Blithely, Cole ignores real school issues

Althea Cole’s Sunday column, “Do public schools reflect a gold standard of transparency?” celebrates her dream come true.

Iowa “finally” passed a voucher bill to funnel tax money to private/religious school systems.

Althea assures us, vaguely, that the voucher bill is a good thing, because government processes are never “executed perfectly” and also “private institutions face a surprising number of identical standards, when it comes to accreditation.”

I’m pretty sure that private/religious schools don’t execute their processes “perfectly,” either, Althea. And I’m not convinced by your blithe assertion about accreditation.

Althea finally gets around to the issue of transparency in paragraph 5, admitting that “private school operations are not subject to scrutiny from the public as a whole.”

And that, right there, is the crux of the matter.

If private/religious schools are not subject to scrutiny from the public as a whole, then how does the Iowa legislature justify voting to give them one billion dollars of public money over the next four years?

Lauren Tiffany

Iowa City