I posted the link to Carol Burris’s terrific article about school choice yesterday but was unable to copy the text. Carol sent the text to me.
Here it is:
Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new reportfrom the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.
For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.
This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio.
In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.
Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country. Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.
Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five.
Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.
In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.
Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.
The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.
Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.
You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.
The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.
None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.
What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.
Mike Simpson posts amazing memes on Twitter and BlueSky. He calls himself “Big Education Ape.” He makes the point with his illustrations.
Here is one of his best: THE GHOST OF ELI BROAD: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF VULTURE PHILANTHROPY AND THE ONGOING DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION.
I wasn’t able to copy some tables and graphics. Please open the link to read the post in full.
Eli Broad was one of the billionaires who was eager to tear apart public education and remake it. I referred to him, the Waltons, and the Gates Foundation as “the Billionaires Boys Club,” which was chapter 10 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
Eli Broad’s distinctive contribution to the corporate reform movement was his Broad Academy, where aspiring superintendents were “trained” with his ideas. All expenses were paid, and trainees got to hobnob with others. They also had the Academy’s help in job placement; many “graduates” of the Broad Academy were placed as superintendents in big-city districts, imbued with the ideology that schooling was a business, that low-performing schools should be closed and replaced by charter schools. Eli and his wife Edythe were both graduates of the Detroit Public Schools, but they were not grateful for what they learned.
In 2009, when I was writing the book, I was not aware that the Billionaire Boys Club had many more members and that some were women. There was Alice Walton, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, John Arnold, Joel Greenberg, Daniel Loeb, Jeff Yass, and many more. I posted a far longer list of the super-rich underwriting the privatization of public money in my book Slaying Goliath.
I once was invited by Eli Broad to meet at his gorgeous apartment in New York City, overlooking Central Park. He wanted to know why I was critical of his efforts. He told me that he knew nothing about teaching or curriculum, but he knew a lot about business management and organization. His belief was that public schools could improve by better management.
Mike Simpson performs a public service here by updating the legacy of Eli Broad.
He writes:
How a billionaire’s “vision” became a scandal-soaked legacy — and why it refuses to die, now dressed in Yale’s ivy
There’s a particular kind of audacity required to spend a quarter-century systematically dismantling public education, leave a trail of federal indictments, billion-dollar procurement disasters, and devastated communities in your wake — and then get your name engraved on a building at Yale University. That, in essence, is the story of Eli Broad, the Broad Academy, and its reincarnation as The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. If you were hoping the death of Eli Broad in 2021 would finally close this chapter of American education history, well — ghosts don’t follow rules. And this one has a $100 million endowment.
Part I: Venture Philanthropy — When Billionaires Play School
Let’s start with the concept that makes all of this possible: “venture philanthropy.” It sounds benign — even noble. In practice, it means a billionaire who made his fortune in housing construction (KB Home) and insurance (SunAmerica) decided he understood public education better than educators, parents, communities, or — heaven forbid — children.
Eli Broad’s core thesis, launched formally in 2002 with the Broad Superintendents Academy (BSA), was elegantly simple and catastrophically wrong: public school systems are just badly managed corporations, and what they need is corporate managers.
Not teachers. Not child psychologists. Not community leaders. Corporate managers. Preferably ones with MBAs, military command experience, or backgrounds in supply-chain logistics. Because nothing says “I understand the developmental needs of a seven-year-old” quite like a background in restructuring defense procurement contracts.
The curriculum reflected this philosophy with almost comedic precision:
10% — Actual education: pedagogy, curriculum, child development
90% — Corporate operational reform: fiscal optimization, data-driven accountability, labor relations, and what the Academy euphemistically called “reform accelerators” — which, translated from the original MBA-speak, meant privatization strategies
The program was free to participants — tuition, travel, lodging, all covered. Because when you’re deploying an ideological army, you don’t charge the soldiers.
Part II: Yale Said “Yes” — And Charged It to Prestige
In 2019, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation committed $100 million to Yale University to transform the independent, unaccredited Los Angeles operation into The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. The transition was completed in 2020, and the unaccredited LA entity was quietly sunsetted — like a getaway car abandoned after the heist.
The rebranding was masterful. Suddenly, the same ideological pipeline that had produced federal convicts, FBI raid subjects, and a generation of “disruptors” who disrupted primarily the educational lives of low-income children of color was now operating under the imprimatur of one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
The center today operates two flagship tracks, both tuition-free:
The 2026–27 MMS cohort is already being assembled, per the center’s own Instagram, described as “leaders committed to reimagining” public education — which, given the network’s history, should be read as a threat as much as a promise.
Beyond the programs themselves, the center has launched an aggressive data aggregation initiative — a centralized repository hosted on GitHub tracking superintendents across more than 10,000 of the nation’s 13,000 public school districts, aggregating over 180,000 data points across 23 states. The stated goal is academic research. The unstated goal, critics argue, is mapping the vacancy pipeline for the next generation of Broad placements.
Part III: The Damage Ledger — Twenty-Five Years of “Disruption”
Let’s be precise about what the word “disruption” meant in practice. A landmark 2022 longitudinal study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis tracked two full decades of Broad Academy graduates and delivered findings that would be devastating — if anyone in the venture philanthropy world were capable of embarrassment:
No statistically significant positive effects on district spending, student completion rates, or test scores
Broad-trained superintendents had 18% shorter tenures than non-Broad peers in equivalent districts
The only statistically significant footprint left behind? A sustained, measurable trend toward increased charter school enrollment and sector privatization
In other words, after 25 years and hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars, the Broad Academy’s measurable legacy in public education was: more charter schools and shorter superintendent tenures. That’s it. That’s the product.
The Human Cost
The abstract numbers become concrete when you look at specific communities:
Oakland & Detroit saw aggressive charter expansion and centralized fiscal management that critics argued deepened structural deficits and fractured community trust for generations.
