I cannot believe that it is solely the graduates of PRIVATE and PAROCHIAL schools who are responsible for the latest blows inflicted on public education in the State of Florida.  The Pre-K plan approved by the Florida Legislature that is surely going to be signed by the President’s brother, Governor Jeb, is a “reform” that creates vouchers using Public TAX PAYER money that may be given to private and parochial schools when parents decide that a better school than the neighborhood PUBLIC SCHOOL can be found elsewhere.

It is amazing to see how the wars over public education have metamorphosed from the time Catholics and their Priests, Bishops and Cardinals fought against the Protestant religion in the newly built public schools in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, it is the graduates of Public Schools who have forsaken the leveling influence of public schools that accepted EVERY CHILD and produced a reading, writing and thinking individual who believed in democracy.  Those people today are validating an elitist system where only the poorest and most defenseless of families have to be satisfied with schools that are denied the best available resources and trained teachers.

For over a half century teachers’ organizations, school boards and politicians have been obsessed with the notion that the earlier children attend school the better chance they have to be optimally educated by the time their “free” tax paid education is finished. Remember the Liberal idea of Head Start? Yet, the arguments against public schools are that they fail because they are not elite schools where enough money is spent to give the best education available. In those schools well-educated, well-trained, experienced teachers who are well-paid are the new standard. In Public Schools the roofs leak and the equipment and the books are old and there is no money to make them better. They fail in our present mind but once were ornaments of our democratic experiment.

What Public School graduates forget is that the history of the PUBLIC SCHOOLS includes the record of how they were fought over and that people once did not want to spend their money so other people’s children could attend the same schools as their children. That battle has never been resolved since the elitists began their denigration of the public schools as places they did not want their children to attend.  Yet, these elitists demand tax monies diverted to “charter” schools and have no problem with religion being supported in private, parochial AND public schools.

Public School graduates have forgotten the lesson won over decades and almost two centuries of winning almost universal tax supported education for all.