In 2023, the state of Texas took control of the Houston Independent School District because of an absurd state law that allows a state takeover of an entire district if only one school is “failing” for five years. In Houston, that one school was Phyllis Wheatley High Schol, which had disproportionately high numbers of students with disabilities, English language learners, and impoverished students. Wheatley was improving, but not enough to avert the takeover.
HISD went to court to block the takeover by the state, but eventually lost in 2023.
The State ousted the board and installed a new superintendent, former military officer Mike Miles, who had had a rocky tenure as superintendent in Dallas (teachers left in droves in response to Miles’ autocratic style.) Miles also started charter schools.
Miles imposed a standardized “New Education System” and ousted experienced (but noncompliant) principals.
HISD enrolls about 168,400 students this year. It has lost 13,000 students since the takeover in 2023. Enrollment is growing in other districts, not declining.
Loss of enrollment means loss of state and federal funding.
The biggest enrollment losses occurred in schools closely implementing Mike Miles’ mandates. Researchers “found that campuses strictly implementing reforms lost more students. Certain magnet and specialty program schools with more autonomy gained students.”
Researchers said that this exodus from public schools to charter schools did not happen statewide.
The exodus of experienced teachers has led to a sharp increase in first-year teachers and uncertified teachers. The number of first-year teachers increased by 562 teachers, or 64.7%, since the takeover, according to the UH research center…
Area school districts and charters are hiring more HISD teachers after the first year of the takeover than they did previously, according to the report. Fort Bend ISD hired the most former HISD teachers, bringing on 207. Katy ISD ranked second in 2024–25, followed by Cypress-Fairbanks ISD.
“The increase in uncertified teachers and the increase of novice teachers … that increase was greater in HISD than the other districts surrounding it,” Templeton said.
Teacher turnover soared in Dallas when Mike Miles became Superintendent. In his first year, he ruled as an autocrat, and nearly 1,000 teachers quit. Over his three years, the rate of teacher resignations increased from the low teens to about 22% annually.
Jennifer Berkshire, keen-eyed commentator on the nation’s schools and their detractors, writes that the doomsayers are up in arms again. After 25 (or 40) years of nonstop “reform,” their lamentations are once again in style. Note that the lamentors never blame the failure of the “reforms” they imposed. No. It’s the students, the teachers, the public schools, anyone else but not themselves.
Berkshire writes:
The kids are dumb and getting dumber. They can’t add or read the books they are no longer assigned, rousing themselves from their stupid stupors only to demand extra time on tests or another (now meaningless) A. The schools are collapsing, thanks to weakened standards and something called “cargo cult equity.” Just how bad is it out there? Today’s kids are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage-backed securities that blew up the economy in the lead up to the Great Recession. (Yes, somebody actually made this argument).
I could keep going, but you get where this is heading. Also, we are only a few days into the new year and I am already exhausted. The point, reader, is that we find ourselves in the throes of a full-blown public education panic. But why now? And why does this one feel different? I kick off 2026 with a look at a story that is all but guaranteed to keep telling itself in the months ahead.
America’s oldest pastime
If you’re new to the great American pastime of bemoaning the state of the nation’s schools then perhaps you’re unaware that we’ve been doing this since at least the ‘70’s. By which I mean the 1870’s. If the railroad collapse that triggered the Panic of 1873 feels startlingly familiar in our own bubbly AI economy, so too will feel the ensuing laments about the schools. They were too expensive. They used to teach reading well, but no longer. They had too many administrators. And if you’ve been following the ‘women ruin everything’ discourse, this was also the time when teaching became a female-documented occupation. Related? You tell me. Over the past 250 years, complaints “that the public schools of today are inferior to those of a generation or two ago” have resurfaced as reliably as measles or whooping cough.
Too many of the wrong kids are in college
Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’”
Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.
Billionaires gonna billionaire
Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart.
Nobody knows anything
“I Don’t Know What to Think About America’s Declining Test Scores and Neither Should You” was the title of a great post last year by teacher and writer Michael Pershan. Digging into the surging remedial math program at University of California San Diego that fueled roughly one billion hot takes, Pershan patiently pointed out the contradictory nature of the data regarding student achievement in California. Even as student math skills were supposedly declining, state test scores were increasing. Or take Los Angeles, one of the few bright spots in the post-pandemic recovery landscape. During the last golden age of education reform, roughly 15 minutes ago, the progress of LA’s students would have merited its own fawning press treatment. No longer. Today, the story is decline and failure, and while this is a global phenomenon that includes adults, why let a little complexity get in the way of a hot take? The emergence of our ‘hot take’ economy, by the way, in which content entrepreneurs are handsomely rewarded for their “obtuse penchant for moral and ideological incuriousity” (and pay no price for 1) being wrong or 2) contradicting themselves) is a major driver of our current round of public education panic.
Neoliberalism is gone (but not forgotten)
Every year I ban myself from using the word “neoliberalism,” and, well, you can see how that’s going. The story of education decline and collapse that’s now sweeping the land typically goes something like this. Back when we had accountability, standards and choice, things were going great, but then [insert teachers, unions, progressives, lazy kids here] did [insert bad thing here] and the result is [insert calamity here.] But if you’ve been paying attention to education politics for more than 15 minutes then you know that that story is not just partial but wildly inaccurate.
For example, did you know that grassroots opposition to the Common Core standards on the right blew up, not just the era of bipartisan accountability, but helped deliver the current occupant into the White House? The result is that we’re now in an in-between-state, in which the vision of market-minded education reform that has held sway for the last THIRTY YEARS is exhausted while no clear alternative has emerged to take its place. For a compelling explanation of how the crack up of education policy relates to our larger political disintegration, check out this essay by Matt Wilka and Kent McGuire, “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools.”
The neoliberal paradigm has cracked, but it has not crumbled. And this instability marks our current transition period, which has brought much graver threats to American democracy. The confluence of economic pain, demographic change, and new media has proved fertile ground for authoritarian leaders to champion resistance to government.
Human capitalists vs. the chainsaw
Of all of the reading I’ve done in the last month, it was this piece that stopped me in my tracks. The author, a used-to-be copy writer now being replaced by AI, asks an AI chat bot for career advice, to which he is instructed to pick up a chainsaw. I’ll stop here as I want you to read it yourself, but suffice it to say that the author uses his experience to take aim at two sacred cows of the neoliberal era: 1) that more and better education is the answer to our economic woes and 2) that the remedy for worker dislocation is retraining. (For evidence of our muddled moment, consider that the New York Times ran, in addition to the chainsaw op-ed, a Sal Kahn ripped-from-the-time machine argument for worker re-training and a good old-fashioned education-as-boot-straps editorial, all in the same month.)