Chicago experienced the largest single wave of school closures in modern U.S. history — 50 neighborhood schools shuttered in 2013 under Broad-network-affiliated Barbara Byrd-Bennett — triggering federal civil rights complaints alleging the closures disproportionately harmed low-income students of color.
Seattle watched Broad graduate Maria Goodloe-Johnson (BSA Class of 2003) get fired in 2011 following a state audit revealing $1.8 million in public funds funneled into a contracting program that provided little to no actual services — with investigators concluding she exercised a “severe lack of oversight” despite early warnings.
Part IV: The Scandal Hall of Fame — From Procurement Fraud to Federal Prison
Here is where the story transitions from ideologically troubling to criminally spectacular.
John Deasy — The iPad That Broke LAUSD
Deasy (BSA Class of 2006) championed a $1.3 billion initiative to put Apple iPads loaded with Pearson software into the hands of every LAUSD student. The rollout failed within days — students bypassed security filters almost immediately — but the procurement scandal was far worse than the technical failure.
Internal records revealed that Deasy and his deputies had close personal and professional ties to Apple and Pearson executives prior to the bidding process, raising serious allegations of a rigged procurement cycle. The FBI seized boxes of district records. Deasy resigned in 2014. The district eventually abandoned the program and settled for millions in refunds.
His post-resignation career? He was immediately hired by the Broad Center as a Superintendent-in-Residence — coaching the next generation of urban leaders. Because in this ecosystem, failure is a credential.
Barbara Byrd-Bennett — The Federal Prison Graduate
Byrd-Bennett’s career arc is the Broad model in miniature: leave Cleveland in fiscal distress, leave Detroit in structural chaos, get hired as a “turnaround expert” in Chicago, execute the largest school closure wave in American history, then get indicted on 20 counts of federal mail and wire fraud.
Federal investigators proved she steered $23 million in no-bid contracts to SUPES Academy and Synesi Associates — the very consulting firms she had worked for immediately before taking the CPS helm. Internal emails laid bare her motive with a candor that would be almost admirable if it weren’t so brazen: she needed the money because she had “tuitions to pay and casinos to visit.”
In exchange, she was promised a 10% kickback disguised as future consulting fees funneled into trust funds for her twin grandsons. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison.
Robert Runcie — The Perjury Arrest
Runcie (BSA Class of 2009) took over Broward County Public Schools — the nation’s sixth-largest district — and oversaw a culture of severe administrative bid-rigging around an $800 million capital bond program, with independent investigations revealing contracts steered to pre-selected corporate entities.
Following the 2018 Parkland school shooting, which exposed deep systemic lapses in district safety infrastructure, a statewide grand jury investigation led to Runcie’s arrest by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement on felony perjury charges in April 2021 — prosecutors proving he lied under oath about communications regarding procurement contracts.
He resigned in exchange for a $743,000 separation agreement. Paid by taxpayers.
Alberto Carvalho — The AI Echo of the iPad Disaster
If the Deasy iPad scandal was the defining Broad-era procurement catastrophe of the 2010s, Alberto Carvalho’s LAUSD tenure became its 2020s technological sequel — almost as if the universe decided one billion-dollar tech procurement disaster per decade wasn’t sufficient.
Carvalho, a celebrated figure on the corporate-reform speaking circuit who regularly headlined Broad Center leadership panels, aggressively championed a contract with “AllHere,” a tech startup contracted to build a multi-million dollar AI student-chatbot tool for LAUSD. The project collapsed into total insolvency. The startup’s founder was indicted for fraud. Federal investigators traced systemic steering of contracts that bypassed traditional public bidding protections.
In early 2026, FBI agents raided Carvalho’s personal residence and district offices. He was placed on paid administrative leave and subsequently resigned — a modern, tech-era echo of the Deasy iPad scandal, separated by exactly one decade and approximately zero lessons learned.
Part V: The Carousel — How Failed Superintendents Get Recycled
One of the most structurally revealing features of the Broad model is what happens after a superintendent fails. In a normal accountability framework, catastrophic failure — federal indictment, FBI raids, mass community protests, historic labor strikes — would end careers.
In the Broad ecosystem, it typically accelerates them.
The recycling mechanism operates in three predictable stages:
Stage 1 — The Soft Landing: Departing executives are caught by the philanthropic safety net. Foundations like Broad, Walton, or Gates place them into well-funded “fellow,” “executive coach,” or “senior advisor” roles at charter management organizations or policy think tanks. The local political dust settles. The national network maintains their status.
Stage 2 — The Headhunter Buffer: National executive search firms — operating with screening frameworks that prioritize corporate operational metrics over community approval or longevity — present the executive to a new school board in another state as a “courageous, battle-tested change agent.” The fact that the “battle” was largely against the parents and teachers of the previous district is presented as a résumé enhancement.
Stage 3 — The Next Major District: Re-hired at a higher salary, with stronger contractual protections, and a golden parachute clause ensuring that the next failure will also be financially comfortable.
Mike Miles left Dallas ISD under multiple internal investigations and extreme executive turnover, founded a charter network, and was then directly appointed by the Texas Education Agency — which had dissolved Houston ISD’s elected school board — to run the entire Houston district with even fewer democratic constraints than before.
Jean-Claude Brizard left Rochester under a 95% teacher vote of no confidence, was immediately recruited to lead Chicago Public Schools (the nation’s third-largest system), triggered the historic 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike within 17 months, was pushed out with a $250,000 buyout, and transitioned smoothly into senior advisory roles at national education foundations.
The pattern is not a bug. It is the feature.
Part VI: Buying the Boardroom — How Venture Philanthropy Captured School Governance
The Broad playbook cannot function under genuine democratic oversight. A superintendent who closes 50 neighborhood schools, eliminates teacher tenure protections, and converts public schools into privately managed charter networks will be fired by an elected school board that answers to the community — unless that school board has been pre-selected to not do that.
