Senator John “California” Carley had another bad proposal completely smashed today by the South Dakota State Senate, as his proposal to strip funds from neighborhood schools for private religious academies was defeated on more than a 2-1 vote on the Senate floor:
“The primary goal of this bill is to give schooling options for families by offering financial coverage for their nonpublic or alternative education,” said Sen. John Carley, the bill’s prime sponsor, who touts the measure as a way to provide “school choice” without sending state funds directly to families for homeschool or private school tuition.
and..
The Legislative Research Council, however, predicted SB 190 could result in tax discounts totaling between $14 million and $21 million annually.
This is good reminder to voters that they really need to pay attention to the people they send to Pierre.
Because some of them come with agendas. And they are not there to represent their local constituents.
We’re better for this debate. Not every issue is obviously good or bad, and school choice can be fraught for public education, which we all know is doing a bang-up job. Where do we go from here? For the record, I taught high school English back in the day.
Public education is doing a great job considering how far it has come. You ever pick up a history book?
I didn’t realize the metric was today versus Laura Ingalls Wilder. Still, I wouldn’t take much comfort in that comparison, either. The state’s score card is pretty much identical to the national score card, which is abysmal. Given that fact, and having seen the test questions students had to answer to graduate from high school in the 1890s, I doubt many of today’s students would pass that old test. Meanwhile, in recent times it’s the home-schooled kids who win all the state and national spelling and geography bees. Go figure.
The kids winning these spellings bees are at max level on the socially awkward scale, they are wacky. On the recent NAEP, SD 8th graders are 6th in the nation in Math and 16th in the nation in reading and well ahead of national averages. If we want to fix our scores in the state we need to address the issue in Indian Country where Native American youth are 40-50 points below white kids and make up 10 percent of the test population. Carley or Odenbach or Graves do not want to talk about that or put resources there. They only want to subsidize their wealthy Private School/Homescrewl parent friends.
Pretty easy to do when they spend half their day learning just those 2 competitions.
He lacks the education to find a solution to the problem.
Mr. Carley, who is from California, is not a real South Dakota Conservative. He does have good hair, like many Californians do.
Please see Article VIII, Section 1 of the South Dakota Constitution and tell me how directing ANY public funding to non-public education survives Day 1 in a Court of Law.
Odenbach loves to quote the constitution on the floor and in the media but he always mysteriously leaves out the part about “open to all and free from tuition.”
Can this get any worse? These whackos like Pischke need to be removed.
Glad to see Perry found a bill he didn’t like.
I realize the Wiccans and Satanists here in SD really like this California Carley guy but can we get some locals together and chip in some money so he goes back to California or Oregon and stays there? Maybe he can take a few other legislators and activists with him.
Indeed, grudznick’s Wiccan friends and Satanic acquaintances do like Mr. Carley, who is from California.