What does this have to do with our current round of public education panic? For the past three decades, bipartisan education reform has been pitched as an alternative to economic redistribution. Why impose higher taxes on the wealthy when going after the teachers unions is so much more satisfying? But as downward mobility comes for a larger and larger segment of the workforce, that sales pitch has officially run out of steam. The big question now is ‘whither the Democrats?,’ who, to paraphrase the great Tom Frank, have long seen every economic problem as an education problem. Will they seize the populist economic mantle, as even James Carville is prodding them to do? Or will the centrist zombie rise again, flogging the exhausted case that “[e]ducation reform is the seed corn of economic prosperity”? My money is on the chainsaw…
Race science is back
What single silver bullet would cause US test scores to soar like a SpaceX rocket? If you answered ‘kicking out all of the immigrants,’ you would be quoting Trump advisor Stephen Miller. While the claim is measurably preposterous, it’s indicative of the roaring return of race science during Trump 2.0. But Goebbels envy isn’t the only reason for the obsessive fixation on IQ these days. For a forthcoming essay on the Democrats’ populism bind, I’ve been revisiting education historian Michael Katz’s 1987 Reconstructing American Education. In his survey of 100 years of education reform promises and disappointment, Katz identified a familiar pattern. Once the hypes and hopes of addressing an astonishing array of societal ills through the schools inevitably fall short, “hereditarian theories of intelligence reemerge” like clockwork.
Here’s Katz:
As so often in American history, education had been deployed as the primary weapon to fight poverty, crime and social disorder, and, as before, schools were unable to alleviate these great problems whose structural origins lie in the distribution of power and resources.
Katz was surveying the wreckage of the War on Poverty era, its optimism curdling into mainstream social science claims that 1) because IQ was largely inherited and racially determined 2) efforts to boost achievement through the schools were doomed to failure. Today we’re in a similar moment, the exuberant claims of the last education reform era (see above) crashing into the chasm of economic inequality. Katz argued that the only way to challenge genetic arguments, by the way, was to acknowledge “the structural origins of social problems and the inherently ineffectual nature of the reforms that have been attempted.” Sound familiar?
Too many of the wrong kids are in college
Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’”
Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.
Billionaires gonna billionaire
Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart.
THERE IS MORE! OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH THE ARTICLE. And open the link to see the links to sources.
The Network for Public Education reposted this analysis of school funding in Florida by Sue Kingery Woltanski. She was not surprised to discover that the state provides much more aid to students in non-public schools than to those in public schools. Imagine what a difference that money would make if it were directed to public schools, where it belongs. Florida now subsidizes the tuition of every student in private schools, religious schools, and home schools. Most of that state money goes to students who never attended public schools. Florida is underwriting the
In this post, Sue Kingery Woltanski breaks down the finances in just one Florida district to show how taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually resulting in more taxpayer dollars going to private schools than to public ones. Reposted with permission.
What Monroe County’s numbers reveal about Florida’s broken school funding priorities
I saw this image today, and it prompted me to take a closer look at the numbers for my Florida school district: Monroe County.
SURPRISE! Here is the state funding breakdown for Monroe:
Monroe’s 8,457 Public School students (district and charter) receive $181.86 each from the state (for a total of $1,537,924).
While Monroe’s 743 Family Empowerment Scholarship voucher recipients receive $6,786.03 each from the state (for a total of $5,040,326).
What if that $5,040,326 was used to fund Monroe’s public school students instead? Per pupil funding would be nearly $600 more per pupil, which could translate into teacher raises of $8,000/year or a reduction in class sizes, expanded electives, richer learning experiences, or some combination of all of the above – all of which could directly improve classrooms and student learning
On December 3, Kanawha Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey issued a permanent injunction that prevents the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board from authorizing any new charter schools without the approval of the voters in the county where the charter wants to do business.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, is an expert on charter schools and charter legislation. For the past decade, she has studied the charter school movement, state charter laws, and federal funding for charters and the consequences of those laws and funding more closely than anyone I know.
More than thirty years have passed since nineteen states first embraced charter schools as laboratories of innovation, and the evidence is clear: The model has broken down. Public trust has sharply eroded. School closures are routine, leaving students stranded and families frustrated. And nearly every day brings yet another charter school scandal.
The second installment of “Charter School Reckoning: Disillusionment,” a three-part report by the National Center for Charter School Accountability, reveals that the very structure of this sector—rather than merely isolated bad actors—is what enables mismanagement, profiteering, and instability at high cost to students and taxpayers. The need to rewrite charter laws is no longer a matter of debate; it is a matter of protecting students, taxpayers, and the public trust.
Roughly half of all charter schools by the 2018-19 school year were operated by management corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit. In Michigan, for-profit operators run 70 percent of the state’s charter schools. In Ohio and Florida, for-profits run half. Nevada’s, North Carolina’s, and South Carolina’s for-profit-run school sectors are quickly increasing. Charter schooling is now an industry, not a public school reform.
This growth in corporate chartering has been accompanied by the expansion of complex real estate and contracting structures. These arrangements are not incidental; they are built into the fabric of many charter school laws. In nearly every state, management companies can own school buildings, set their own lease terms, and collect “management fees” that reach 10 percent to 25 percent of a school’s total revenue. Through these related-party transactions, companies maximize profits, siphoning off funding that should be benefitting students.
In every state, authorizing entities that issue charters for schools are responsible for ensuring that the school is fiscally sound, well-managed, and that students are achieving. According to the new report, authorizers “decide who can start a new charter school, set academic and operational expectations, and oversee school performance. They also decide whether a charter should remain open or closed at the end of its contract.” Unfortunately, fee incentives, multiple authorizers, and political appointees to state authorizing boards often make the authorization process vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement.
In 25 percent of states with charter school laws, four or more types of organizations—including universities, nonprofits, struggling colleges, junior colleges, school districts, and state agencies—are permitted to authorize charters to collect at least 3 percent of a school’s funding. In some states, small and cash-strapped nonprofits and colleges have created charter portfolios that generate millions of dollars. The “Charter School Reckoning” report also documents examples of failing schools that “authorizer shopped” to avoid being shut down, as well as one case of an authorizer who took charter customers on junkets to London and Stockholm.
Charter school board governance also generally remains slap-dash and unaccountable. Only five states require charter school governance to be based on elections. Nearly all other appointments are created by charter school boards’ bylaws, with only a handful of states having any requirements around term limits or membership.
Too often, board members have been sought out by the school’s operator and serve without term limits or approval beyond the board. The Epic Charter Schools case in Oklahoma shows how boards stacked with associates of the school’s founders failed to oversee tens of millions of dollars in questionable spending, with one board member admitting that he was a childhood friend of co-founder David Chaney.
Drawing from news stories published between September 2023 and September 2025, the “Charter School Reckoning” report documented a staggering $858 million in taxpayer funds lost to fraud, theft, profiteering, or incompetence. In story after story, board members were asleep at the wheel, claiming ignorance of the theft, fraud, and incompetence occurring on their watch. Only three states—California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts—“expressly prohibit contracts between a charter school board member and a company with whom the school is doing business.”
The consequences of these system design flaws fall heavily on students and families, with more than one in four charter schools closing by their fifth year and nearly 40 percent shuttering by year ten. And the funds taken from the public school system and taxpayer pockets are irretrievably lost.