The solution was elegant and corrosive: buy the school board elections.
Because local school board races historically required minimal campaign capital, the injection of billionaire wealth fundamentally altered the political landscape. The money flows not directly to candidates (which faces statutory limits) but through Independent Expenditure Committees and Super PACs — allowing unlimited spending on sophisticated polling, negative television ads, and targeted digital saturation.
In Los Angeles, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and allied donors regularly poured $5 million to $10 million per election cycle into LAUSD board races — specifically to achieve a “pro-reform majority” that would protect executives like John Deasy and later Austin Beutner (a former investment banker with no education background whatsoever) from community accountability.
In Oakland, independent groups funded by the California Charter Schools Association outspent local parent-teacher associations 10-to-1, successfully seating board members who routinely approved charter petitions and fiscal consolidation plans drafted by Broad Residency staff embedded in the central office.
When even this proved insufficient — when local civic resistance made winning democratic elections too expensive or unpredictable — the network pivoted to eliminating the elections entirely:
Chicago: Mayoral control legislation allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to single-handedly install Broad executives without board confirmation.
Houston: The Texas Education Agency dissolved the elected school board entirely and replaced it with a state-appointed body, allowing direct installation of Mike Miles.
Detroit: The short-lived Education Achievement Authority bypassed the traditional school board to implement a centralized, non-unionized reform experiment under Broad graduate John Covington.
The structural message is unambiguous: the corporate management model and democratic accountability are incompatible. When democracy gets in the way, the solution is to remove democracy.
Part VII: The Network Map — 1,000 Alumni and Counting
The Broad Network now comprises more than 1,000 alumni spanning major urban school districts, charter management organizations, state education agencies, and venture philanthropy foundations — with its heaviest concentrations precisely where the playbook finds the most fertile ground:
California remains the densest hub, with alumni embedded throughout LAUSD, Oakland Unified, and San Diego Unified central offices, as well as major CMOs like KIPP SoCal, Aspire Public Schools, and Green Dot.
Texas has become the fastest-growing hub, with Houston ISD under state-appointed Miles serving as the current flagship experiment, alongside significant placement within Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, the Texas Education Agency, and massive charter entities like KIPP Texas and IDEA Public Schools.
New York serves as the “soft landing” capital of the network — hundreds of alumni operating within Wall Street-adjacent education foundations, charter advocacy groups, and elite national search firms headquartered in Manhattan.
Illinois and Pennsylvania — Chicago and Philadelphia specifically — remain high-density environments where teams of Broad Residents are embedded in central operations managing financial stabilization, facilities restructuring, and school assignment data systems.
Meanwhile, the network has largely migrated out of direct superintendencies — where the political friction is high and the tenure is short — and into the broader ecosystem where influence is durable and accountability is minimal: senior director roles at the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; high-level education consultancies like Watershed Advisors and Instruction Partners; and, of course, The Broad Center at Yale SOM itself, where the current MMS cohort is being trained to carry the philosophy forward.
Part VIII: Yale — Laundering a Legacy in Ivy
Let us be direct about what the Yale partnership accomplishes that the standalone Los Angeles operation never could: institutional legitimacy laundering.
The Broad Academy, operating independently, was unaccredited, ideologically transparent, and easy to critique. Its graduates were called “Broadies” — a term used by both allies and critics — and the pipeline was visible enough that parent groups, teachers’ unions, and education researchers could track, document, and organize against it.
The Broad Center at Yale SOM is something different. It is now embedded within one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions, granting an Ivy League master’s degree, hosting fellows in New Haven, and publishing peer-reviewed research. The same corporate management philosophy that produced federal convictions and FBI raids now arrives in urban school districts wearing a Yale credential.
The center’s new data aggregation initiative — tracking superintendents across more than 10,000 districts, aggregating 180,000+ data points — is framed as academic research. Critics see it as something more operational: a comprehensive national vacancy map for the next generation of Broad placements, now with the algorithmic sophistication that the original Los Angeles operation could only dream of.
The 2025-26 Fellowship cohort of 17 fellows is already gathering in New Haven for weeklong modules at Yale SOM. The 2026-27 MMS cohort is being assembled. The pipeline flows.
The Synthesis: What Twenty-Five Years Actually Taught Us
Here is what a quarter-century of Broad-style education reform has empirically demonstrated:
The Promise: The Reality
Corporate management improves district outcomes/No measurable positive effect on test scores, graduation rates, or spending efficiency”
Disruptors” bring needed change/18% shorter tenures; accelerated community fracture
Charter expansion improves options/Statistically significant increase in privatization; no demonstrated academic gains
Data-driven accountability improves teaching/Curriculum narrowing; teaching to the test
Free consulting support helps districts/Permanent embedding of private ideology on public payroll
School board reform improves governance/Systematic dismantling of democratic accountability
The most damning verdict is not the federal indictments — though those are damning. It is not the FBI raids — though those are spectacular. It is not even the $23 million in no-bid kickback contracts or the billion-dollar iPad disasters.
It is this: after 25 years, hundreds of millions in philanthropic investment, and the placement of Broad-trained executives in over 160 school systems, there is no credible empirical evidence that any of it helped a single child learn to read better.
What it did produce — measurably, statistically, reproducibly — was more charter schools, shorter superintendent tenures, and a revolving door of well-compensated executives cycling between urban districts, consulting firms, and Ivy League fellowship programs while the communities they “disrupted” rebuilt themselves from the wreckage.
Epilogue: The Ghost That Won’t Be Exorcised
Eli Broad died in April 2021. His foundation subsequently announced it would spend down its assets and close. The Los Angeles operation was already gone, folded into Yale two years prior.
