So imagine a black/Jewish ticket with the president married to a Jew. Oy VEY!
Memo to Kamala: Don’t Pick Josh Shapiro as VP!
By dianeravitch on July 25, 2024 |
Dear Kamala,
You are an exciting candidate, and I am thrilled to help in any way I can to see you become President of the United States. I admired President Biden and his courage in selecting you to be his Vice-President.
Now I see you in the campaign trail, happy and spreading joy. Quite a contrast to Trump, who is always scowling, angry, and promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies.
I have one piece of advice: Please do not choose Josh Shapiro as your Vice President. I know he is popular in Pennsylvania, and you need Pennsylvania.
But Josh Shapiro is a supporter of vouchers. Vouchers are a hoax. Their boosters are right-wing foundations who oppose abortion, gun control, and climate action. Vouchers hurt public schools. Vouchers are the pet project of Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and Texas evangelical billionaires Wilks and Tim Dunn. Another huge voucher supporter is multibillionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, who has spread money to other states to promote vouchers and is rumored to have encouraged Shapiro to push vouchers.
Vouchers are bad not only because of their supporters but because they fail to help poor kids. In fact, the evidence from evaluations in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and D.C. demonstrate that vouchers damage the academic outcomes of poor kids.
Most students who use vouchers are already enrolled in private schools. Why should the state subsidize families who don’t need the money but would be happy to have it as a gift from the state?
I know you don’t have a lot of time for reading these days, but I urge you to read anything that voucher researcher Josh Cowen has written since 2022. In that year, he declared that vouchers had failed and were hurting the kids they were supposed to help. His new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, lucidly describes the origins of vouchers in the fight against desegregation in the 1950s and their utter failure to help “poor kids escape from failing schools.”
You have a great list of potential VPs. Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania should not be on that list.
Thank you,
Diane Ravitch
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