A reader who calls himself “Gitapik” shares his experience with the introduction of new technology into the special education programs for which he was responsible in New York City public schools.
He wrote:
As a former tech guy for our five District 75 special education sites in Brooklyn, I had quite a ride on this tech roller coaster. I was in on it from the beginning.
I applied for and received multiple very large state grants in technology. Once the money was received, I would choose, order, and facilitate installation of what technology went where in all the sites. From classroom computers, iPads, laptops, Attainment Stations, and Smartboards to full scale labs. It was a very big undertaking.
This also included conducting professional development classes and individual training session sessions…very often to an unappreciative audience.
My sales pitch was always the same: this is a wonderful tool for you to incorporate into your standard every day teaching methods. You can turn it on and off in order to create interest and spur on new ideas. I would even give examples of how I, a teacher, would do a class, using the different devices.
This would’ve been all well and good if it hadn’t been so naïve on my part. I witnessed firsthand how the technology went from being a tool for the teacher to the teacher being the tool of the technology. Might sound like a catchy phrase, but looking back on it I can’t help but see it for what it was. A planned takeover of the school systems.
I could go into specifics, but this is getting pretty lengthy as it is.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City recently endorsed the use of AI in the classroom. He said he had met with top officials who had assured him that teachers and administrators would have a voice in how the technology would be applied. I would like to have his ear, knowing what I know. It’s the same sales pitch as was given to me. They just want to get their foot in the door
Yesterday, I posted Peter Greene’s post about the voucher battle in Nebraska. Republicans in the state legislature really want vouchers. Voters really don’t want vouchers. I no as recent referendum, Nebraska voters overturned the state’s voucher program. That shoukd have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t. The Republican Governor and legislature decided to ignore the voters and participate in Trump’s voucher plan.
But then Peter discovered the battle was not over.
As we noted last week, some Nebraska fans of taxpayer-funded vouchers tried–again–to get enact vouchers, this time through the sneaky technique of putting them in the budget. Instead of getting their vouchers, they raised a controversy that sank the entire budget.
State Sen. Rob Clements of Elmwood, Appropriations Committee chair, removed the $3.5 million of voucher money, meant to bridg the gap between the end of the state’s voucher program that was repealed by voters, and the beginning of the federal voucher system that Governor Pillen opted into (the voters get no say on that one). And lots of people were upset, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner.
Arguments for the voucher money were baloney. Sen. Christy Armendariz of Omaha argued that the vouchers were needed to protect poor kids who might be “kicked out” of public school. State Sen. Brad von Gillern of the Elkhorn area expressed frustration toward opponents, calling it hypocritical to oppose the measure when many of the same senators argue the state isn’t doing enough to help the poor.
“Shame on you,” von Gillern said. “If you make a pitch for poor people for any other reason, and you can’t support this, you’re a hypocrite.”
Except that vouchers are used mostly by wealthy, already-in-private-school students, and it’s the private schools that get to pick their students, not vice versa. It is telling that the voucher crowd did not have anecdotes of poor children who had been kicked out of public school and had been rescued by vouchers. The program ran all this year, so those stories, if real, should have been easy enough to locate.
Sen. Myron Dorn of Adams, the only Republican on Appropriations to oppose the $3.5 million in vouchers, criticized focus on this one issue, and also criticized the whole sneaky business of trying to slip this policy into the budget when there is no bill or law behind it.
Said Tim Royers, president of Nebraska State Education Association–
This standoff is exactly why you don’t try and pass policy through the budget, especially when that policy is to extend an incredibly unpopular program that was repealed by voters in the most recent election. … We hope enough can come together and negotiate a path forward that keeps vouchers out of the budget.
So Nebraska voucherphiles managed to sink the state budget over a program that voters had already voted down. That’s a bold stance to take and one can hope that Nebraska voters will deliver the reward they so richly deserve. It’s yet another reminder, in a backhand way, that no matter how hard voucherphiles insist to the contrary, supporting taxpayer-funded school vouchers is not actually a winning political issue.
Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.
Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.
