Rep. Steve Berch Newsletter - Connecting the Dots

Majority party leaders made an iron-clad promise at the end of the 2024 legislative session: They will pass a school “voucher” bill in 2025.
 
This will be the third consecutive legislative session where they’ve tried to do this. In 2022 it was called an Education Savings Account (ESA). In 2023 the attempt was masqueraded as a tax credit – which was deliberately done to sidestep the House Education committee. Instead, it went to the Taxation and Revenue committee where it died by one vote.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by outside sources to unseat members of that committee (and other legislators) who voted against it – and two of those committee members were defeated in this year’s May primary.
 
Why is there such a persistent effort to implement school "vouchers" in Idaho?  Well . . .
 
. . . Idaho will spend $2.3 billion on K-12 public education in 2024. There are powerful forces that want to get their hands on that money. Many are driven by profit, others by political ideology, religious beliefs, or a combination of interests. They all share one common goal: shift your public school tax dollars to themselves and the private sector . . . and they have many legislative allies eager to help them.
 
Here are some of the dots to connect in their “privatizing public education” playbook:

1. Make public schools look worse than other school choices. The legislature does this by continually underfunding public education in the face of historic population growth. Schools struggle to meet parental expectations, accommodate growth, or hire/retain experienced teachers when salaries are not competitive and buildings are falling apart. Idaho has a backlog of over $1 billion in K-12 school building maintenance, and we're still at or near the bottom in per-student investment - even after having had a $2.1 billion surplus. This makes other school choices look more attractive by comparison.

2. Undermine confidence in public schools. Propaganda campaigns incite fear and anger against local public schools. Parents are bombarded with false claims about rampant pornography in libraries, groomers in classrooms, and student indoctrination. Non-stop postings on social media perpetuate these inflammatory accusations. Self-proclaimed “think tanks” funded by third-parties produce slick, official looking reports that create a false perception of legitimacy to these manufactured fears.    

3. Hide the facts. Legislative leaders tried to get rid of the Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) – which provides factual, in-depth, unbiased research and analysis to the legislature. The public wouldn’t know about the billion dollar backlog in school building maintenance if OPE didn’t exist. The OPE report that revealed this new information angered political leaders trying to tell a different story. Without facts, false narratives go unchallenged.

4. Legislative intimidation. Classrooms are being turned into a hostile workplace. This includes bills that threaten to sue educators and librarians, fine school districts, muzzle teachers, and empower Attorney General Raul Labrador to aggressively prosecute the targets of these punitive laws. No wonder teachers are leaving Idaho.

5. Use words like “school choice” and “education freedom.” This is clever rhetoric, but it is meaningless since Idahoans already have a myriad of education choices – none of which are going away. It’s not about having choice, but rather having you pay for someone else’s choice. A recent in-depth investigation revealed a vast network of powerful forces funneling money into Idaho to promote and sell their alternative education choices to the public.

6. Kill public education with “vouchers.” All these voucher initiatives have one desired outcome: privatize public education by starving the schools that serve 90% our children.