And yet — the ghost persists. It persists in the 2026-27 MMS cohort assembling in New Haven. It persists in the 180,000 data points tracking superintendent vacancies across 10,000 districts. It persists in the career of Mike Miles, currently running Houston ISD under state protection from democratic accountability. It persists in the aftermath of Alberto Carvalho’s FBI-raided departure from LAUSD — a scandal so structurally identical to the Deasy iPad disaster of 2014 that it reads less like history repeating and more like history plagiarizing itself.
The Broad Center at Yale SOM is not a reformed version of the Broad Academy. It is the Broad Academy with better branding, an Ivy League address, and a GitHub repository. The philosophy is identical. The network is intact. The pipeline flows.
The only thing that has genuinely changed is the zip code — from Los Angeles to New Haven — and the price tag of the credential being handed to the next generation of disruptors preparing to be deployed into the public schools of America.
Eli Broad may be gone. But his ghost has tenure.
And unlike the superintendents he trained, it shows no signs of an early exit.
Sources:
: The Broad Center institutional history, curriculum breakdowns, alumni scandal documentation, EEPA 2022 longitudinal study findings, and school board funding mechanics — as documented in comprehensive public education policy research and investigative reporting compiled in the source brief above.
: EdSource — “FBI raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho’s home, office may be linked to student AI chatbot” (2026) — edsource.org
: Los Angeles Times — “How probe into failed startup led to LAUSD superintendent investigation” (March 1, 2026) — latimes.com
: Yale School of Management — “The Broad Center Announces 2025-26 Cohort of the Fellowship for Public Education Leadership” — som.yale.edu
Master Source List: The Ghost of Eli Broad & The Broad Center at Yale
🏛️ The Broad Center at Yale SOM — Official Sources
$CITETitleSourceLinkThe Case of Broad Superintendents— Full EEPA Longitudinal Study (2022) Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis / Tom Dee tom-dee.github.io — EEPA-Broad.pdf New Study: Broad Supes Made No Difference, Other Than Increasing Charter Schools Diane Ravitch’s Blogdianeravitch.net
🗞️ Investigative Journalism & Policy Criticism
$CITETitleSourceLink Critics Target Growing Army of Broad Leaders Education Week edweek.org The Broad Foundation’s Impact on Public Schools Facebook — Oakland Parent Sharon Higgins Analysis facebook.com — Broad Foundation Analysis
⚖️ Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Federal Conviction (Chicago)
$CITETitleSourceLink Former Chief Executive of Chicago Public Schools Sentenced to More Than Four Years in Prison U.S. Department of Justice — Official Press Release justice.govBarbara Byrd-Bennett — Full Coverage Archive WTTW Chicago Public Media news.wttw.com Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Wikipedia Overview Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
⚖️ Robert Runcie — Broward County Perjury Arrest
$CITETitleSourceLinkFDLE Arrests Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie for Perjury Florida Department of Law Enforcement — Official Release fdle.state.fl.us Former Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie Avoids Trial — Perjury Charge Dropped CBS News Miami cbsnews.com/miami State Drops Perjury Charge Against Former Broward Schools Superintendent Miami Herald miamiherald.comPerjury Charge Dropped Against Ex-Broward Schools Superintendent NBC Miami nbcmiami.com
🤖 Alberto Carvalho — LAUSD FBI Raid & AllHere AI Scandal
$CITETitleSourceLinkFBI Raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho’s Home and Office May Be Linked to Student AI ChatbotEdSource edsource.org How Probe Into Failed Startup Led to LAUSD Superintendent Investigation Los Angeles Times latimes.com
📌 Quick Citation Reference Guide
For the article sections, citations map as follows:
Broad Center Yale programs → , , ,
EEPA 2022 empirical study → ,
General Broad criticism & history → ,
Byrd-Bennett federal conviction → , ,
Runcie perjury arrest → , , ,
Carvalho FBI raid / AllHere AI → ,
⚠️ Research Note: Several additional primary sources — including the original EEPA journal publication, the Jeffrey Hubbard California Supreme Court ruling, the Maria Goodloe-Johnson state audit, and the Jean-Claude Brizard Chicago strike documentation — are recommended for deeper verification. Additional searches can be run to surface those specific primary documents on request.
It is a well-established fact that the school choice movement was created in the South in the 1950s to protect segregation. After the Brown decision of 1954, whites resisted desegregation with e Rey strategy they could dream of. One such was to offer vouchers to every student to attend the school of their choice. The predictable result was to protect segregated schools.
In this century, voucher promoters sell them as parental choice, “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” etc.
But unless an effort is made to enrcuage racial integration, choice will lead to segregation.
Halley Potter of The Century Foundationwrote this report. I urge you to open the link and read it in full.
Potter wrote:
In rural Northampton, North Carolina, a private Christian school called Northeast Academy is 99 percent White in a county that’s 40 percent White. It receives about half of its tuition from taxpayers, through the state’s private school voucher program. Northeast is one of a number of private schools known as “segregation academies,” because they were founded during desegregation so that White parents could avoid having their children educated in an integrated setting.
Segregation academies ought to be a thing of the past, but they could experience a resurgence—paid for with taxpayer dollars—under the new federal private school voucher scheme enacted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA). Bringing back segregation academies using taxpayer dollars is part of the Trump administration’s radical two-pronged approach to undermine public education. The first tactic in the Trump administration’s plan to undercut public school systems is to dramatically reduce the federal role in education by dismantling federal programs, reducing oversight, attempting to cut federal funding for K–12 schools, and working to close the U.S. Department of Education. The second tactic is actively working toward privatization through an unprecedented federal private school voucher program.
How the Voucher Plan Would Work . . .
In July 2025, OBBA established a new federal tax credit—known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit—that, in effect, serves as a private school voucher program. The program allows individuals, beginning January 1, 2027, to contribute up to $1,700 per year toward private entities known as scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) and receive a dollar-for-dollar return of their money in the form of a federal tax credit. SGOs then would then be able to decide how to distribute the funds as scholarships to applicant students for them to spend on education. There is no cap on the size of such scholarships, and no limit on the number of individuals that can claim the tax credit. While recipient students may be able to use scholarship funds to pay for some things like tutoring or activity fees at public schools, because public schools are essentially free, it is anticipated that the vast majority of these funds will go toward private school enrollment.