In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.
But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.
Peter Greene writes:
Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.
In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.
The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.
And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.
At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.
It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.
Well, no.
Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.
But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”
In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.
Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”
Fat chance.
Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.
Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.
Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).
“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”
The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.
Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).
This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.
Audrey Watters is one of the best–maybe the very best–writers about Ed-tech. As she has documented in her writings, including her book, Teaching Machines, the quest for a cheap and mechanical way to replace teachers with efficient devices has a long history. A few people dream of endless profits, but the promise of better teaching by machines has never been realized.
This morning I attended one of the new NYC Chancellor’s public “conversations,” his administration’s initiative to “engage directly with communities to reflect on what safety, academic rigor, and true integration look like in practice.” There were about one hundred folks in attendance, including members of the AI Moratorium for NYC schools, who were there to leaflet beforehand (and were vastly outnumbered, I should note, by the NYPD).
As the aforementioned name suggests, this coalition of local organizations is asking for a two-year moratorium on AI in the city’s schools, pointing to the growing opposition to AI and (in their words) “to evidence that it represents substantial risk to student privacy, cognitive development and skills, critical thinking, creativity, mental health, and the environment.” I’d add that it represents substantial risk more broadly: to labor (teachers’, librarians’, translators’, social workers’) and to democracy itself.
And really, what’s the rush?! I mean, other than the desperate need of the tech sector to prove that the trillions of dollars invested in this endeavor will soon show some profit and that – unlike crypto and Web 3.0 – this isn’t just some giant fraud being perpetrated so executives can buy more private islands.
I’ve said repeatedly (but didn’t articulate into any open mic at the meeting because I still very much feel like a new New Yorker), this recent push for “AI” is yet another grandiose and grotesque experiment on children – one that no one asked for and few want. Another grandiose and grotesque experiment on all of us.
We have lived through decades and decades now of repeated digital promises — we’ll be better, faster, stronger, more connected, what have you — and none of the computational fantasies have really come to fruition, certainly not for everyone. We are not more productive (despite now being asked to work so much more, clicking away on our devices at all hours of every day); we are not smarter; and most importantly, we are not better. (A tiny group of men are, on the other hand, now richer than any other humans have ever been in all of history. So there’s that.) Our public institutions are crumbling, in no small part because these men are fully and openly committed to the failure of democracy, having positioned themselves to profit mightily from years of neoliberalism. “AI” marks the further (and they hope, final) consolidation of their power – not just the privatization and monopolization of all information under their control, but the automation of the dissemination and replication of knowledge. These men are more than happy to sell a story, a system that trains all of us, but particularly young people, to become entirely dependent on and subservient to computational machinery; they are more than happy for us to sacrifice our cognitive capabilities, our creativity, our agency, our decision-making, our morality, to solidify their crude oligarchal dreams of total efficiency, total financialization, total domination.
We should know by now that this stuff is almost entirely wretched – we do, right? I mean, at this stage, I’d be deeply embarrassed if I was out there, trying to argue that this stuff is any damn good. And yet here comes Silicon Valley and education reform, hand-in-hand once again, trying to peddle disruption and innovation and their long war on “one size fits all education,” armed with their algorithmic bullshit and billionaire board members.
It doesn’t help, I think, that there are several prominent technology journalists who keep falling for / perpetuating this stuff, who loudly insist in caps-lock-on prose that “THERE IS NO EVIDENCE!!!111” that devices are bad for children. (The irony, of course, is after they repeat this claim — and with such certainty — they turn around and point to dozens of stories of the most batshit–crazynews about the horrors of digital culture.)
And maybe part of the problem too is just that: we are so steeped in the insanity of techno-capitalism, the insanity of techno-capitalists that some folks are losing track of what aberrant behavior really is. Cory Doctorow writes a bit about this this week, offering “three more AI Psychoses” — a response, in part, to Samantha Cole’s excellent piece in 404 Media, “How to Talk to Someone Experiencing ‘AI Psychosis’.”
