Source: Bruce Wilson, Talk to Action, October 18, 2013

In 1953, a year in advance of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that would rule racially segregated public schools unconstitutional, Georgia Governor Herman Talmage laid the groundwork for a voucher scheme that would privatize Georgia’s public schools.

Talmadge and his fellow pro-segregation state governors never implemented that plan, but now – over fifty years later – a shockingly similar neo-voucher scheme, backed by Michelle Rhee’s pro-privatization group StudentsFirst, is siphoning taxpayer money off to fund white-dominated wealthy suburban schools and pay for students to attend Christian fundamentalist private schools that bar openly-LGBT students even teach that they are hated by God.

Judging by StudentsFirst’s choice for its first two “educators of the year” — Tea Party-aligned state legislators who have sponsored virulently anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant legislation, the Rhee-backed neo-voucher schemes now operating in twelve U.S. states, which have been accused of fostering a new, anti-gay school segregation regime, are dragging the racist legacy of Southern segregation in tow….