The “Widows and Orphans” Approach to Vouchers

by David Safier

Conservative Arizona Republicans have been pounding the media with stories about $5 million in vouchers that were taken away in the recently passed state budget. They freaked. “The money is to help disabled and foster children!” they screamed. “Why do you hate disabled and foster children? Did I mention these children are disabled or in foster homes?”

If Arizona conservatives love children so much, why do they fight increased funding for KidCare? Why do they fight to keep school budgets low? Why do they insist on funding ELL education at such ridiculously low levels that they’re willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for their right to starve the program?

The answer is, they don’t love these children. They love vouchers. They’re using the disabled and foster children as political pawns to breathe life back into the one voucher program they’ve been able to push through in Arizona. Napolitano OK’d it as a way to get all day kindergarten legislation passed, and now the courts want to take it away because it’s illegal to use state funds to support private schools.

When it looked like the program was going to be ruled illegal by the courts, it was left out of the current budget. Then the state supreme court said the voucher program could continue until a final decision was reached, and the conservatives tried to figure a way to fund the program. First, the plan was to take the money from some surplus State House funds to reinstate the program. When that didn’t fly, the Department of Ed transfered money from the basic state aid account, where it can’t be used for the vouchers, to an operating account, where it can.

For weeks, House Speaker Jim Weiers and Ed Supe Tom Horne have been screaming, “Disabled and foster children! Disabled and foster children!” over and over, knowing that Democrats are all for offering social programs to help those in need and the media are suckers for a “Widows and Orphans” story. The media have seen this ploy used again and again by conservatives, but they can’t resist. Vouchers are boring. No coverage for that. Throw in disabled and foster children, and the story writes itself.

This is all about vouchers, folks. Arizona’s Republican elephant has been trying to get its voucher trunk into the public education tent for decades. If they can sneak that trunk in with this ploy, the next step is to move in the head, then the body, until the voucher elephant takes up so much space in the tent, there’s no room left for public education.

The Bush administration is doing everything it can to push voucher schools at the national level. It has thrown $70 million in U.S. Department of Education dollars to the “Free Market Education” crowd to push its agenda. But the vast majority of Americans have said they don’t like vouchers. Even Utah, not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, couldn’t pass voucher legislation.

So the conservatives scream machine repeats, “Disabled and foster children! Disabled and foster children!”

What they’re really saying is, “Don’t look here at vouchers. Look over here at these poor little children and give us . . . I mean, them, . . . what they need.”