These documented patterns point to a clear conclusion: Charter laws in many states create predictable opportunities for profiteering, opacity, and instability. Reform must therefore address the systemic issues that enable these outcomes. The report concludes with ten concrete legislative changes that, if correctly implemented, will reduce fraud and abuse and bring charter schools back to their original mission to serve as laboratories of educational innovation, deserving of the word “public.” Among the specific changes supported by the evidence in this report are stronger financial transparency rules, clear prohibitions on related-party transactions, limits on authorizer fees, democratic governance requirements for charter school boards, and renewal terms capped at five years.
The report concludes, “We can still incubate good ideas, but we should do so where they belong: inside the public system, with the sunlight, stewardship, and community voice that public money requires. Recommitment to that principle—public dollars for public schools under public rules—is the surest way to move from reckoning to repair.”
ProPublica published this article by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards in October, but I somehow missed it. It’s still relevant because it nails the personnel that Trump and wrestling entrepreneur Linda MacMahon installed at the U.S. Department of Education. The common thread among them: they want to privatize public schools, and they want to emphasize the Christian mission of schools.
It starts:
The department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.
Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students….
To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years.
Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.
In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.
Although more than 80% of American students attend public schools, Burke predicted that within five years, a majority would be enrolled in private choice options. The impact of their policies, she believes, will lead to the closure of many public schools.
Accountability, once a watchword for conservatives, won’t be needed in the future that McMahon and Burke are building.
As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation….
Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution.
Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students.
Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.”
McMahon has welcomedeaders of extremist rightwing groups into the Department, like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.
Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row [at McMahon’s confirmation hearings] from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration.
Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department.
AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.”
The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity…”
AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.
Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.
Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools.
Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals.
The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.
These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views.
Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, is optimistic about the plans of MacMahon:
Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero….”
McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office.
Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools.
Jeff Bryant, a veteran education journalist, dissects he plan to destroy public schools. Governor Ron DeSantis and the Legislature has unleashed the for-profit vultures to pick the bonds and funds of the state’s public schools. Not because the charges are better schools, but because the rightwingers have close ties to members of the legislature. Want to open a charter school? Want the state to pay all your expenses? Come on down to the Sunshine State!
This article was produced by Our Schools.Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky@jeffbinnc.
The letters started coming in October 2025. In the first wave, according to the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), “at least 22 school districts in Florida” got letters alerting them that charter school operators, including a for-profit charter school management company based in Miami, intended to use a state law recently enacted to open new charter schools on the campuses of existing public schools beginning August 2027.
In Broward County, a South Florida district that includes Fort Lauderdale, the Mater Academy charter school chain, operated by for-profit charter management company Academica, claimed space in 27 public schools. Mater Academy claimed space in nearly 30 schools in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa Bay, “along with more than a dozen [schools] in Pinellas [County] and six in Pasco [County],” Tampa Bay Times reported. In Sarasota County, Mater claimed space in three public school campuses.
“So far, 480 schools in 22 counties have received 690 ‘letters of intent’ from charter school organizations expressing their intent to occupy space in public school buildings,” FPI’s Norin Dollard told Our Schools in late November. When schools receive letters from multiple charter organizations, it’s first come, first served, she explained, and the timeline for schools to respond is incredibly short—just 20 days.
Once the charter occupies part of the public school, Dollard explained, it operates rent free, and the public school district becomes responsible for much of the charter’s costs, including those for services charters don’t customarily provide, such as bus transportation and food service, as well as costs for school support services like janitorial, security, library, nursing, and counseling. Even any construction costs the charters might incur have to be covered by the public school.
This new law will force some public schools to convert to charter schools, said Damaris Allen, “and that’s intentional.” Allen is the executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, a public schools advocacy organization that is rallying opposition to the law.
The letters have caught the attention of national news outlets, including the Washington Post, which reported, “The Florida law is an expansion of a state program called ‘Schools of Hope,’ which was set up to allow certain charters to operate in areas with low-performing local public schools. The new law allows ‘Schools of Hope’ operators to take over space at any public school that’s under capacity, regardless of whether it is high- or low-performing.”
“The expansion of the Schools of Hope idea has been on a slippery slope,” Dollard explained, “much like school vouchers have been in the state.” Originally, in 2017, schools identified for Schools of Hope transition from public governance to charter management were very narrowly defined as persistently underperforming schools. That changed in 2019 when the legislature altered the definition of low-performing to target more schools and added schools in so-called opportunity zones—government-designated areas selected for economic development—as open territory for charters. Now, the new law allows charter schools to take over “underused, vacant, or surplus” space in traditional public schools and operate free of charge.
As the reach of the Schools of Hope idea morphed, so did its rationale. According to a 2025 op-ed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the program was originally conceived as an “initiative that incentivizes high-quality charter operators to open schools for students trapped in failing ones.” The aim now, according to Bush, is to solve the “problem” of underutilized space in existing public schools.
With school enrollments in steep decline in nearly every district in the state, fear of a potential mass charter school industry takeover of public school spaces—along with the costs local districts will incur—looms over district leaders across the state and strikes them as a clear existential threat.
Other consequences of colocating more charters in public schools have not been well-thought-out, according to Allen. For instance, on the issue of school safety, public schools have undertaken a number of measures to protect against school shootings, such as converting buildings to single-point entry. Charter schools don’t have to do that. So what happens when a charter operation moves into a building and doesn’t comply with the single-point entry? Also, the state legislature created new rulesfor public school libraries in 2022. Charters don’t have to follow those rules. How is that going to work in a colocation?
Allen fears the daunting challenges of charter colocations will cause some school boards and communities to sell school buildings or convert them to district-operated charters rather than give in to charter schools run by outside, for-profit companies.
And while proponents of Florida’s Schools of Hope program see it as a way to expand education options for students and families, critics point to evidence that Florida charter schools, which one expert called “a shitstorm,” need stricter oversight rather than a free rein. And, regardless of the outcomes, they warn that the idea is sure to get promoted as an “education innovation” that other Republican-dominated states will likely adopt.
A warning sign, not a model
When Nancy Lawther, a retired college professor of French, got involved in public schools advocacy, she became very skeptical about the oft-told narrative about the need for more education options because “too many poor children are trapped in failing public schools.” After all, in Dade County, Miami, where she lives, the public system has an A rating by the state despite having a challenging student population that is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with many living in households earning less than the state’s median income.
Her skepticism only increased when she first heard about expanding the Schools of Hope program to more schools, especially when she saw the results from the first schools taken over.
The original “Schools of Hope” weren’t individual schools; it was a whole district. In 2017, the Jefferson County school board voted in favor of participating in a pilot project for the new Schools of Hope initiative. The board’s approval to join the pilot meant that the district was required to turn over the management of their schools to a “high-performing” charter management company, which, in this case, happened to be Somerset Academy, another charter chain managed by the for-profit Academica management company.