There are very few requirements of SGOs in the statute, and it appears that any organization in a participating state that meets the criteria will be allowed to participate. SGOs must give scholarships to ten or more students who do not all attend the same school, must spend at least 90 percent of the income on scholarships, must give priority to students who received scholarships the previous year and to siblings, cannot earmark funds for a particular student, and must ensure that students come from families earning no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Essentially everything else will likely be up to the SGO, as the program’s regulations are not expected to add additional guardrails. It appears an SGO could, for example, be set up to fund scholarships to Christian schools only. Because private schools are not subject to all of the same civil rights laws as public schools, SGOs could also likely discriminate against students based on disability or sexual orientation.
While starting the process with individual donations gives the program the veneer of a charity operation, this is a ruse. All this does is mask who is truly bearing the cost of the program. In actuality, the donors to SGOs bear no cost, as they are later fully reimbursed by the federal government through the dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The federal government—using taxpayer dollars sent to the supposed donors—bears the entire cost of the program. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers range from around $4 billion to over $50 billion annually.
Moreover, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s language regarding the tax credit program is very misleading. Their fact sheet states: “A recent report estimates that the Education Freedom Tax Credit will generate an additional $24 billion in education funding annually.” That makes it sound like this is a revenue-creating program rather than one that bears a huge federal cost.
States and the District of Columbia have to decide annually whether or not to opt out of or into the voucher program. As of July 6, 2026, twenty-nine states had indicated that they plan to opt in for the first year of the program. However, federal regulations guiding the program are not expected until September. Further complicating matters, at least eighteen states will have new governors and the District of Columbia will have a new mayor when the program launches in 2027 because of term limits, and that number could be as high as thirty-six after this fall’s elections.
. . . To Increase Segregation and Undermine Public Education
Diverse learning environments that bring students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together are one of the most powerful educational tools we have. Integrated schools help encourage critical thinking, boost academic achievement, and build the skills for working across lines of difference that are essential for our democracy. The growth of private school voucher programs threatens to roll back progress on integration, limit educational opportunity, and further fracture the educational landscape by race and class.
As state leaders and advocates weigh whether or not to opt into the federal voucher program, they should consider the evidence on how the program could deepen inequality and further racial and socioeconomic divides. New analysis in this piece shows that in some metro areas in states that are still deciding whether to opt out of or into the federal voucher program, private schools already drive more than 40 percent of the racial segregation in schools.
The Segregationist History of Private School Vouchers
Private school enrollment nationwide is disproportionately White and wealthy. As of 2021, 9 percent of American schoolchildren attended private schools. Sixty-five percent of private school students are White, compared to 45 percent of public school students. Private school students are about twice as likely as public school students to come from higher-income households, and private school attendance is concentrated among the highest earners.
Private school voucher programs were started by segregationists across the South in the 1950s and 1960s as part of efforts by Southern leaders engaged in “massive resistance” to avoid integrating their schools in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Many communities opened all-White private schools, which became known as segregation academies. Local governments slashed public school funding and instead created public subsidies for these private schools—including voucher programs to reimburse tuition as well as tax credits.
The courts eventually struck down many of those voucher programs tied to segregation academies, but current voucher programs still show troubling patterns of segregation. Roughly 300 private schoolsthat were founded as segregation academies still receive money from publicly funded voucher programs. Most voucher money goes to students who are already attending private schools, and data has shown that private schools tend to raise their tuition after the introduction of voucher programs. For example, when Iowa started a new voucher program in 2023–24, two-thirds of vouchers went to students who were already attending private schools. By 2026, tuition at some of the state’s largest private high schools had grown by as much as 50 percent. It is important to note that vouchers typically do not cover the full cost of tuition, making private schools still out of reach for most low-income families, and so the voucher programs tend to function mostly as cost-reducing schemes for wealthier families sending their children to private schools. In Arizona, for example, half of all voucher recipients come from the wealthiest quartile of zip codes.
There are some private school voucher programs that target low- to middle-income students and enroll mostly students of color, such as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest operating school voucher program in the United States. However, research shows that even students in these programs, which arguably have the highest potential for integration, by and large did not give students greater access to integrated schools.
Furthermore, some voucher programs that started out serving mostly students of color have now seen an increase in White students in recent years. When North Carolina’s private school voucher program launched in 2014, for example, a majority of students receiving vouchers were Black, and just 27 percent were White; however, as the program expanded incrementally from one serving only low-income students to one with no income limits, the percentage of vouchers going to White students grew to 73 percent, in a state where only 51 percent of school-aged children are White. A 2024 investigation by ProPublica into North Carolina’s private school voucher program found thirty-nine schools that fit the profile of segregation academies that were receiving public money through voucher programs.
The new federal private school voucher program specifies that participation is open to families earning up to 300 percent of area median gross income, which means it would be open to roughly 90 percent of students nationwide. With near universal eligibility, the federal program could easily be susceptible to similar patterns of segregation, disproportionately benefiting White students and furthering segregation between public and private schools.
Kelly Edgar taught music in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) for 25 years. She recently wrote this article in The Nevada Independent about the dangers of charter schools.
Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our “failing public schools.” To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren’t thriving in traditional educational settings.
But that’s not what’s happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I’ve developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it’s now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.
Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they’re free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.
Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy.
According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there’s a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada’s education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite “historic education funding” being passed in 2023?
Because you can’t pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward “private alternatives” such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, “Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand.”
The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan’s administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with “apocalyptic rhetoric” and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.”
What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson’s paradox. Students weren’t actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush’s own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.
And when public schools didn’t crumble under those “reforms” as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.
