KS

In Pennsylvania, we have a state constitutional mandate to provide appropriate free education to everyone, but we’ve also got a Republican supermajority legislature that has starved our public schools of almost every revenue stream possible, and choked our state education funding to historic low levels.

Property taxes are pretty much the only sustainable method we have of collecting revenues to fund our schools. This means that if you live in a poor district, you actually get squeezed more than in a town that’s higher-income, where you already have a really good school system and decent class sizes. So inadequate funding ends up punishing the poor.

Our funding is now at 37 percent of the total cost of education. Add to that the burden of many, many legislators with a lot of interest in charters and vouchers, which we’ve already proven are not successful. I don’t think that we should be spending public funds on schools that potentially are able to discriminate against our children, discriminate against their parents and, and could be unsafe for some populations of kids.

We shouldn’t be in the business of telling mothers in underserved communities what to do with their kids. I don’t pretend to know what the solution is for each parent, just that we have to adequately and fully fund our public school system.

It’s the same old story as with anything that’s a public good. As conservatives gain power in elected office, they set about the very systematic work of underfunding, understaffing, and dismantling public services through attrition. They starve it of any resource that it needs, bring it to the brink of failure. And then it makes what they’re saying seem true, that we have to privatize it.