But the results of the pilot would be a warning sign about the abilities of charter management firms to improve the education outcomes of public schools. As a 2025 op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel recounted, “[T]axpayers saw higher costs, stagnant results, and constant staff churn. By 2022, the takeover collapsed. Local leaders called it ‘an absolute disaster.’ The state had to step in with a $5 million bailout just to get the district running again.”
A 2024 account of the pilot in the Tallahassee Democrat reported, “[F]rom 2017 to 2022,… [Jefferson County] remained troubled by students’ lagging academic performance and mounting disciplinary issues, like fighting that in one case led to the arrest of 15 students. … [And] the school district was still getting a D grade” from the state.
Nevertheless, after Florida lawmakers expanded the Schools of Hope program in 2019, which has cost more than $300 million as of 2025, “There are only about a dozen Schools of Hope in Florida. In 2024, eight of them got C or D grades,” pointed out the Bradenton Times.”
‘All about market share’
Given its track record of failure, Lawther suspects that expanding Schools of Hope has nothing to do with improving education outcomes or making better use of publicly funded school buildings.
Indeed, Sarasota County, one of the districts targeted for charter colocations, has been an A-rated system since the state created the grading system in 2004, according to the district website.
Also, in districts where there are enrollment slides, there are few signs that demand for charters will soak up excess building capacity. According to a 2025 analysis of Sarasota County by Suncoast Searchlight, “The number of charter schools has grown in recent years, but the share of students at charters has not shifted much.” And building utilization rates of the different sectors are nearly identical—82 percent for public schools and 84 percent for charters, WUSF stated. “Some of the lowest-performing charters are barely a third full.”
Mater Academy, the charter operator using the Schools of Hope law to claim space in Sarasota public schools, does not currently operate a school in the district.
“This is all about market share,” Lawther said. “It’s about getting an advantage over charter operators that are not Schools of Hope providers, and independent charters that can’t compete in a market geared to the large chains,” like those operated by Academica.
Further, while enrollments in Florida charter schools continued to grow, it has shown signs of slowing down—from 3.7 percent in 2024 to 2.6 percent in 2025—and the number of charter schools decreased, from 739 in 2023-2024 to 732 in 2024-2025.
Also, the charter industry in the state faces many more privately-operated competitors. “Expansions of voucher programs are creating a more competitive market for charter schools,” Lawther noted, “and private schools, microschools, and homeschooling are growing forms of school choice.”
Indeed, charter schools no longer appear to be the fastest-growing form of school choice in the state.
After the Republican-led Florida legislature passed a bill in 2023 that did away with income requirements for families to receive state-sponsored school vouchers, the share of state funding diverted from the public system—which, technically, includes charters—to private schools and homeschooling doubled from 12 percent in 2021 to 24 percent in 2025, WUSF reported. In the school year 2023-2024, the number of vouchers, often called “scholarships,” given out to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling increased by approximately 142,000 students, according to Next Steps, a school choice advocacy group.
Florida has also experienced a 46 percent increase in homeschooling over the past five years, WEAR statedin 2025. And the state has freed up 50,000 new community facilities to serve as microschools, according to the Center for American Progress.
It would seem that in this increasingly competitive education landscape, the Florida charter school industry could use a new competitive angle like the one offered by Schools of Hope. “Officially, charter school advocates say Schools of Hope is an amazing opportunity to expand parent choice,” Dollard said, “but unofficially, this is an incredibly lucrative business opportunity.”
An industry in decline?
The charter school industry’s desire for new business strategies that enable charter operators to seize public school classrooms—or even whole buildings—is not confined to Florida.
In Indiana, for years, public school districts have been required to notify the state, within 10 days, when one of their buildings becomes vacant and to make the building available to lease to a charter school for $1 per year or sell the building to a charter operator outright for $1.
In Ohio’s 2025 approved budget, a new provision allows the state to force school districts to close some public school buildings and sell those properties to charter or private schools “at below market value,” Ideastream Public Media reported.
One market condition that’s likely behind these increasingly aggressive charter school industry is land grab, as revealed in a 2025 analysis by the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA). According to the report, charter school closings have been accelerating nationwide, while the pace of new charter openings has slowed significantly during the same time.
“[T]he 2023-24 school year saw just 12 more open charter schools than during the previous year,” the report found. This is “a dramatic departure” from the heydays of industry growth when “[t]he number of charter schools increased by 421” between 2010 and 2011.
Charter school enrollment growth has also stalled, according to the report, increasing by 0.1 percentage point—from 7.5 percent to 7.6 percent of total charter enrollment—between 2020 and 2023.
In the most recent school years, based on official data from 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, NCCSA found, “Most states experienced declines or stagnation [in charter school market share], and preliminary indicators suggest that, once the 2024 data is finalized, the trend will likely worsen.”
North Carolina offers a clarifying example of the significant headwinds that the charter school industry now faces.
In the Tar Heel state, charter schools have enjoyed widespread support among state lawmakers and private investors. The state legislature has made dramatic changes to state laws regarding charters, including loosening regulations and fast-tracking approval of new schools. And a 2024 analysis by the Charlotte Observer found “at least $279 million in private equity investments in North Carolina charter schools since 2013.”
Despite this support, the number of charter schools in North Carolina declined in 2024-2025, from 211 to 208 in 2023-2024, according to an industry spokesperson. And many of the newest charter schools to open in the state have not fared well. “State data show that only about 26 percent of new charter schools in the past five years met or exceeded their enrollment projections,” NC Newsline reported, “and more than half of those that missed the mark are now closed or never opened.”
The report’s findings revealed that although charters tend to locate in low-income neighborhoods, they serve far fewer children from low-income families, fewer children who are English learners, and fewer children with disabilities, resulting in leaving traditional public schools with elevated needs and higher costs.
Critics of the Schools of Hope law noted that these industry shifts, as well as a historical tendency for education policies enacted in Florida to get picked up in other Republican-dominated states, will spur other states to adopt similar policies, regardless of any evidence that they might harm public schools.
“More generally,” Baker added, “Florida charter schools are a shitstorm, both underserving higher need populations and underperforming with those they do serve.”
‘A shitstorm’
Among the critics of Florida’s Schools of Hope legislation is Bruce Baker, a professor and chair of the department of teaching and learning at the University of Miami and an expert on charter schools and public school finances.
“I’m, of course, deeply concerned with granting preferential access to any charter operator, at the expense of a fiscally strapped school district,” Baker wrote in an email. “I’m more concerned when it may present a slippery slope regarding control over land and buildings that should—by the [state] constitution, which supersedes this regulatory change—be solely under the authority of the local boards of education elected by the taxpayers who financed those facilities and continue to maintain them. It becomes even more problematic if this eventually creates an avenue to transfer ownership. That would be a particularly egregious violation of local board authority and private taking of public assets. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a concern.”
Baker’s assessment of charter schools in the Sunshine State is evident in his 2025 report, which looks at the impacts of the industry on school funding adequacy, equity, and student academic outcomes across the state, and, more specifically, in the Miami-Dade district.