I wonder if it isn’t simply that “AI” delusions are ubiquitous (at this stage, I’m thinking these delusions are experienced by almost everyone, not just a tiny fraction of “AI” users); it’s that many of these delusions are unrecognizable as such because they reflect precisely the sort of sociopathy long embraced by Silicon Valley’s Ayn-Randian, libertarian set. “Here’s to the crazy ones” indeed.
[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. – David Graeber, Debt…
If plagiarism is wrong and bad and theft is wrong and bad and schools are duty-bound to help instill these values in students, how can they justify adoption of a technology that is, at its core, built on stolen work and whose purpose is the extrusion of text to be passed off as one’s own thinking and writing?
I invite you to open the link and continue reading this thought-provoking article.
The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.
The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.
The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.
The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).
The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.
Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:
Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.
A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit
The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.
SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.
[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]
Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers.
The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.
[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]
Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit
Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1
What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control
FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.
Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.
Why Oversight and Accountability Matters
Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.
Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.
Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.
Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools.
The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?
Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs.
This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.
A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education
Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.
This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.
By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.
Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded
Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections.
These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.
By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.
Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.
The Cost to Public Schools and Communities
Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.
[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]
This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.
Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more.
IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap.
We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.
The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.
When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.
Notes
The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
When I wrote a history of public schools in the 20th century (Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms), I couldn’t help but notice a consistent pattern: an infatuation with fads and panaceas, not by teachers but by pundits and education professors.
Teachers struggled with large class sizes, obsolete textbooks, and low pay, but the buzz was all too often focused on the latest magical reform. At one extreme was militaristic discipline, at the other was the romantic idea of letting children learn when they wanted and whatever they wanted to. Phonics or whole language? Interest or effort?
Every reform had some truth in it, but the extremes must have been very frustrating to teachers. There is no single method that’s just right for every child all the time.
The latest fad is Ed-tech, the belief that children will learn more and more efficiently if they spend a large part of their time on a computer.
My views were influenced by something I read in 1984. The cover story of Forbes was about “The Coming Revolution in Education.” The stories in the issue was about the promise of technology. Curiously, the magazine’s technology editor wrote a dissent. In 1984 Forbes published an article about the promise of computers in the schools. He wrote: “The computer is a tool, like a hammer or a wrench, not a philosophers’ stone. What kind of transformation will computers generate in kids? Just as likely as producing far more intelligent kids is the possibility that you will create a group of kids fixated on screens — television, videogame or computer.” He predicted that “in the end it is the poor who will be chained to the computer; the rich will get teachers.”
For the past few decades, Ed-tech has been the miracle elixir that will solve all problems..
But now, writes Jennifer Berkshire, there is a backlash against Ed-tech among parents and teachers.
They may have realized that the most fervent promoters of Ed-tech are vendors of Ed-tech products.
Stories about parents rebelling against big tech are everywhere right now. They’re sick of the screens, the hoovering up of their children’s data, and they view AI and its rapid incursion into schools as a menace, not a ‘co-pilot’ for their kids’ education. This is a positive development, in my humble opinion, especially since the backlash against the tech takeover of schools crosses partisan lines. Meanwhile, pundits and hot takers are weighing in, declaring the era of edtech, not just a failure, but the cause of our failing schools.
Which raises a not insignificant question. Now that everyone who is anyone agrees that handing schools over to Silicon Valley was big and costly mistake, how did the nation’s teachers and students end up on the receiving end of this experiment in the first place? And here is where our story grows murky, dear reader. In fact, if you’re old enough to remember the absolute mania around ‘personalized learning’ that took hold during the Obama era, count yourself as fortunate. Because lots of the same influential, not to mention handsomely compensated, folks who were churning out ‘reports’about our factory-era schools 15 minutes ago, suddenly seemed cursed by failing memories.
