Montini: Republicans reviving school segregation

We can dance around the semantics all we want, but the Republican-supported plan to wildly increase the number of students eligible for taxpayer money to go to private schools is, essentially, a revival of segregated schools.

Of course they would never say such a thing.

What they say, instead, is that House Bill 2482 and Senate Bill 1279 will eventually allow all of Arizona’s public school students to get vouchers toward private school tuition.

In reality, the people behind this scheme know that such a program will do no good for families living on modest or low incomes.

The vouchers wouldn’t be enough to cover all of the tuition or other expenses that go along with a private education. Transportation. Other costs. They wouldn’t be able to take advantage.

A lot of the people in this category are racial and ethnic minorities.

Not only that, but private schools, unlike public schools, aren’t required to accept every child.

They get to pick and choose.

Whose kids do you figure most of them would select, given a choice? Those from wealthy families or poor ones?

Meantime, those families who can already afford to send their kids to private schools, along with those who were close to being able to afford it, would be able to  use tax money to do so.

Sadly, some of that tax money would come from those modest- and low-income families.

The regular public schools attended by the children left behind would most likely decline further and we would be back to the bad old days when education was (even more) clearly divided between the have and the have-nots.

All the time under the pretense that the proponents of this plan are helping those they're hurting the most.