Also, charters, despite having an advantage of educating less challenging and less costly student populations, underperform public schools on state assessments while “serving otherwise similar student populations.” This finding holds statewide and in Miami-Dade.
The report concludes that Florida charters are “compromising equity, eroding efficiency, and producing poor educational outcomes for those it serves.”
Given these findings, the report recommends that state lawmakers “[i]mpose a moratorium on charter school expansion, including the Schools of Hope Program.” It also calls for “new regulations for evaluating existing charter operators,” stronger vetting of new charter operators, and stricter enforcement of regulations about charter school student outcomes.
Schools of nope
Several district school superintendents acrossFlorida have urged their communities to oppose the state’s Schools of Hope charter school expansion in public school buildings. When the state’s current education commissioner defended the Schools of Hope law in his address at a 2025 conference for school board members and district leaders and suggested it could be used to shut down whole districts, the audience roundly booed him.
Grassroots groups such as Families for Strong Public Schools have held events to educate the public about the negative impacts of charter colocations. A coalition that includes the United Teachers of Dade, NAACP Miami-Dade Branch, the Miami-Dade County Council of PTA/PTSA, and others has formed to protest charter colocations. And a senator in the state legislature has introduced a bill to repeal the Schools of Hope expansion.
Much of the opposition has rallied under the banner of “Schools of Nope” and is organizing call-ins and an email campaign targeting state legislators.
Opposition organizers like Damaris Allen see this as a do-or-die moment in the state. “Either we win this fight, or it’s the death of public schools in Florida,” she said.
Parents enrolled their children in a new charter school in North Carolina that offered great promise. But the charter school was deeply entangled with for-profit entities whose first priority was profit, not students. The school never opened. Parents had to scramble to find another school.
Last spring, Dulce Garcia heard about a soon-to-open school that would offer students immersion in both Spanish and Chinese. There was no other in High Point like it, and it didn’t charge tuition. It seemed like a way for Garcia, a restaurant worker, to give her children a long-term advantage.
She decided to enroll her 6-year-old daughter, Aracely, in Triad International Studies Academy (TISA). In its first year, the school would serve preschool through second grade. She planned to enroll her 9-year-old son, Joel, when the school expanded to higher grades.
Aracely flourished at TISA. Garcia marveled that her daughter was soon counting in both Spanish and Chinese, and credited her swift academic progress and close friendships to TISA’s small class sizes. Aracely’s first-grade class had only 12 students; the entire school had only 45. “I think she does better in that type of environment,” Garcia said.
While the school’s modest enrollment seemed like a benefit to Garcia, it set off alarm bells in Raleigh. Charter schools like TISA—privately run, but publicly funded—must have 80 or more students under North Carolina law.
Most state funding is awarded on a per-pupil basis, and real estate costs—not covered by a state allocation—can be hefty, making it difficult for even charter schools with more students to remain solvent.
TISA seemed at risk of buckling under the financial pressure, facing an acute version of the challenges that have begun to slow growth in the once-booming charter school sector. At the same time, its management was pushing the bounds on conflicts of interest.
After learning about TISA’s low enrollment, the state Charter School Review Board summoned school leaders to their October 6 meeting. The board has the responsibility to shut down schools that fail to meet the state minimum, but broad leeway to set terms and make exceptions.
TISA’s board chair, Chaowei Zhu, fielded the state board members’ questions. He largely blamed construction delays.
The plan to renovate a former church and install modular classrooms on the property had hit one obstacle after another, said Zhu, who is assistant dean for global initiatives at Wake Forest University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. By mid-August, school leaders were on Plan C: putting all the kids in the auditorium until the renovations were finished. Two days before the start of the school year, parents arrived at an open house and found the parking lot a muddy mess. Zhu said that while he was directing traffic that rainy evening, he overheard parents saying that the school wasn’t ready.
Zhu’s wife, Junlan Li, a veteran educator and TISA’s principal, also told the board that an incident inside the school during the open house did perhaps even more damage. A child with autism hit several other students, she said. The child’s parents had not disclosed the child’s needs, so the school was unprepared.
TISA had projected 144 students in its first year. Roughly 90 attended the open house, but only about half that showed up on the first day.
Zhu and Li tried several arguments to persuade the Charter School Review Board to let their school stay open. They pointed out that state law allows the board to grant exemptions from the minimum enrollment if there is a “compelling reason.” In this case, TISA’s leaders said, the reason was the school’s “unique student population”—almost a third of students had a disability or other need for specialized education.
Zhu described aggressive marketing plans and a commitment from the school’s landlord to defer rent, which would allow them to break even with just 50 students. He requested that the board delay closing the school until next summer even if a waiver was ruled out. “If there’s any way you think we can continue, we’d love to give it a try,” Zhu said.
Bruce Friend, the charter board’s chair, said he was skeptical that TISA could boost enrollment substantially so far into the school year. “I’m just gonna be honest with you,” said Friend, who is head of school at Pine Springs Preparatory Academy, one of North Carolina’s largest charter schools. “Your track record doesn’t suggest that that’s going to happen.”
Friend moved to revoke the school’s charter, effective at the end of December. The board, made up largely of people with experience founding or operating charter schools, voted unanimously in support.
Garcia hadn’t considered TISA’s financial viability when she was selecting a school. She chose it for its programming and schedule. Seeing Aracely so happy, she imagined the school a staple of her family’s life for years to come. She didn’t expect to have to find another one just weeks into the school year.
Charting a New Course
North Carolina was among the first states to permit privately run, publicly funded charter schools. In its 1996 authorizing law, the General Assembly laid out its aims: to provide more choice for parents, more educational opportunities for gifted and at-risk students in particular, and new professional opportunities for educators.
The proposition was more freedom to experiment in exchange for more accountability. Rules on how money could be spent and what lessons could be taught were looser. But if the schools failed to meet student performance standards, they could be shut down. Some level of instability was built into the system.
At first, no more than 100 charter schools were allowed across the state. Legislators removed the cap in 2011 after Republicans gained majorities in both chambers. The number of charter schools doubled over the next decade. Then growth began to slow down. After hitting a peak of 211 in 2023, the number of charter schools fell for the first time ever. But the climb resumed this year. There are now 221 charter schools across the state, including virtual academies.
Even during the height of the boom, schools were regularly closing. Most years, there was at least one; some years, as many as 10. Regulators forced 38 charter schools to close between 1998 and 2024 for reasons that included insufficient enrollment, untenable finances, and poor academic performance. Over the same period, 32 other schools chose to voluntarily give up their charters—three in their first operating year. Another two dozen approved charters never materialized as schools.
While established schools continue to expand, pushing overall charter school enrollment ever higher, new schools are struggling. Every one of the seven that opened in North Carolina this school year came up short of their enrollment projections. Liberty Charter Academy, also in High Point, projected 500 students, but had only 172 enrolled as of the beginning of October. Three other new schools reported October 1 enrollment under 100.