The not-so-wayback-machine
If you need a refresher to summon forth the 2010-era ed tech frenzy, proceed directly to Audrey Watters’ unforgettable write-up: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.” Watters’ has moved on to a new newsletter and AI refusal, but her once lonely voice as the ‘Cassandra’ of education technology remains as essential as ever. Her tally of “ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas” is studded with now tarnished silver bullets that promised to transform our factory-era schools into futuristic tech centers, making a pretty penny in the process: AltSchool, inBloom, Rocketship, Amplify, DreamBox, Summit… The names have changed or been forgotten but the throughline—a fundamental misunderstanding of schools and teaching combined with the promise of hefty returns—remains constant.
My own introduction to the ed tech hustle came back in 2015. Jeb Bush’s annual convening for his group, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, or FEE, to use its comically apt acronym, came to Boston. To which I said, ‘sign me up!’ Always an early adapter (see, for example, school vouchers in Florida), FEE was unabashedly pro technology, as I wrote in a story for the Baffler.
It’s one of FEE’s articles of faith that the solutions to our great educational dilemmas are a mere click away—if, that is, the schools and the self-interested dullards who run them would just accept the limitless possibilities of technology. Of course, these gadgets don’t come cheap. And this means that, like virtually all the other innovations touted by our postideological savants of education reform, the vision of a tech-empowered American student body calls for driving down our spending on teaching (labor costs account for the lion’s share of the $600 billion spent on public education in the United States each year) and pumping up our spending on gizmos.
In virtually every session I attended, someone would relate a story about a device that was working education miracles, followed by a familiar lament: if only the teachers, or their unions, or the education ‘blob’ would get out of the way.
False profits
In a recent piece for Fortune, reporter Sasha Rogelberg offers an interesting origin story for the tech takeover of public education. And you don’t need to read past the title to get where she’s going: ‘American schools weren’t broken until Silicon Valley used a lie to convince them they were—now reading and math scores are plummeting.’ I’d make the header even clunkier and add ‘the education reform industry’ to the mix. While the push to get tech into classrooms predates Obama-era education reform (check out Watters’ fantastic history of personalized learning, Teaching Machines, for the extended play version), it was the reformers’ zeal, when married to Silicon Valley’s profit optimization, would prove so irresistible.
In the last hundred years, the base of the United States economy has shifted from industry to knowledge—but the average American classroom operates in much the same way it always has: one teacher, up to thirty same-age students, four walls. This report from StudentsFirst argues that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cut it in the modern world, in which mastery of higher-order knowledge and skills ought to matter more than time spent in front of a teacher—and that what we need is competency-based education. This approach, also known as the “personalized model,” is characterized by advancing students through school based on what they know and can do, using assessments to give them timely, differentiated support, made easier by the introduction of learning technology.
StudentsFirst, the hard-charging school reform org started by Michelle Rhee, has since been eaten by 50CAN, which now advocates for school vouchers, but the fare they offered up was standard. Indeed, here’s a fun activity for you. Revisit any prominent reform group, individual, or cause and you will find the same argument about our factory-era schools, followed, inevitably, by the same sales pitch for a tech-centric solution.
Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education reform initiative, didn’t just bribe cash-strapped states to overhaul their teacher evaluation systems. It also ‘encouraged’ states to shift their standardized tests online. And Arne Duncan and Obama’s Department of Education actively courted the tech industry, encouraging them to think of schools as a space ripe for disruption. “Many of today’s young people will be working at jobs that don’t currently exist,” warned the XQ Institute, the reform org started by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Today Powell Jobs presides over the Atlantic, where new panic pieces regarding young, tech addled dumb dumbs appear seemingly every day.
Warning signs
My obsessive interest in the intersection of education and politics began back in 2012, when my adopted home state of Massachusetts came down with a serious—and well-funded—case of education reform fever. At a time when red states were crushing the collective bargaining rights of teachers (Wisconsin, anyone?), I was struck by how often reform-minded Democrats ended up repurposing the right’s anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public-school rhetoric for their own righteous cause. Ed tech sat right smack in the center of this queasy juncture—beloved by liberal reformers, ensorcelled by press releases promising higher test scores, and conservatives who liked the idea of spending less on schools by replacing teachers with machines.
