Video: "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias"

The video below is a short preview of the 34-minute video "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias." Private schools receiving funding through "school choice" programs are using A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and other Protestant fundamentalist curricula. The textbooks in these series teach that dinosaurs lived on earth with humans; deny global warming; promote hostility toward other religions and other sectors of Christianity (particularly Roman Catholicism); provide a biased and often factually incorrect version of history; and teach extreme laissez-faire economics, claimed to be biblically-based.

The full length video (embedded at end of article) focuses on the state of Pennsylvania and its Education Improvement Tax Credit program or EITC, the oldest and second largest corporate tax credit program in the country. Pennsylvania was the site of Kitzmiller v. Dover, which unfolded in 2005 in the full glare of the press. Meanwhile an end run has been made around this case and other well-publicized battles over curriculum. The EITC program, with little press or controversy, is providing taxpayer funding for private schools that have no accountability to the public whatsoever.

Taxes of all types owed by businesses to the state, are diverted to "scholarships" for private schools. In Florida, the largest of these programs, over 80% of the students subsidized by tax credits are attending religious schools, many of them using fundamentalist curricula.

-Rachel Tabachnick

Preview of "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias" from Rachel Tabachnick on Vimeo.