The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.
But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of “school choice,” and “save” Americans from the crisis they created.
In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.” This “Education Reform Report” became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025.
And while we haven’t seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing “lax classroom discipline” and “poorly performing public schools.” One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents’ concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child.
The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicate that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide.
This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren’t charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight?
That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It’s in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities.
Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.
The paradoxes of “school choice” can’t be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the “choice schools” didn’t have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services.
Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don’t blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let’s not repeat the same mistake with our children’s education.
Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.
When it comes to supporting its public schools, Florida ranks dead last in the nation. Not only was it dead last of all states, it was at the very bottom in 2024 and 2025.
Florida betrays its state constitution, which contains a clear mandate to create and protect strong public schools.
Article IX, Section 1(a) states:
“The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education…”
Under the misleadership of Republican politicians like Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis, Florida has diverted billions of dollars to privately governed charter schools and unaccountable vouchers for private and religious schools and home schooling. Bush and DeSantis have ignored and abandoned Florida’s state constitution.
And among all the states, Florida’s school rank dead last.
Based on the NPE report Public Schooling in America 2026, Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for public Education, wrote:
This is the third consecutive year that Florida’s statehouse has earned last place when it comes to supporting public schools. Florida’s lawmakers don’t merely encourage privatization through charters, vouchers, and homeschools; they actively engineer conditions that undermine public schools and worsen the environment for teaching and learning.
The damage from Florida’s universal voucher program is staggering. Close to four billion dollars in state education funding now flows annually to voucher programs — nearly one in four state education dollars diverted away from public schools, including to families whose children never set foot in a public school. And the funding mechanism puts the burden directly on school districts, which must absorb the loss.
Meanwhile, Florida continuously revises its school rating standards to ensure more public schools are labeled as failing, while simultaneously incentivizing and subsidizing charter expansion. Its Schools of Hope program even allows charters to colonize unused space inside public school buildings. Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz teamed up with a Florida billionaire to help draft the enabling legislation, then used it to muscle her chain into the Miami charter market with generous public funding in tow.
Fifty percent of Florida’s charter sector is run by for-profit operators — one of the highest shares in the nation. Only Michigan has more. Florida is home to Academica, the largest for-profit charter chain in the country, and to Charter Schools USA. Both profit from the real estate they build and lease back to their own branded schools.
Charter schools claim to be equally open to all students. That is not the case in Florida, which lost points for the numerous enrollment privileges its laws permit. Florida is one of a small number of states that allow company-based charter schools. The Villages, the largest retirement community in the country, has its own charter school, and it functions less like a school of choice than a company store. The school was created by the community’s developer, and at least one parent must be employed by The Villages or a company that services it. If that parent quits or is fired, the child must leave immediately. For a low-wage service worker who might want to change jobs, the school becomes a trap — a reason to stay put rather than pursue something better.
Florida sinks to the bottom not only because of its weak charter and voucher laws and the financial incentives it offers to expand privatization, but because it actively undermines its public schools through policy and funding decisions at every turn. Florida lost every possible point on school funding — whether measured by cost-of-living-adjusted teacher salaries, equitable funding distribution, or funding based on capacity to pay. It has low teacher satisfaction, high student-to-teacher and student-to-counselor ratios, weak anti-bullying laws, and it still permits corporal punishment.
Of 102 possible points, Florida disgracefully earned only 14. You can read our full NPE 2026 report card here.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.
She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:
Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.
The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.
A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.
What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.
Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.
If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears.
Rhode Island welcomed charters under former Governor Gina Raimondo. When she left to become President Biden’s Secretary of Commerce, lieutenant governor Dan McKee took her place. He was widely viewed as a strong supporter of charter schools. He was closely associated with the creation of Rhode Island’s mayoral academies, especially the Blackstone Valley Prep network. But this year, he signed legislation pausing the approval of new charter schools for three years. He said that declining enrollment and funding challenges warranted the pause.
This was awkward for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (sic), which had honored him in 2009 as a Charter School Champion. Taken aback, the Alliance did something unprecedented. It withdrew his award!
Today, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools withdrew its recognition of Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee as a Charter School Champion, marking the first time in the organization’s 21-year history this award has been rescinded.
This happened after McKee signed a bill “that enacts a moratorium on public charter schools for three years, lowers the statewide cap from 35 to 28, and prohibits already approved schools from opening.”
Think about it: 9.9% of Rhode Island’s students are enrolled in charter schools. Some are in private and religious schools. Probably 80-85% attend public schools. Where should the Governor’s priorities lie?
This is a rare and unusual move in the U.S. given how aggressively neoliberals have been imposing school privatization on the nation for the last few decades. It is also noteworthy that both chambers of the State’s legislature overwhelmingly approved the three-year moratorium on these privately-operated schools. Opposition to charter schools has been steadily growing across the country over the years.
Not surprisingly, many business groups, charter school advocates, and even some democrats tried to pressure the Governor and legislature not to approve such a moratorium. The fact that many democrats still support privately-operated charter schools goes against the mainstream narrative that it is mostly or only republicans who support school privatization.
Whether this moratorium decision by Governor McKee and the state legislature is based on principle or cynical maneuvering by certain factions of the rich against other competing factions, the moratorium is still a positive step forward for the public interest and public schools. More charter schools always means more problems.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board has made some charter fans big mad, and now the courts will be involved.
FNSBSD last fall dealt with a request to open a charter school in the district, to be the Pearl Creek Steam Charter School. The board voted unanimously to deny the request. They had plenty of reasons– 52 pages worth, in fact. Those reason included a lack of a facility plan, lack of a clear enrollment projection, a mess of a contract, no transportation plan, an inadequate instructional plan that doesn’t fully address state standards, no student lunch plan, no professional development plan, an admission plan that is probably illegal, an error-filled and incomplete budget, and the fact that this would have a big financial impact on the district. FNSBSD has already been closing schools to deal with dropping enrollment and funding. “Hey, the district is financially strapped, so let’s open a new building,” said no responsible school board ever. The Pearl Creek proposal is to reopen one of the closed schools as a charter school.