Recall, if you will, Rocketship charter schools, whose innovative blended learning model caused the test scores of its students—almost all poor and minority—to go up like a rocket. Richard Whitmire’s fawning 2013 book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope, is a veritable time capsule of the era. Unlike the fusty Model-T schools of yore, Rocketship schools were tech forward. Students spent a chunk of each day in so-called Learning Labs, taking, retaking or practicing taking tests, a practice that had a measurable impact, especially since 50 percent of teachers’ pay was tied to test scores ascending. All that clicking also translated into dollar signs, wrote Whitmire. “A major cost-saving solution was for students to spend significant time working on laptops in large groups supervised by noncertified, lower-paid “instructional lab specialists.”
Rocketship has since fallen back to earth, in part because of stellar reporting like this from Anya Kamenetz, documenting the chain’s less savory practices. But it’s hard to overstate just how excited the reform world was about this stuff. Next time you hear an edu-pundit bemoaning the take over of kindergarten classrooms by big tech, remember that Rocketship got there first. “[K]indergarten teachers are spending less time making letter sounds,” co-founder Preston Smith told Kamenetz. And reformers couldn’t get enough.
Whodunit?
Investigative reporter Amy Littlefield has an intriguing-sounding new book out in which she uses the model of an Agatha Christie novel to suss out who killed abortion rights in the US. I imagine that taking a similar approach to the question of how big tech conquered public education would end up in Murder on the Orient Express territory. That’s the classic Christie whodunit in which everyone on the train ends up having ‘dunit.’ These days, there is a comical effort underway by reformers to distance themselves from the tech takeover—what train? I’ve never been on a train! But the idea that Silicon Valley had the cure for all that ailed the nation’s public schools was absolutely central to Obama-era education reform.
I’d locate the zenith of the reform/tech love affair in 2017 when New Schools Venture Fund, a reform org that funds all of the other orgs, laid down a challenge, or rather, a big bet. At its annual summit, backed by a who’s who of tech funders—Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton, NSVF called for big philanthropy to bet big on tech-based personalized learning. “The world has changed dramatically … and our schools have struggled to keep up,” then CEO Stacey Childress warned the crowd. But not all the news was bad. Going all in on education innovation would also pay off handsomely, claimed NSVF, producing an estimated 200 to 500 percent return on investment. And lest parents, teachers and students failed to adequately appreciate the various reimaginings they were in for, NSVF had an answer for that too: a $200 million ad campaign to “foster understanding and demand.”
As I was preparing to type a sentence about how poorly NSVF’s “Big Bet on the Future of American Education” has aged, a press release popped up in my inbox, announcing that Netflix founder Reed Hastings is joining forces with Democrats for Education Reform or DFER. “Just as Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive, Hastings believes public education can make the same leap.”
AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it. The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before.
Of course, transforming “a school system in desperate need of reinvention” the way that Hastings reinvented home entertainment will require “governance innovation and political will.” No doubt an ad campaign is in the works too. And convincing education ‘consumers’ that individualized software = school is going to be a tough sell as the Great Big Tech Backlash accelerates.
The “Mississippi Miracle” seems to be too good to be true. The scores of Mississippi fourth-graders have risen sharply on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Supporters of the Miracle attribute the dramatic increase to the state’s adoption of the “science of reading” curriculum, teacher training in the “science of reading,” and holding back third-grade students who aren’t reading well enough.
This formula is especially appealing to Republicans because nothing need be done to reduce the children’s poverty or improve their living conditions. Conservative states have hailed the “Mississippi Miracle” because it relieves them of any responsibility to create jobs or change the conditions in which the poor live. It’s a low-cost cure: Just raise reading scores and prosperity will follow.
The story of the Mississippi Miracle also appeals to blue states because they are convinced there is a quick and easy way to end the perennial “reading crisis.” So they too have passed legislation to require all reading teachers to adopt the “science of reading.”
Critics of the “Miracle” say that the practice of holding back low-performing third-graders artificially inflates the fourth grade scores. They also point to eighth grade scores to say that there was no miracle. Eighth grade scores are more important that fourth grade scores because they show longer-term effects of reading instruction.
