Jackson Free Press

Charter schools and "school choice" rhetoric is all the rage at the State Capitol this year, and just months after millions voted for and against (sort of) Amendment 42, Mississippians of all stripes are adamant about the future of the state's education.

This week it appears that "level" funding for MAEP is here again for 2016, meaning an overall underfunding of the now essentially toothless formula somewhere on the order of $172 million. (And that's after the Legislature cooks the books with its 63-percent attendance rule, according to The Parent's Campaign.)

Meanwhile, this year has already seen National School Choice Week celebrated at the Capitol, with groups like Empower Mississippi and Mississippi First celebrating charter schools and vouchers as an answer to the trials of Mississippi public schools.

Fed Up with 50th, the energetic bipartisan volunteer group that focuses its efforts on Mississippi education, spoke explosively at the Capitol last month against charter schools and vouchers, with one member, Lauren Wilkes Stubblefield, calling those programs "expensive and abysmal failures of education policy."

In the state, a lot of support falls along partisan lines; Republicans (particularly Tea Party types) generally favor "school choice" programs, while Democrats largely oppose the "blood-from-turnips" strategy of underfunding public schools and then releasing more money to charter organizations.

While the current law allowing nonprofit charters is an interesting experiment, it's important to note that Republicans in the Legislature aren't actually waiting to see that experiment's results before charging ahead with their prescription pads. Instead, they push in on wherever possible, including into C-rated districts and across district boundaries.

We're particularly suspicious of legislators who vote against programs such as Medicaid and want to require fingerprinting for food stamps, but wholeheartedly support charter schools because they so desperately want poor children educated. While innovation in schools is good—and emphasis on quality learning and instruction is great—why is having it delivered privately so darned important? Is it because privatization is the wine consumed so feverishly at ALEC revivals?

At some point, education has to be less about continued experiments in failed economic theories and more about actually educating children. With the public-education spigot filling the buckets of private interests with public money, all while being underfunded by a tax-cutting supermajority, it's now or never for this state's citizens to demand that their representatives do what's best for the state's children.

Ease off the privatization punch and let's focus on the education stuff that actually works.