#vouchers

[buffetlicious]

Walked pass Nine Fresh (九鲜) in Sun Plaza and mum wanted aiyu jelly dessert. Their seasonal Sour Plum Ai-Yu Series promotion is still on even though it indicated only till 15th July 2024. You also receives a set of Vouchers with a minimum spending of S$9 during their 12th anniversary celebration.

Bought both the A and B items on the menu and topped up S$1 sweetened red beans for the two cups. Mum got the Sour Plum Ai-Yu A (蜂蜜寒天青梅爱玉冻) which comes with sour plum aiyu, honey popping jellies, kantan jellies and taro balls.

I took the Sour Plum Ai-Yu B (珍珠芦荟青梅爱玉冻) with sour plum aiyu, aloe vera cubes, black pearls and taro balls. The jelly is infused with the salty and sourish flavours of sour plums which in turn adds a refreshing profile to the otherwise sweet dessert.

Topmost image from Nine Fresh Singapore.

[liberalsarecool]

School choice and vouchers produce nothing but corporate greed and a 67% fail rate.

The kids/students don't deserve these adults.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guy Venables

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 16, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 16, 2024

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[moonbean117]

[lenbryant]

Their war on education continues. They like their voters to be poorly educated.

[country-corner]

With all the issues with food and other products, I keep hearing things like we need to bring back rationing, the government needs to hand out vouchers good for only so much food/product per person (think WIC type vouchers) per month, stores should restrict how much people can buy so everyone gets their "fair share". The problem is I keep hearing this from people ranging from about 30 to 45. Many I see driving hybrid cars/trucks or have some other nearly new vehicle. Many also gripe about the "hoarding" done by preppers and homesteaders.

Questions they never want to answer:

Who decides what is everyone's "Fair Share"?

Who, at the store decides what the limit on sales is? Now I can see if the store gets a limited amount of items (think nearly every Christmas or the last ammo shortage), they can limit to 1 or 2 per person. But think things like eggs, what is the monthly limit per person, 3? 6? 12? If it is a family of 6 does everyone need to go through the checkout to get their limit? Or can one family member go through with everyone's ID to buy the per person limit? What about meat? OTC Medications? How many aspirins/tylenols per person monthly? Sanitary items? Antacids? Bandaids and what size? Baby wipes? Diapers? The list goes on.

As for government vouchers, I see people who get WIC and Food Stamps that complain because it's not enough to make it to the next allocation date. But others have (FS) funds left at the end of the month, or trade with friends/family items from their WIC benefits because the kid can't, not wont but CAN'T eat what the voucher pays for and are told if they don't get everything they risk loosing their benefits.

What IS everyone's fair share? And how would that be determined? What if you was limited to something you can't eat/use but are prevented from buying what you can eat/use because it's not fair to others?

[emptyjunior]

Hey gang! Per request, I've started doing digital vouchers! Feel free to email me with the amount you want to gift a friend and once we're sorted then they can commission me like normal when I'm Open and use their voucher!

And here's my price ranges again so you can see what amounts to be thinking🙏

(And genuine apologies I haven't been open too much this month, finishing off some work over the next few weeks but should be Active again soon.)

[davidaugust]

Their “statement of nondiscriminatory policy” actually ends with the nonsense quoted in the post, and points out school vouchers are…not good.

[pauket]

25 Brands onboarded within100 days | Pauket

[truetravelplanner]

Learn the best 9 tips to find hotel vouchers for the homeless online in this step-by-step guide. Discover eligibility criteria, & reliable resources.

Here, https://youtu.be/PHy_LrNINok

[news-buzz]

Win £100 in your Asda Rewards Cashpot | UK | News News Buzz

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Fitzsimmons, Arizona Daily Star

* * * * *

Across Florida, spontaneous demonstrations against Ron DeSantis' gutting of public education. This summer, Iris Mogul – a junior at a Miami high school – found out that she wouldn’t be able to take an AP African American history course that she had planned for the coming semester because it had been blocked by the state’s department of education.

“As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” the department said in a statement. “It felt so far away when I first heard about all of this,” says Mogul, who only had a passing knowledge of book challenges and changes to school curriculum previously. “But that is really when it hit me – when it started to affect me directly.”

Now, Mogul is prominent among the growing number of students and parents in Miami-Dade county and across Florida who are speaking out in opposition to book challenges, the capture of Florida school boards by conservative activists and this summer’s latest policy changes, which includes the expansion of DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act.

[‘Reading is resistance’: students and parents take on DeSantis’s book bans]

[shrawfrog]

The Internet is out to get me

I’ve just spent a good hour trying to sort out an activity track day given to my son in the form of a voucher. Driving a fast car on a fast racetrack without a licence seems like a specious package. The voucher came in at £44, which allowed for a certain amount off I would have thought, but after squinting at the receipt for the voucher number, having to take a photo of the voucher and then…