There are a lot of serious flaws — unfixable flaws — with the “scholarship” bill that has been making its way through the state Legislature in recent days.
First, we should be working to improve public education by making public schools better, by finding more money for schools in urban districts and changing the funding mechanism to make it fairer. Creating a system in which the state gives tax credits to rich folks to create scholarships designed to siphon kids from the public schools into private — including religious — schools does not improve educational opportunity. It only exacerbates the gap between urban and suburban schools (the top kids get to escape failing schools) and endorses the privatization of public schooling.
Just as important, the bill would take public money — tax money — and hand it off to religious schools, an endorsement of religion that is a direct violation of the First Amendment prohibition against the state wading into religion.
This brings me to the quotation referenced in this post’s title, from one of the few top-notch political columnists in the state, Robert Braun of The Star-Ledger:
It is just plain wrong to use taxes to promote a religious message.
Simple. To the point. Too bad the people in Trenton do not seem to be listening.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 
The big money is behind the push to privatize our schools and to kill off or cripple our traditional public schools; Diane Ravitch calls them the billionaire boys' club. The billionaires can exert a tremendous influence on schools and school policy with little accountability. They are not educational experts and they have never been in the classroom but because of their economic clout, they get to call the shots while the flunky politicians jump to their tune. If charter schools and school vouchers flop and fail to improve our schools, the billionaires just move on to the next fad without any responsibility for the wreckage that they have wrought. The GOP and the right wingers love charter schools and school vouchers as a lever to kill off the unions, they are rabidly anti-union.School choice is a horrible idea in practice and in reality. Overall and on average, charter schools do no better than public schools and there are more failing charter schools than there are good ones. You would not know this from the corporate media which get paid to propagandize for charter schools or the media uncritically accept questionable data from the billionaire funded pro charter propaganda mills. NJ schools are in the top tier of schools in this country but from the way Christie talks, you would think that all or most NJ schools are a failure; this is not true, not even close.