Also, said the FNSBSD board, this school is probably going to fail. “The plans in the application do not demonstrate likelihood of success,” is how the board put it. Again, 52 pages of details covering the above.
The charter crew offers an estimate of $830,000 cost to the district. The district COO says it’s more like $2.8 million. Coverage of the “controversy” has been extensive, especially from reporters Patrick Gilchrist and Shyler Umphenour at KUAC and Corinne Smith at the Alaska Beacon.
But Governor Mike Dunleavy would really like to see more charters, and so would Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, and so would the Dunleavy-appointed members of the Alaska State Board of Education, which has the power to overrule local school boards.
So in April, the state board went ahead and approved the charter over the objections and explanations of the duly-elected local school board. The state board declared that, essentially, the charter board had filled out all the paperwork, and that was good enough. Took them a whole fifteen pages to say it.Bobby Burgess, the president of the FNSBSD Board of Education, had a comment for KUAC.
“Basically, my read of the state’s decision is that, if the application is filled out in full, the contents don’t really matter, even if the plan described is impossible to execute,” Burgess said. “It kind of seems like a lower standard than we hold students to on homework assignments.”
Now, in the newest twist, Acting Attorney General Cori Mills has filed an emergency petition to force the district to get that school opened. Because nothing says “We do too have an adequate plan for this charter school” than insisting you can get it up and running in two months. (Mills is Acting AG because the legislature rejected Dunleavy’s first choice.)
Meanwhile, Pearl Creek STEAM Charter is still announcing that it will be open in the fall on both its website and Facebook page.
There are other issues at play here. Veteran reporter and columnist Dermot Cole points out that Pearl Creek will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, part of a larger charter trend in Fairbanks:
I believe that nearly all of the charter schools in the Fairbanks area have tended to attract enrollment from families with higher incomes or families where the parents have the time, energy and ability to be directly involved in their children’s education…
There are far fewer economically disadvantaged students in Alaska charter schools than neighborhood schools. There are also fewer students for whom English is a second language. Most charter schools do not have bus transportation for students, school lunch programs or other features that would make them more accessible to poor families.
I’m guessing, based on what I know about Fairbanks, that most charter school families have more flexibility built into their lives, whether it’s because of economic status, help from extended family members or the sense of mission that the best parents share.
Beyond all that, Fairbanks now has the bizarre situation of a district that has tried to cut costs by closing a school now being told by the state that they must reopen the building and pay for someone else to run a school there, reversing the decision of the elected local school board.
It’s not the most extreme version of state governments usurping the power of local school boards (take Ohio, where school districts can get in legal trouble for failing to hand buildings over to charters). But it is one more literal example of how running multiple parallel school districts costs the taxpayers extra. If only choice fans were honest enough to say, “We want choice, so we are going to levy a new School Choice Tax to pay for it.” Good luck, Fairbanks.
Jan Resseger, stalwart champion of public schools, is alarmed by the damage that privatization inflicts on public schools, attended by the vast majority of children. She describes the erosion of public schools as “a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions.”
Resseger writes:
On Monday, the Network for Public Education (NPE) released an urgently important report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools. The report ranks the states on their protection of the institution of public schools that serve the mass of our children and adolescents and the degree to which school privatization is undermining that promise.
In what I found to be the report’s most shocking statistic, 19 states now provide Education Savings Account (ESA) vouchers and ten of those states give ESA vouchers to “virtually every family regardless of income or need.” An ESA is a virtual debit card that parents whose children do not attend public schools can use to pay for any kind of privatized education or for materials and services the parents claim to be using to homeschool their children. What this really means is that many of these states are basically just giving money away to parents to use as they please without appreciable regulations or oversight.
The Network for Public Education (NPE) confirms “a troubling and consistent pattern. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and education savings accounts—are the same states most neglectful of their public schools, their teachers, and their students. Our analysis found a strong, statistically negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and public school support…. Privatization and disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.”
What is the scale of the problem? “Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia now fund one or more private school voucher programs, and nineteen states operate Education Savings Account (ESA) programs… The charter school sector presents parallel concerns. Forty-seven states have charter school laws, and in the majority of them, private unelected boards govern schools with no term limits and no formal accountability to the communities they serve… The consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives: those in poverty, those with disabilities, those in rural communities, and those whose families lack the time or resources to navigate a fragmented marketplace of educational options. Public schools remain the only institutions in American life constitutionally obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance. They are governed by elected boards, funded by public taxes and accountable to the communities they serve…”
The report examines four related threats.
Privatization Vouchers are one form of school privatization. The Network for Public Education reminds readers that vouchers trace back to the combination of racism and libertarian ideology. The first voucher schools supported segregation academies in the years immediately following Brown v. Board of Education, and NPE’s report explains that even today, “Study after study has found that school choice programs generally increase segregation,” with vouchers “enabling outright discrimination with public money.” Thirty-four states have at least one voucher program; in total states operate 73 voucher programs, “including some that allow families to double-dip, applying for funding from multiple programs.” Besides their traditional school voucher programs, some states have education savings accounts (“the most damaging and irresponsible of all voucher programs”). Some states have tuition tax credit ‘scholarship’ programs with tax credits for parents and others who contribute to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) which are tapped by parents to pay for private schools and other educational expenses. “(S)ome states also give individual tax credits (TTCs) for educational expenses at private schools or homeschools.” Thirty-one states have now also opted in to the federal tuition tax credit program created in the “One Big Beautiful” Bill.
