If you were a billionaire and you wanted to make the  American people totally gullible, you would dream up ways to keep them far removed from schools and teachers that teach them how to think critically.

You would embrace “education savings accounts,” which are vouchers by another name, which remove from the state any responsibility to educate any child. Just give every student a debit card, to be used at will.

Carol Burris explains the hoax here.

Parents pledge not to enroll their son or daughter in a public school or a charter school. In exchange, they get nearly all of what the school would have spent (usually 90 percent) placed on a debit card or in an account. The remaining 10 percent is used to fund program administration.

Parents can use the money for private or religious school tuition, online learning, books, hippotherapy (horseback riding for therapeutic purposes) and home schooling — or they can choose to spend minimal dollars on K-12 education and save for college.

There is no obligation that the curriculum that is used to teach students who use ESAs to attend private schools be developmentally appropriate, challenging or even accurate. Although a few states require parents to promise that their children receive instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, science and social studies, what content is taught and what is learned is immaterial.

If at this point you are thinking that most taxpayers would view such an unaccountable and unregulated system as one in which families could easily be victimized by misinformation, false claims, profiteering and fraud, you would be right. This is not lost on the proponents of ESAs. That is why they have developed all kinds of language to make ESAs seem hip and cutting edge, when they are really advocating a return to a time before the 1830s when schooling was a haphazard event for all but the wealthy.

See how cool it is? Parents pledge not to enroll their children in a public school or a charter school. The family gets a debit card and goes shopping. Destroy public education. Just like Uber or Amazon, except this is education. This is our future. These are our children.

The people behind this are the super-rich. What do you think they have in mind? They send their own children to elite private schools. The ESA won’t cover that. Are they mad? Are they stupid? Are they vicious? What gives?