My letter to the Portsmouth Herald concerning voucher repeal appeared this morning:

In his Feb. 18 letter, former representative Will Smith calls for bipartisan support for the voucher tax credit program that Republicans passed on a strict party line vote last year over the governor’s veto. Then he recycles discredited arguments about how bad our public schools are and says that it would be “insanity” to continue to spend money on them. Instead, we should privatize education by using public money to send our kids to private, religious and home schools.

Mr. Smith engages in a bit of misdirection when he asserts that vouchers are about poor people, not privatization. As a co-sponsor of the voucher bill, he knows that the Republican House accepted a modest level of targeting only under protest. He is trying to make a virtue of necessity, but we should not expect this commitment to poor people to endure. Already, former speaker Rep. Bill O’Brien is proposing to remove targeting entirely.

I doubt we’ll see bipartisan support for dismantling our public education system, Mr. Smith.

And we should all urge Sen. Stiles to change her position and support voucher repeal in the Senate.

Bill Duncan

New Castle

via Vouchers dismantle public education | SeacoastOnline.com.