ECOT Charter School continues siphoning money from Ohio’s top-rated school districts

All of this education furor that is the Republicans drumbeat only serves their one purpose. That purpose is to deny access to the path of economic and social mobility to those outside of the their 1% ranks. Education and advancement in the Republican view must never be as available as it has been; because Republicans realized the result of an Ivy-League educated black man winning the presidential election – by a significant margin, and now occupying the White House. It ain’t gonna happen anymore if the Republicans can crush public education.

Destroying public education is the cornerstone of keeping the “got mine” tea-partiers and GOP rightwing zealots in wealth and power in this country. The Republicans see the rise of the middle class and newcomers to the upper class as wrong, especially if those rising and coming up are not Lilly-white. As much as how public education enabled rewarding achievers in the classroom, destroying it, in the Republican view, keeps the interlopers they fear from attaining anything other than meager existence while the 1% ensure their limited access to advantages in this society.

Ripping off tax payers to fund shoddy schools whose owners fund Republican politics is a perfectly natural activity for Republicans and it serves their purposes.

Competition has new meaning in the GOP calculus of educational opportunity insofar as eliminating all others but the GOP 1% tilts the competitive balance to favor them. Kepp the riff-raff out of the ivy-covered campuses and they’ll never (again) compete for a seat in the boardroom.

Privatization was a Nazi policy before it was a Kasich/ ALEC policy. It’s very beneficial to those who are running it— no transparency, no regulation, and they get to keep most of the money, while providing fewer and lower quality services.

There is a sad irony being delivered to thousands of homes across Ohio as kids and parents open the denial letters for colleges and universities. The Republican slaughter of public education in Ohio, statewide student testing, state school evaluations, Ohio auditor/Chief Truant Officer witch-hunt attendance scandals don’t mean jack-shit in colleges admissions and providing opportunity through education to Ohio’s children.

The sadness is for the kids who get denied by their dream school and have to trundle off to a safety school. The irony is that this happens all too often in the tony ‘burbs where the Republicans cluster. These parents find out that the highly selective schools really do accept very few applicants and unless their kid was recruited by the school for athletics or something else and has superior academic credentials that kid isn’t getting in.

Even local favorites, Miami, OSU, etc. are rejecting good students from local schools in favor of higher paying out of state students who will get the loans and grants to jack up the institution’s revenue. Welcome to the “branch campus” or Columbus state.

The Republican slashing of public education causes cuts in academic programs and extra-curriculars that matter in the college admission universe. It all fits in with the GOP passion to deny access to opportunity for those of us outside the hallowed 1% the Republicans worship.

The humor is that all those Republicans are finding out that they really aren’t in the 1%. They may not be in the 47% Romney described but their children too are cut out of the herd of privilege at the world’s most select colleges and universities.

If this wasn’t so pathetic it would be hilarious. Isn’t it the republican mantra that schools should be run like businesses? And by that logic would they tolerate such subpar performance in their businesses? Oh, I forgot. They like to have it both ways. That is, when they make bad business decicions and loose money, they run to the government for bailouts and handouts. Kasich, the Leman Bros. stooge, knows all about that.