Rural Iowa counties are where a person can easily identify Iowa values. Small town and agricultural communities are where people know everyone in their township; vote for their neighbor for school board; volunteer in their school and church; encourage everyone to participate in the community events; attend school events even if they have no children participating, and come together when a neighbor has a tragedy.
This is why it is puzzling why Gov. Reynolds wants to break up community spirit by inviting out of state charter schools to draft students from the local school district. Republican efforts should instead be directed to building up public schools so that Iowa values will endure.
A community is centered around its schools and churches. Let schools educate our young people and let churches indoctrinate the community into the faith that they chose.
Julie Stewart Ziesman | Waukee
Before the Iowa House and Senate vote on the governor’s bill, depleting $918 million from public education students (in the first four years alone!), the people we elected to our legislature need to do due diligence: Actually study the results/data of places which have reduced public education funding to prop up what are likely to be short-lived private schools.
Like Iowa, Sweden’s public education system was once considered the Gold Standard. And, like here, well-funded lobbyists convinced the government that privatizing education via a voucher system would result in giving parents “freedom of choice.”
Last year (2022) Sweden’s voucher system turned 32. Sweden is now saying that privatizing (vouchers, scholarships, savings accounts) is an abject failure! Swedish political scientist Lisa Telling says it “has wrought a vicious cycle of inequality and under-performance,” although the investors in privatization have made a fortune running these schools (while Sweden’s public schools are badly shortchanged).
Take-away: Do not hurriedly fast-track a harmful, financially devastating system, a system which only makes fortunes for the “educational entrepreneur” business owners, their shareholders and donors at the expense of taxpayers, students and communities. Reminder: private schools are unaccountable to the public (whose dollars they’re siphoning).
More due diligence: Jeff Bryant (Independent Media Institute, August 2022) says 20 years of data finds more than one in four private/ charter school close after just five years; after 10 years 40% of charter schools shuttered; after 15 years about 50% closed. He reminds us: students whose education is disrupted are likely to experience poorer grades, higher dropout rates. Recall what we learned during Covid, that disruption can have serious consequences in a student’s life.
Iowa’s PUBLIC education used to be the God Standard. Diverting $918 million (in the first four years of the governor’s plan) is not how you prepare our children for the future.
Susie Petra | Ames
Gov. Reynolds’ mantra, school choice, is best described as school’s choice.
We use apostrophes to show contraction, possession and omission. This simple grammar lesson applies to the most important decision Iowa lawmakers will make for decades to come.
Contraction — in funding for public schools, with school districts losing $7,600/year for each of its students enrolled in a private school. By the third year of implementation, school’s choice will contract monies for public education by a third of a billion dollars yearly.
Possession — of private schools by only 58 of Iowa’s 99 counties, with 23 of those 58 counties possessing only one private school. Of Iowa’s 240 private schools, only five are non-religious and none of those five are west of Des Moines. Clearly, school’s choice will pose burdensome transportation problems.
Omission — of state authority over private schools. School’s choice will omit requirements to show fiscal responsibility for taxpayer funds, omit enough funding for private school families to pay for essentials like transportation, food, athletic fees and computer leasing. Tuition in Iowa’s non-religious private schools ranges from $7,240 to $19,500. More omissions: rules against discrimination in admissions and hiring, against demonization of LGBTQ+ students, and against requirements to publicly disclose anything but the bare minimum necessary to implement the new law. Will Reynolds' privatization o’ schools be as successful as Branstad’s privatization o’ Medicaid?
Reynolds’ school’s choice idea will not support the glare o’ scrutiny — scrutiny all lawmakers should apply before casting their vote.
Karen Heidman | Sioux City
Notwithstanding the devastating forecasts of others, please consider introducing some new perspective to the issue of providing public money to finance private schools in Iowa.
1. This sounds like a new take on reviving the “separate but equal” excuse for segregation from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. If folks don’t recall, it didn’t work. Does anyone really think the courts will let this new plan stand?
2. Governor Reynolds and her supporters win either way. If the plan passes, she leads a new initiative to segregate schools and funnel huge amounts of money to private interests who are likely to remember her with their generosity. If the plan tanks, private interests will still help her fight for it again and/or fight for some other scheme. All outcomes for the voucher plan (and the governor’s strong past support for Republican positions) should put our governor in great competitive position to be the Republican candidate for Vice President.
3. To understand why this is all happening and better see the path forward, we need to look beyond Iowa (the pilot site). Consider who would benefit most and have the planning intelligence to put together such a plan. Consider if this is a classic move by Donald J. Trump and his team, such as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. Not only will their team win with any outcome, they can transplant it (before it starts to smell too much) to other states. How about Arkansas?
Robert Thompson | Des Moines
President Biden’s first and recent visit to El Paso was a photo-op that accomplished nothing. The faint hope was that if he could observe that chaos his open-border policies have produced, would move him to change course and offer policies that would secure the border. The Border Patrol union stated prior to his arrival, “all the migrants who were sleeping on the streets were removed.” From there President Biden met with the President of Mexico, a corrupt dictatorial socialist, and instead of talking about what the two countries could do to secure the border, they mainly talked about income inequality; anything but border security and the Mexican drug cartels. Along with the unprecedented number of migrants entering our country — most of whom are economic migrants — is the massive amounts of illegal drugs, including the deadly Fentanyl entering our country via the drug cartels taking advantage of the chaos.
Giving $4 billion to countries such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, etc. run by corrupt socialist thugs will do nothing to help the economy or the people of those countries. A poll of Central and South American countries indicated that 100 million would be happy to migrate to the United States. We could not afford or begin to handle those amounts, we can't even afford those at our borders now. A country that doesn't enforce immigration laws and secure its borders will cease to be a country. A country has a legal duty and moral obligation to do so. President Biden is a miserable failure in that duty and obligation.
Vic Massara | Omaha, Neb.
America can learn from ancient Rome how to better deal with crime today. Because democracy generally values all human beings, democratic Rome’s criminal statutes were not designed to repress, but quickly judge and inexpensively rehabilitate. For that reason, Rome did not use prisons, except as places of detention before trial.
One historian of early and middle Roman law summarizes: “Penalties were either pecuniary or they were capital. There was nothing else.”
But capital punishment was seldom utilized, because the law provided for an alternative way out of society—exile.
After the emperors overthrew democracy, penalties multiplied in variety and savagery. The convict could be sentenced to hard labor, usually in the mines, or to life as a gladiator, which eventually brought death. Courts had discretion to inflict arbitrary, even savage, punishments like flogging, crucifixion, burning, walling up alive, and feeding the felon to the circus lions.
In all this, a person possessing common sense can see two great lessons. First, the country might want to return to our early practice of dealing with crime expeditiously and humanely before penitentiaries became all the rage. Second, America must by any legal means necessary prevent its governors and presidents from becoming kings and emperors and inflicting whatever damage they want on others.
Kimball Shinkoskey | Woods Cross, Utah
Letters to the Editor can be sent to times@stormlake.com or by mail to P.O. Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588. Letters must include the writer’s name, address and telephone number.
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