are “bigly” supporters of private school vouchers.

But it’s important to understand that their arguments for vouchers are, at best, not based on current research and best practices in education, and at worst, dishonest, misleading, and dangerous.

More @ eclectablog.com/2017/02/privat…