Ashley Logue has noticed new schools facing ever-greater headwinds over the eight years she has worked in the state Office of Charter Schools. In that time, three first-year schools had their charters revoked for failing to meet the state’s minimum enrollment requirement; two were in the past two years….
She also saw other signs of escalating distress: More boards with approved charters were delaying their school’s opening by a year or more or deciding to give up their charter before the school ever opened. New schools were, on average, missing their targets by higher percentages.
National trends have been following a similar trajectory, according to a report published this summer by the National Center for Charter School Accountability that asked, “Has the charter movement reached its saturation point?”
Logue, who is now the director of the Office of Charter Schools, said the pandemic shifted how many parents thought about school, and in subsequent years alternatives to traditional public schools multiplied. “Post COVID, parents are much more understanding of the options and also more willing to say, ‘OK, this option that my child had—whether it was a district school or something else—is not working. What are my other options?’”
The alternatives include abundant variants of homeschooling, magnet schools run by public school districts, and private schools ranging from tiny church-run operations to opulent college preparatory academies. Since 2023, the General Assembly has made a massive investment in subsidizing private school tuition—families of any income now qualify for Opportunity Scholarships, though not all private schools accept the vouchers.
Meanwhile, birth rates in many parts of the state are declining, and high housing prices have changed where families with children live. The combined effects have been hard for schools of all stripes to predict.
The problem is perhaps most acute for novice independent charter school operators, who are, almost by definition, optimistic. By the time their school is about to open, they have been working toward that goal for years, sometimes racking up significant debt in the process. TISA said in its application that it planned to take out a $210,000 loan with a five-year term and a 7% interest rate to fund its planning year.
Real-estate and financial constraints can have a strong influence on the enrollment projections that operators submit to Logue’s office and the Charter School Review Board. Friend, now the board’s chair, said that was his personal experience when he was preparing his application back in 2015.
He was trying to project enrollment two years out in one of the state’s fastest-growing communities, Holly Springs. “The truth of the matter is my projections were largely based on what the size of my facility was going to be, and the size of my facility was going to be largely based on how much money I could secure,” Friend said.
The board of every school that Logue has warned about low enrollment has come before the oversight board promising that they will make their numbers. “I call it unrealistic optimism,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that we’ve seen over the last couple of years that you wouldn’t want to happen to your school.”
In response, the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools has begun organizing new training for schools in the year-long, state-mandated planning period that follows a charter award. First-year schools will also be allowed to participate. “Having names on a list and people telling you they’re going to send their kid—that doesn’t mean much these days,” the association’s Executive Director Rhonda Dillingham said. “We’ve got to make sure that the new schools that are opening understand that and do everything in their power to market the school.”
Dillingham’s group also recently received a $53 million federal grant to help charter schools build out career development; science, technology, engineering, and math; artificial intelligence; and career and technical education programming. Some of that funding will go to new schools.
Logue has proposed several changes to the state’s oversight of charter schools to try to prevent closures that leave families scrambling for a new school for their child in the middle of the school year.
“TISA,” she said, “was a worst-case scenario.”
High Hopes
Pressed for first-year numbers, Zhu said they had almost 100 students registered, but it was hard to know how many would show up. He estimated no-shows at 30 to 40 percent.
TISA’s plans were exuberantly bullish from the start.
Its application for a charter describes dual-language immersion programs in four different languages by the school’s fifth year in operation.
The school would start by serving kindergarten through second grade and add one grade per year until it was a full K-8 school. More than 900 students were expected at full enrollment.
The application named three model schools—East Point Academy in Columbia, South Carolina, and East Voyager Academy and Elbert Edwin Waddell High School, which are both in Charlotte. But only the latter offers multiple languages, and it is a magnet school within the public school district, rather than an independent charter.
Above: In mid-November, a for-sale sign stood on the property that housed TISA. Right: Parent Dulce Garcia was sad to see the school close. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)
Mike Lally, the head of school at East Point, said in an interview that the prospect of running a school offering multiple languages was “scary.” “It’s difficult enough with HR and personnel to do Mandarin immersion,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine trying to manage that with multiple languages.”
The candidate pool for language-immersion teachers is small and would be smaller still if fluency in multiple languages was required, Lally said. On top of that, there is often extra administrative work related to immigration for those teachers.
Renee Mathews, the CEO and principal of East Voyager, was the founding principal of East Point and said the two schools had very different growth trajectories. The South Carolina school grew quickly, she said, because there was little competition at the time. The Charlotte charter school, facing more competition, has grown steadily, but much more slowly. It offers Spanish in addition to Mandarin, but only introductory classes that are limited to middle schoolers.
Li worked at both East Point and East Voyager, but consulted neither Matthews nor Lally as she prepared to open TISA, they said. Neither did Zhu, who was on the committee that helped to open East Voyager. One member of East Voyager’s board of directors was on TISA’s board for a time, but he declined an interview through Mathews.
In their charter application, TISA leaders cited the success of the charter school movement in the state as one reason to think their enrollment projection was sound. “While some may view this as a concern for too much competition, TISA’s case is different,” the application said. “If approved to open, TISA will be the only public school in Greensboro offering multilanguage immersion programs in Chinese, Japanese, French, German, and/or Spanish under the same roof. … TISA’s program is unique, innovative, and difficult to replicate. Therefore, competition should not be a concern in TISA’s case.” They indicated their break-even number was 138.
After school leaders couldn’t find acceptable property in Greensboro, they shifted their sights to High Point. The former church they settled on required a special use permit, which meant school leaders had to plead their case before the city council.
What city leaders most wanted to know during the March hearing was how many students TISA was expecting.
“We just want to build a very small school,” Zhu told them. “Because that’s always my dream. At a small school, teachers get to know everybody, give them individualized care, and particularly help them to learn the language.”
High Point’s planning staff recommended that the special use permit restrict the school’s enrollment to 250. TISA was arguing for up to 390 students, with a plan to have students arrive on a staggered basis each day to minimize traffic.
Minutes from a TISA board meeting three days earlier indicate the school had sent out acceptance notices to 76 families. Enrollment wasn’t meeting expectations, Li told the board. She noted that another new charter school, Liberty Charter, was also opening in High Point.
‘Came Out of Nowhere’
The families with children enrolled at TISA learned about the Charter School Review Board’s vote to revoke the school’s charter the following evening, on October 7.
“Please know that our staff and leadership team are fully committed to ensuring a smooth, supportive transition for every student and family in the coming months,” Li, the principal, wrote in the email, which said the school would close at the end of December.
Garcia was shocked. To her, the information “came out of nowhere.”
She had no idea that board members were discussing a shortfall of $58 million in September or that state charter school regulators had advised against TISA’s management structure.
A deeper look at public records tied to the school might have prompted additional questions about ethics and finances. TISA Board Chair Zhu is also a partner in LinguaVista, the for-profit company that owns the school’s property and holds its management contract. Additionally, he is president of TISA Child Care Center, a for-profit company with a contract to run the on-site preschool.