What about the effects of the vast growth of private school vouchers? Because few states set income limits on the families who can qualify for the vouchers, they primarily benefit children from wealthy families. The vouchers “result in the defunding of public schools,” fail to protect the rights of disabled students, often fail to admit LGBTQ students, fail to provide any proof that students are thriving academically, fail require teachers to be certified, and fail to require background checks for teachers. Many states are spending on each voucher a large percentage of what they spend per-pupil on each public school student, and many vouchers are going to children who were always enrolled in the private school where the voucher will reimburse the families who have been paying tuition.
Publicly funded, privately operated charter schools are the second primary form of school privatization. Kentucky’s supreme court recently found that state’s charter school funding unconstitutional, and Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont have never had charters. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia all have passed laws that enable the operation of charter schools. Additionally, “a growing sector operates entirely online—and is largely run by for-profit corporations”—often displaying flagrant “financial opportunism” and “fraud.” And, “Like voucher schools, charter schools are subject to fewer regulations and less oversight than neighborhood public schools. As with voucher schools, this has resulted in significant concerns regarding accountability, accessibility, fiscal responsibility, and academic quality… In 39 states, for-profit companies are permitted to manage nonprofit charter schools. One common arrangement—known as a ‘sweeps’ contract—allows a for-profit management company to handle a school’s day-to-day operations while receiving the bulk of its public funding in return… This practice is especially prevalent in six states—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia….”
Protections for Homeschooled Children “Homeschooling… is now the fastest-growing education sector,” fed by Education Savings Account vouchers. However, “even as homeschooling growth has accelerated, laws to protect the homeschooled child have not. Through the relentless pressure exerted by the Homeschool Legal Defense Associations… even the most modest legislation designed to protect homeschooled children from educational or physical neglect and abuse has been opposed with breathtaking ferocity.” The report details how states fail to require that parents let states know they are homeschooling children; fail to protect students from sexual abuse or violence; and fail to demand some kind of evidence that students are progressing academically.
Conditions that Promote Teaching and Learning Along with the massive growth of privatization, “Right-wing political forces have mounted a coordinated campaign against public education—eroding trust in neighborhood schools, creating hostile working conditions for teachers, and withdrawing support from the students who depend on them…. (N)umerous states have enacted laws that make the lives of transgender students significantly more difficult, while not fully protecting… LGBTQ students from bullying and discrimination. Nearly half of all states still permit corporal punishment in schools.” Class size has been increased, collective bargaining to ensure adequate teachers’ salaries has been undermined, and other conditions to attract highly qualified teachers have been undermined.
School Funding NPE declares: “Research has firmly established a positive correlation between per-pupil (public school) spending and student learning.” “This report tells a clear and troubling story. Across the country, statehouses are making deliberate choices—choices that defund neighborhood schools, strip teachers of dignity and professional standing, leave vulnerable children without protection, and redirect billions of public dollars to private alternatives that are too often beyond public control… They are the predictable results of an ideological campaign decades in the making, whose architects have been candid about their ultimate goal: the elimination of public education as Americans have known it… States that most aggressively expand vouchers and charter schools are the same states that underfund their public schools, underpay their teachers, and provide the weakest protections for students… States with the most expansive ESA programs have produced the most egregious fraud… States that strip teachers of collective bargaining rights are the same states with the lowest teacher attractiveness ratings…the overlap is not coincidental. Privatization and disinvestment are two sides of the same coin.”
The report grades each of the states overall for their protection of the public schools.”Seventeen states earned an F for their lack of support of public schools, students and educators while embracing privatization.” A second privatization grade identifies the states where schooling has been most damaged by privatization. In both categories, Florida earns the lowest “F” grade, while Arizona’s grade is almost as bad.
NPE’s new report traces the impact of today’s national wave of school privation and the overall impact on our nation’s largest institution—a fifty-state system of public education. It cannot trace the convoluted history of any one state’s legislative and sometimes legal battle around school finance. It cannot examine the specific politics in any particular state that have contributed to the spread of today’s wave of privatization—of the role of gerrymandering, of particular regional funders of state legislators’ political campaigns or the lobbyists who surround the statehouse. And it cannot examine the role of disparities caused by racial and economic injustice any particular state’s school funding.
The fact that such a report cannot possibly explore state-by-state detail, however, does not reduce the report’s significance. The Network for Public Education accomplishes an urgently important goal: identifying a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions. NPE concludes:
“Public schools are not merely institutions that deliver academic instruction. They are the places where children of every background, ability, faith, language, and circumstance are welcomed—not as paying customers, but as members of a community with an equal right to learn. They are governed by publicly elected boards, funded by public taxes, and accountable to the public in ways that no charter management company, no ESA vendor, and no private religious school is required to be… When public schools are weakened—through funding cuts, through the diversion of students and dollars, through the erosion of the teaching profession—the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives… For those left behind in underfunded, understaffed public schools… (there) is no choice at all.”
There is a heated Democratic primary for Congress in NYC’s District 12.
Micah Lasher vs. Alex Bores.
Vote for Bores.
He has led the way in opposing the use of artificial intelligence in the schools.
Micah Lasher was the NYC Department of Education’s chief lobbyist during the Bloomberg era. Lasher helped get the charter cap lifted repeatedly and making it legal to co-locate charters in public schools for free.
None of this was good for public schools, which saw charter freeloaders wedged into their buildings and taking away prime space.
Lasher then went on to head the NYC chapter of StudentsFirst, the pro-charter organization founded by Michelle Rhee.
He is no friend to public schools.
Now, Bloomberg is spending $10M to get him elected to Congress. That explains why there are so many Lasher ads air on local TV.
Meanwhile, Bores has been a leader in the battle to regulate AI, and in the Legislature co-sponsored the RAISE Act, the strongest state bill so far requiring large AI developers to have a safety plan to prevent widespread harm and destruction. As a result, according to NPR, “super PACs tied to investors in ChatGPT maker OpenAI unleashed a torrent of spending aimed at torpedoing his campaign.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 