Nick Freitas and the billionaire Koch brothers love educational savings accounts. Should you?
The Washington Post op-ed by Virginia Delegate for Culpeper Nick Freitas and Jacob Fish, deputy director of Americans for Prosperity-Virginia sounded innocuous enough. Virginia parents, it argued, deserved K-12 education choices other than our public schools. So why not offer them “education savings accounts” (ESAs) – a way to stash money away, tax-free, that they would then be free to spend any way they chose, as long as it is (ever so loosely) connected to their children’s K-12 education. Education, the op-ed went on, shouldn’t be “one size fits all”. Seems reasonable enough – on the surface.
But let’s dig a little deeper. Americans for Prosperity claims to be a grass-roots organization – but in reality it is a vehicle for channeling millions of dollars from the mega-billionaire Koch brothers to their pet causes. They are famous (or infamous) for fighting against laws and services that help average Americans (like health care and labor unions) -- and for lower taxes (so that billionaires can amass even more wealth).
It turns out that ESAs (as distinguished from the older 529 plans which can only be used for post-secondary study) are the new darling of the radical right. Why? Because they are the perfect tool to defund public school education and direct those monies toward private and religious schools that operate with no real oversight. This is part of a national strategy. As shown by reporting by the non-profit online paper In These Times, radical right groups are trying to pass ESAs in more than a dozen states.
Of course, taxpayers who are putting money into ESAs will be even less likely to vote to fund public school budgets – and as under-funded public schools crumble, parents’ demands for more ESAs will only grow. That self-reinforcing cycle will keep taxes low – especially for the billionaires funding this effort. Finally, failing public schools will create new opportunities for for-profit schools, such as those backed by billionaires like Trump’s former education secretary Betsy DeVos.
But what does this mean for rural Virginians? Rural communities aren’t likely to see the new educational “opportunities” that this op-ed touts. Their population base is too small for that. They will almost certainly, however, feel the effects of a reduced tax base to support public education. To make matters worse, the Freitas-Fisk op-ed advocates for “using a percentage of per-pupil state funds” to support non-public schools favored by parents with ESAs.
So the next time these politicians try to sell you on yet another set of tax breaks that will benefit primarily the wealthy, ask them why they aren’t instead voting to invest in our public schools -- and in all children. And if they aren’t sure what investments are urgently needed, here is a politicians’ to-do list:
--fix Virginia’s woeful neglect of teachers’ salaries. Because it turns out the Virginia ranks dead last among the 50 states in teacher salaries as a percentage of median state income!
--invest in fixing the $25 billion backlog in renovating decrepit school buildings in rural Virginia.
--invest more funding into community and four-year state colleges so that rural Virginia kids don’t have to pay some of the America’s highest state college tuition fees.
--bring down the cost of pre-school child care. Because it turns out that Virginian parents spend on average more money on child care each year than they do on college tuition!
Those are the kinds of initiatives that will really make a difference for Virginian youth, especially those whose families are not wealthy.
Want to know more? Read these links:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/koch-brothers-americans-for-prosperity-rightwing-political-group
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity
https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/#/VA
https://www.business.org/hr/workforce-management/best-us-states-for-teachers/