TISA said in its 2023 charter application that it “does not foresee any existing relationships that could pose actual or perceived conflicts if the application is approved.” Zhu was identified as the board chair, and Li was identified as the likely principal candidate. It made no mention of the fact that they are married.
North Carolina law allows charter schools to hire relatives of board members as long as the conflict is disclosed, and TISA’s board meeting minutes indicate that Li and Zhu left the room for certain discussions due to a conflict of interest.
But theminutes and a financial journal shared with some board members in February also show Zhu had deep involvement in managing the school’s finances—including scheduling $40,000 in payments to Jun-Chao Consulting, a company registered to his wife, for “supporting in planning year” and “writing charter.”
The board had also experienced high turnover. The only members named in the application that were still involved by late 2024 were Zhu and Hua Qin, who is described in the application as a certified public accountant. Records from the CPA oversight boards in North Carolina and South Carolina list no one by that name. (The Assembly tried to reach a Forsyth County resident by that name, but did not receive a reply.)
It’s not clear from the minutes how seriously the board considered contracting with companies unconnected to Zhu. Neither Li nor Zhu provided copies of full board packets and contracts in response to multiple requests from The Assembly. Li declined an interview; in response to detailed questions, Zhu provided a written statement that said TISA complied with all state disclosure requirements and followed the conflict-of-interest policy its board approved. Other board members either declined to speak with The Assembly or did not respond.
“Without subpoena powers, it is very difficult to figure out what is going on financially” at a charter school, particularly one with a for-profit management company, said Tom Kelley, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about charter schools and nonprofit law. While there are federal and state legal doctrines intended to prevent self-dealing, investigations are rare, he said.
The second email Garcia received about TISA’s closure really shocked her. That email, sent about 24 hours after the first, retracted many of Li’s previous assurances that school would continue as normal through the end of the year.
“Effective immediately,” there would be no more breakfast or lunch service, no transportation, and no before- or after-school care.
Garcia attended an emergency board meeting the following evening. Parents gathered in the school cafeteria to encourage the board to appeal.
Lisa Noda, an attorney who drove her children from Davidson County to attend TISA, went first. She told the board that her second-grade daughter, who has dyslexia, now loves to go to school and wants to read. Her younger daughter, who is in the preschool program and advanced academically, is also happy at TISA, Noda said. “Please consider appealing and allow students to finish.”October 15 was students’ last day at TISA. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)
Breanne Kraft said the teachers were so patient as her daughter, who has autism, processed her father leaving the family. “She does not want to leave. It hurts her and it hurts me,” Kraft said. “We both cried.”
Cailey Oates said, “To us, TISA is more than a school, it is a community.”
When it was her turn to speak, Garcia suggested things she could personally do to try to boost enrollment. She could hand out flyers and spread the word among Spanish speakers.
But Zhu told the parents that he did not see much of a chance to reverse the Charter School Review Board’s decision. “We told them everything, but it did not change their mind,” he said. “I am the saddest person. I sold my house to build the school.” (County records indicate the house listed on the school’s charter application is still owned by Zhu and Li.)
After a half-hour closed session, the board voted unanimously not to appeal.
The following week, the board held another meeting, voting unanimously to relinquish the charter. TISA would not keep operating through December as state regulators allowed; instead, October 15 would be students’ last day.
Left in the Lurch
Amanda Cook, a former public school teacher who served on the High Point City Council, immediately started to coordinate a meeting to help the families left in the lurch.
“I felt like with the number of kindergarteners that they had, there were a lot of families that had never been part of the school system before, so they hadn’t been through the process,” said Cook, who has since been appointed to the state House to replace Rep. Cecil Brockman.
On the day TISA closed, Guilford County Schools held an event at one of the district’s two Spanish-immersion schools, Kirkman Park Elementary School, to introduce parents to other local options.
Teachers and other staff were available to translate, Cook said. The district also brought people to answer questions about transportation, enrollment, exceptional children’s services, and English language support. As of mid-November, 18 former TISA students have enrolled in district schools, a spokesperson for Guilford County Schools said.
Garcia learned at the open house that she could send Aracely to Northwood Elementary School, where a weekly Chinese class was offered. There was also a spot for her son and room for both children in the afterschool program. She enrolled them the next day, but Garcia was still out of work for the better part of a week.
Aracely Lopez Garcia flourished at TISA, her mother said. She credited her swift academic progress and close friendships to TISA’s small class sizes. (Carolyn de Berry for The Assembly)
Noda lost much more work time getting her daughters resettled. She felt that Davidson County schools did not have the resources to do right by her daughter with autism and dyslexia, so she looked into private options.
“My older child was out of school for a month where we were trying to find something, and she did trials at different schools that did not accept her because of the needs that she has,” Noda said.
She ultimately enrolled her older daughter at another school in High Point, The Piedmont School, which serves children with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, and received some state funds toward the private school’s tuition. Her younger daughter now attends a private pre-K program.
Zhu and Li received a bill from the state the same day the board voted to relinquish the charter. TISA had received state funding based on its projected enrollment; charter schools that end up enrolling fewer students have to give a proportional amount of money back. TISA now owes the state $112,789.
LinguaVista, the for-profit company that owns the school property, is facing legal action for another apparently unpaid bill. In late November, Dobbins Electric Company Inc. filed a claim of lien against the school property, asserting that it’s owed $68,351.86.
In mid-December, after repeatedly reminding Li that the school is obliged to disclose public records, The Assembly received an email from the address tisabankruptcyperiod@tisanc.org. The email, signed “TISA Board of Trustees,” said the board was “in transition and in the process of retaining bankruptcy counsel.” No public records requests would be fulfilled in the meantime.
Carli Brosseau is a K-12 education reporter for The Assembly. She previously worked at The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter and a ProPublicaLocal Reporting Network fellow.
Andy Spears, veteran journalist based in Tennessee, writes about “reformers” plan to undermine and disrupt public schools in Indianapolis.
Indianapolis appears to be the latest front in the ongoing battle to “disrupt” public education so much that it doesn’t exist anymore.
WFYI reports on a new governing body created to “bridge” the provision of services between Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and the city’s charter school sector.
In an 8-1 decision Wednesday evening, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance recommended establishing the nine-member corporation. If approved by state lawmakers, this new agency called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, would act as a logistical bridge between the district and charter schools, managing unified busing, enrollment, and facility use.
While the IPS School Board will remain intact, the new agency will have significant authority to manage interactions between the Board and charter schools.
Some see this as the beginning of creating an unaccountable agency to further advance school privatization in the district.
During public comment, many spoke out against taking any power away from the IPS Board. Some suggested the board should oversee the transportation needs of charter schools. And others painted the ILEA members’ process as undemocratic.
WFYI explains how charter schools work in Indiana:
Charter schools are tuition-free public schools managed privately by nonprofit boards rather than elected officials. These boards operate under contracts granted by one of several authorizers in the state.