He begins a recent post with a quote from scholar Bruce Baker:
On NAEP Grade 8 Scores: “a better indicator of the cumulative effects of a system on student learning than 4th grade assessments.” Bruce Baker, February 11, 2026
He writes:
The media, political leaders, and education reformers are making a mistake about reading reform well explained in the parable of the blind men and the elephant.
In this case, many are rushing to make over-stated claims about reading reform in Mississippi by hyper-focusing on limited and distorted data—grade 4 NAEP scores on reading.
First, research details that states implementing reading reform have achieved some short-term test score increases in grade 4; however, those gains disappear by grade 8. And more damning, the determining factor in successful reform is exclusively grade retention policies (not teacher training, reading programs, direct instruction, etc.).
Next, grade retention in Mississippi has been analyzed revealing that retention distorts those scores, resulting in a statistical manipulation of the data and not higher student achievement. In short:
Yet, a new story has emerged claiming that Black students in MS are outperforming Black students in other states, notably California:
Suggesting that Black students are being better served in MS than CA is at least misleading. In fact, Black students in CA, GA, LA, MA, and notably the Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools outperform Black students in MS at grade 8.
But an even better story is that student achievement among Black and Hispanic students is very complicated, especially when you consider that states have dramatically different percentages of these populations of students.
Further, if we return to the parable from the opening, even better data at grade 8 is not the full picture.
In MS and throughout the US, Black students are still suffering the consequences of the persistent race gap in achievement (most states have the same gap as 1998, including MS).
And Black Americans remain trapped in the burden of racial inequity both in schools and in their communities.
The misleading stories about MS using grade 4 NAEP data are designed to promote a “beating the odds” story—one that isn’t true—but all students in the US would be better served if we chose not to seek those who beat the odds, but to change the odds so that no one—especially children—would have to overcome those inequities in the first place.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is holding the line on spending, except for vouchers, which h will get a big boost. About 85% of the students using vouchers never attended public schools, so Governor Sanders is handing out money to pay for students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
Poor people in Arkansas don’t get much help in the budget, but affluent families get tax cuts and vouchers to pay for private schools, religious schools, and home schools.
Arkansas lawmakers are set to convene April 8 to hash out next year’s state budget. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Sanders said she’s proposing a 3% increase, a pretty standard figure on par with recent years.
But what’s going to be funded in this mostly flat spending plan, and what’s not? At first blush, it looks like well-to-do Arkansans are the big winners, cashing in on private school vouchers and more income tax cuts.
Sanders’ proposed 2026-27 budget, presented to lawmakers by Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration Director Jim HudsonWednesday morning, includes up to $379 million for the Arkansas LEARNS vouchers that parents who opt out of traditional public schools can tap to pay private school or homeschool expenses. That’s a big increase over the $187 million budgeted for vouchers last time.
The 2025-26 school year was the first in which all students in Arkansas were eligible for these vouchers, and the price tag keeps creeping higher. Ballooning costs are pretty much a given, based on what’s happened in other states that pioneered this tricky transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to their wealthy overlords by paying fancy kids’ tony tuitions for them. Just ask Arizona and Florida.
Lawmakers have made a number of adjustments and budget increases for LEARNS after voucher costs quickly exceeded the budgeted amount. In January, a legislative committee signed off on giving another $32 million in one-time reserve funds to Arkansas’s newly universal school voucher program, bringing its total cost in the current 2025-26 school year to $309.4 million, which covers more than 44,000 students. That $309 million is the base amount proposed for 2026-27, but Sanders’ budget proposes an extra $70 million for it, just in case.
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families warned in January that vouchers are doing all the things opponents warned they would: creating new spending obligations for taxpayers to cover private school tuitions and other costs that were never on the public dime before; chipping away at public schools’ financial resilience; and generally busting budgets.
