Senator Bernie Sanders Warns in New Report of Right-Wing Billionaire Plot to Sabotage Public Education in Order to Privatize It

From Bucks County Beacon

As chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, Senator Bernie Sanders released a June report entitled “By the Wealthy, for the Wealthy: The Coordinated Attacks on Public Education in the United States.” The report is a brief but thorough (16 pages of text, 4 pages of footnotes) takedown of the current wave of attempts to end public education as we know it.

“Over the past decade, there has been a coordinated effort on the part of right-wing billionaires to undermine, dismantle and sabotage our nation’s public schools and to privatize our education system,” said Chairman Sanders. “That is absolutely unacceptable. We can no longer tolerate billionaires and multi-national corporations receiving massive tax breaks and subsidies while children in America are forced to go to under-staffed, under-resourced, and under-funded public schools. On this 70th anniversary year of Brown v. Board of Education, let us recommit to creating an education system that works for all of our people, not just the wealthy few.”

Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

Sanders notes that in the past three – an unprecedented number of states have adopted and expanded school vouchers – draining hundreds of millions of dollars from state coffers and education systems to feed a system of private schools with neither accountability nor oversight. This voucher system is designed both to protect discrimination and, as we have seen here in Pennsylvania, to subsidize it with taxpayer dollars. 

These efforts are fueling the creation of two, segregated K-12 education systems – a private and public one – that are neither equitable nor fiscally sustainable.

The report cites studies that find that state funding for public education has barely budged in a decade, but tax breaks and subsidies for private schools have gone up by over $7 billion—408% – adjusted for inflation.

Make no mistake; Republican’s efforts to vilify educators, ban books, and censor what is taught in the classroom are blatant attempts to erode trust in the nation’s public schools and justify diverting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars away from public education.

The report is on the mark. 

Since the 1984 release of A Nation at Risk, the Reagan-era report designed with the goal of supporting a predetermined conclusion that public education was failing, that drum has been beaten ever since. As Christopher Rufo, architect of the panic over critical race theory told an audience at Hillsdale College, “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.” 

Since Milton Friedman laid it out decades ago, a dream on the right has been to replace our public education system with a system of privatization—not just to privatize the delivery of education, but to privatize the responsibility for acquiring it. It’s no coincidence that Friedman’s idea is the central position of the Project 2025 chapter on education.

Read the full article here.