Steve Bullock is the Governor of Montana. He is also a Republican. And he is mad as hell at his fellow GOP members in the United States Congress.
Bullock has been trying to take Montana off of the list of six U.S. states which do not invest in pre-schools, and he recently told teachers at a conference that he had been discouraged after he received a letter from about 50 Republican members of Congress in which they said they oppose funding pre-schools across the country.
When Republicans nixed a plan to add $37 million in pre-school funding back in April, Bullock said he began thinking that Republicans hated him, not 4 year olds. But he said he finally changed his mind after the most recent letter:
“I start to worry that some of them might hate 4-year-olds too.”
Which is probably an accurate statement, as the GOP often seems to only be interested in children prior to their birth, when they are still in utero.
In the letter Governor Bullock refers to, the members of Congress argue that the:
“Creation of government-provided ‘free’ preschools will most certainly drive existing private preschools from the market.”
Oh, well we can’t have that, can we? We must at all times make sure that the free market is held above all else, even the well-being of children.
The GOP nitwits also railed against “federal intrusion” into state education policies, calling the federal standards:
“Insulting to the private providers who currently, and admirably, provide this service to willing parents.”
But educators have noted that families must be below 200 percent of the poverty level to even qualify for federally-funded preschools. Office of Public Instruction spokesperson Emilie Ritter Saunders said:
“Those aren’t the same students who are paying for private preschool.”
Additionally, a study released by the Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness in 2012 showed that private programs in Georgia and Oklahoma were in no way negatively impacted when federal funds were used to fund pre-schools. As a matter of fact, overall enrollment increased in both states.
So the GOP extremists in Congress have plenty of money for endless investigations into Benghazi and email servers, but the children of Montana will just have to do without. As usual, the Republicans say how precious children are right before they take away money for a program that would help those same children. It is the height of hypocrisy.