These set-aside amounts that were incorporated into the state’s school voucher fund this year, and which are being teed up to be added next year to the tune of $70 million, look a lot like a trap. Last go-round, lawmakers approved about $187 million for vouchers, but then added another $122 million to the school voucher cause in piecemeal fashion over the course of the fiscal year, to ultimately spend $309 million. Now lawmakers are looking at $309 million as the floor for voucher spending for 2026-27, and will almost certainly throw in that set-aside $70 million, too (if not more). How many hundreds of millions more are we going to add in these payouts for the well-to-do each year, in slapdash fashion? Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Dr. Mike DeGuire is a lifelong educator who served as a principal of a public school in Denver. Now retired, he has assumed an active role in fighting privatization.
The dirty little secret of the voucher movement is that most of them are claimed by well-to-do families whose children were already attending nonpublic schools. Vouchers are a subsidy for people who were already paying tuition at private schools
His post was distributed by Advocates for Public Education Policy.
A4PEP introduced his statement:
Vouchers aren’t winning because voters love them. In fact, they keep losing at the ballot box.
So what’s going on?
In a new post, A4PEP Vice-Chair Dr. Mike DeGuire points to a big driver: billionaire-funded networks that keep pushing “school choice” as a marketplace, where public dollars follow students into private (often religious) schools.
It’s not just messaging, either. These efforts are backed by think tanks, lobbying, and big political spending, and now there’s a new federal tax credit plan that could supercharge scholarship-granting organizations with even less transparency.
If you want the clearest breakdown we’ve seen of who’s behind this and what it means for public schools, read Mike’s full post:
Public education is a public promise. Let’s protect it.
Dr. Mike DeGuire wrote about why vouchers have been winning despite lack of public support.
He said:
One answer: Billionaires
Billionaires Charles Koch, Betsy Devos, Jeff Yass, William Dunn, Phillip Anschutz, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, John Arnold, and the Walton and Bradley families have led the movement for private school choice through support for both charters and vouchers for over 30 years. Their goal is to dismantle what they call the “government school system” and to change how public education is funded. They want to create a “marketplace of options” so families can use money (vouchers) from public funds to send their children to private, religious, or home schools.
The marketplace concept allows billionaires and their investors to make money through real estate, tech and service contracts, and gain significant tax benefits. For many, the goal is to support religious schools which then profit from enrollment growth.
How did billionaires get the public to go along with their privatization goals?
They used their vast resources to set up think tanks and lobbying organizations which employ hyperbolic messaging with misleading data to communicate that public schools are failing, insisting parents need resources (vouchers) to find alternative schooling options. When their voucher goals met with resistance in the 1990s, billionaires focused on spreading charter schools instead, especially in major cities. The charter movement created the false narrative that parents should leave their local public school instead of focusing on increased funding to meet changing student needs.
During Trump’s first term, and after the pandemic hit, vouchers started to reappear, especially in red states, as billionaires backed pro-voucher candidates in state legislatures and Congress to secure favorable voucher legislation. However, not a single taxpayer-funded voucher program in the United States has been approved by voters. Every state voucher program was enacted by legislators, often under heavy pressure from well-funded pro-voucher lobbying groups. Billionaires also funded groups who lobbied Congress to pass the federal tax credit voucher scheme in July that enlists all 50 states to join in the billionaire’s version of “education freedom for private school choice.”
How will they use the “historic” federal tax credit to spread more vouchers?
Taxpayers in states that opt in to the federal voucher scheme select from a list of scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) to reduce their tax liability by $1700 when they pay their 2027 taxes. Billionaires have been funding K-12 SGOs for over 25 years. They use the money raised to give scholarships for students to attend private schools. These SGOs will have billions more from individual taxpayers to use for the same purposes. Billionaire John Walton, son of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart and the richest family in the US, co-founded the nation’s two largest scholarships granting organizations, ACE Scholarships and Children’s Scholarship Fund. Most of their scholarships go to students who leave public schools to attend religious schools.
The federal voucher program includes no spending cap, and the billionaires have already tossed in over $10 million to market the program. The voucher advocates are pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of this largely unregulated voucher program.