A parent representative on the group that reviewed proposals and recommended the new governing agency expressed skepticism:
The recommendation also drew sharp criticism for lacking specifics. Tina Ahlgren, the appointee representing district-managed school parents, cast the sole vote against it.
“I find my biggest reason to vote no is the level of ambiguity in the plan,” Ahlgren said. “I find these recommendations falling into this bizarre zone of simultaneously feeling both too much and not enough, bold in some areas but overly timid in others, with vague promises that the ecosystem will sort itself out.”
The proposal must now be approved by the Indiana General Assembly.
The Indianapolis move comes at a time when national forces are seeking full privatization of public schools, with some in the Trump Administration’s education leadership suggesting public education should all but end within 5-6 years.
In states like Tennessee, advocacy groups are launching efforts to disrupt public education so much it is effectively a thing of the past.
·And, Indiana is not without its own challenges in maintaining a functioning system of public schools alongside a range of private options.
Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Programallows families to use state dollars that would have followed their child to a traditional public school to instead pay for a private, parochial or nonreligious school.
The state releases this report annually, and for the 2024-25 school year, it showed that the state spent around $497 million on the program, which is an increase of just over $58 million from the previous school year.
Just a few years ago – in 2017 – the Indiana school voucher scheme cost the state $54 million. Now, the year-over-year increase in voucher expenses exceeds what the entire program cost just 8 years ago.
Garry Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, understands the war on public education. He knows that privatization is meant to diminish public education. He knows that it is sold by its propagandists as a way to help the neediest students. He knows this is a lie intended to fool people. He knows that the children who are hurt most by the war on public education are the most vulnerable students.
You might rightly conclude that the war on public education is a clever hoax.
Rayno writes:
“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”
The quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but is also similar to words from British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.
What better measure of treating the most vulnerable than the public education system open to all, not just those with the resources to send their children to private or religious schools.
Public education is often called the great equalizer providing the same learning opportunities to a community’s poorest children to the richest in stark contrast with today’s political climate driven by culture wars and fear of diversity, equality and inclusion.
Public education has provided an educated citizenry for businesses, government and political decision making for several hundred years.
Public education is the embodiment of “the public good,” as it provides a foundation for a well-lived life that is both rewarding and useful to others.
But for the last few decades there has been a war on public education driven by propaganda, ideology and greed.
While the war has intensified in the last decade, it began with the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 declaring racial segregation in public schools a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The decision overturned the court’s earlier Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which established the separate-but-equal provision for public education.
The Brown decision required the desegregation of public schools sending a tidal wave through the south reaching north to Boston.
The southern oligarchs who never really believed the South lost the Civil War soon colluded with others like them to develop a system to bypass their obligation to pay to educate black kids. Instead they established “segregation academies” where their children could learn in a homogeneous setting.
The system was created with the help of libertarian economist James Buchanan who touted the belief that the most efficient government is one run by the wealthy and educated (the oligarchs) because the regular folks are driven by self interest which makes government inefficient, and most importantly, costly through higher taxes.
This philosophy continues today as libertarians and other far right ideologues want to privatize public education because it takes too much of their money in taxes, and a humanities-based public education induces children to develop beliefs different from their parents, which once was the norm for American families.
It is not by happenstance we see parental bills of rights, opt outs, open enrollment and greater and greater restrictions on what may be taught, along with increased administrative work loads piled onto public education by politicians in Concord as they double down on refusing to do the one simple thing the state Supreme Court told them to do 30 years ago, provide each child with an adequate education and pay for it.
Instead they have pushed a voucher system costing state taxpayers well over $100 million this biennium, with 90 percent of it paying for private and religious school tuition and homeschooling for kids who were not in public schools when their parents applied for grants if they ever were in public schools.
Most of the voucher system expansion occurred under the Chris Sununu administration with his back-room-deal appointed Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.
Edelblut nearly beat Sununu in the 2016 Republican primary for governor for those with short memories.
Sununu sent his children to private schools while he was governor and Edelblut homeschooled his children.
Public education during the eight years of the Sununu administration was not a priority although 90 percent of the state’s children attend public schools.
And it is not coincidence that after the Republican House resurrected House Bill 675 which would impose a statewide school budget cap, that Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s small DOGE team — led by two “successful businessmen” — issued its long awaited report and one category targeted schools following the legislature’s Free State agenda of greater transparency and efficiencies, seeking Medicaid and insurance reimbursements and reforming school audit requirements.
HB 675 failed to find enough support last session because it violates the once sacred “local control ideal” often touted for local government.
House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, issued a press release linking the report and the bill.
“HB 675 applies the findings of the report where they matter most. When dollars are committed and taxpayers are on the hook, HB 675 puts power back into the hands of the voter by requiring a higher threshold of consent,” he said.
Yes a higher threshold which means the will of the majority is nullified by a minority.
State lawmakers fail to acknowledge they provide the least state aid to public education of any state in the country. Instead local property taxpayers pay 70 percent of public education costs and should be able to set their school budget and various other realms usurped by state lawmakers without a “higher threshold of consent.”
The battlefield in the war on public education shifts over time. It began with religious and political ideology; moved into gender and sexual identification; parental rights, including who decides whether school materials and books are appropriate; school choice such as open enrollment, which will exacerbate the already great divide between property poor and wealthy school districts; and is now positioned to impact the most vulnerable of public school children, those with disabilities.
Last week special education administrators gathered for their annual meeting and to celebrate 50 years of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to improve access to education and to integrate classrooms to include those with disabilities.
Today’s special education services and supports are lights overcoming the darkness of institutionalization or stay-at-home kids separated from their peers in public schools.
Many children with disabilities were told to stay home and not to attend school as there were no specialized services or therapies for them.
But services are expensive as federal lawmakers knew they would be, promising to pay 40 percent of the cost, but reneging on that promise and paying only about 13 percent.
In New Hampshire, most of the remainder is paid by local property taxpayers.
The state pays little until a student’s costs reach three-and-a-half times the state’s per-pupil average or about $70,000.
But state lawmakers have also failed to live up to their obligation to pay their state of the catastrophic costs, so local school districts are reimbursed at less than 100 percent.
Last session lawmakers approved an 80 percent threshold as the low end of the reimbursement scale.
Special education costs are difficult to predict and a budget can be blown quickly if a couple students needing costly special education services move into a district.
The federal government is potentially moving the Office of Special Education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services which local special education administrators said would change the goal from education to a health model which would imply there is a remedy or an illness.
And they said it is the first step back down the road they began traveling 50 years ago when students with disabilities were institutionalized or warehoused in one facility.
Several bills to come before the legislature this session will explore going back to centralized facilities to provide services and supports and explore if the private sector can better provide the services, which is consistent with the libertarian ideal of private education.
Great strides have been made in the last 50 years allowing people with disabilities to lead productive and rewarding lives independently, but that could change as lawmakers focus on costs and greater efficiencies, and the political climate seeks a homogenous environment without minorities, disabilities or vulnerable people.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.
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