The path forward: opt out, speak up, organize
This isn’t a grassroots uprising. It’s a long-running, well-funded project, one that keeps losing at the ballot box, so it shifts strategy: different messaging, different vehicles, same end goal. If we want truly “free” public education, we can’t let billionaires and private interests redefine freedom as a shopping spree financed by public dollars.
The path forward is clear, even if it’s not flashy. Communities can press state leaders not to opt in. Parents and educators can demand transparency from scholarship-granting organizations and insist on real accountability for any program that touches public money. And all of us can keep returning to the basic truth: the best “choice” is a fully funded, welcoming neighborhood public school, one that serves every child, not just the children a private system chooses to accept.
Public education is a public promise. We should protect it like one.
Stephen Dyer, former state legislator, follows the money. As usual, in Ohio, public money is flowing to private organizations that are neither accountable nor effective. In this post, he assays the trail of public funds collected by the Center for Christian Virtue. The Ohio Constitution could not be clearer: no money for religious schools. The Ohio legislature treats the state constitution like an outdated relic.
Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:
The Center for Christian Virtue is making quite a play in Ohio’s education policy landscape. They are using a multimillion dollar Capital Square office to run the lobbying effort to continue the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. They also are running a so-called $3.2 million Scholarship Granting Organization, which is really just a fancy way of funneling millions more of our tax dollars into unaccountable private schools.
And, potentially most harmful of all, they’re running an operation they call “school planting” where they use the unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy to kick-start “schools” inside of churches across Ohio.
They are now claiming to have done this with 15 “schools” so far, publicly naming four new ones that opened this school year and another 4 next school year. Here’s how they brag about it in their news release about this initiative:
“Through our innovative school-in-a-church model, God is expanding access to Christian education for families in every corner of the state. By leveraging existing church facilities, we help keep costs low, making it possible for more families to afford a high-quality, Christ-centered education.”
Let’s set aside the fact that having schools pop up in churches is an ancient practice and not in any way “innovative” (having American taxpayers subsidize these things is “innovative”, though).
Anyway, here’s the thing: a total of 25 kids in only 1 of these schools — Westside Preparatory, which is the shining example displayed on CCV’s education website — has ever been tested for proficiency in reading and math, with only 9 ever being deemed “proficient” in both1.
This performance reflects these kids’ scores on tests the schools gets to pick from scores of options allowed by the state.
Public schools, in contrast, do not get to pick their kids’ tests.
All taxpayers had to do for 9 private school kids to test proficient on tests the school picked was to unconstitutionally subsidize these schools by about $2 million.2
[Open the link to see the scores.]
But at least the schools’ scores are 51 percentage points worse last year than the previous year in Math. Not an awesome trend, by the way.
Quite a return, wouldn’t you say? I mean, considering that none of these kids ever attended a public school. I am deducing this because in the schools’ first year of existence, only kindergarteners and first graders are included in their enrollment counts.
And that’s it. That’s all we know about the quality of these 15 “schools.” Hence my quotation marks around the word “school”. Because what these “schools” really seem to be are money makers for CCV so it can finance the elimination of public education.
This is why I call them the new White Hat. For those who aren’t familiar with White Hat, it was the company run by David Brennan that made millions running Charter Schools in Ohio and simply flipped a small percentage of those profits into Republican campaign war chests with the goal of de-funding public schools and the teachers unions that backed Democrats.
CCV is running the same White Hat playbook — set up a bunch of bullshit shell corporations, siphon millions of public dollars from Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students, use a small percentage of that money to lobby Ohio legislators and governors (who are notoriously cheap to buy) who allow CCV to continue stealing that money from kids, then watch public school kids suffer from it all.
All in the name of Jesus — they call this a ministry even!
Because robbing money from poor kids in Columbus, Athens, Steubenville and Findlay is exactly what Christ would have done. What CCV is doing to Ohio’s public school kids is blasphemy. Pure and simple.
But get this: Because CCV’s operation involves advocating for the state to shovel money to private schools, we have no idea how much of that largesse CCV is accumulating. We do know that CCV staff is making bank — again, just as Jesus intended.
Diane Ravitch's blog 