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On Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Disappointment in the Public Schools She Chose for Her Daughter

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2026 //
4

A decade ago, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the cover story of the New York Times Magazine about her decision to send her daughter to a local public school, which was segregated and enrolled a large proportion of low-income students, instead of choosing a high-performing public school, a charter school, or an elite private school.

Last Sunday, she wrote a long story in the same magazine admitting that she was wrong ten years ago. She admitted that she and her husband had made a mistake by pressing their views on their daughter.

Their child was disappointed by the low standards and expectations, the indifferent teachers, and the general disorganization of the school her mother chose. Eventually, her daughter was allowed to choose her high school, and she picked one with high standards and academic challenges. Her elementary and middle schools were segregated Black; her high-performing high school is largely white and probably Asian.

Jones quite rightly complains about the intensification of school segregation in the decades since the federal courts abandoned their commitment to desegregated schools. She is right. The nation turned its back on school integration, in large part because whites opposed it and left cities that tried to integrate their schools. They moved to the suburbs, many or most motivated by their desire to escape school integration.

Numerous studies have documented the positive effects of racial integration, but white parents move out. They leave to avoid the kind of schools that Hannah-Jones’ daughter didn’t like, and by leaving, create many more such schools.

Of the nearly one million students in the NYC school system about 16% are white, 42% are Hispanic, 19% are Black. Almost 19% are Asian. 2% are multiracial. About 1% are Native Americans.

This is a key, unmentioned fact in Jones’ compelling article: only 16% of the students in New York City’s public schools are white. Physically and logistically, it is hard to imagine how the schools can be integrated when there is such a small proportion of whites.

She quite rightly complains about the school system’s tolerance of incompetent administrators and inferior curriculum in many of the city’s segregated Black schools. Black students like her daughter can gain acceptance into high-performing integrated schools, but there is no obvious path to integration for the very large number of schools where the student body is Black and Hispanic and impoverished.

Peter Greene wrote a thoughtful column about Jones’s article and the reactions to it. The usual public school haters loved it. They overlooked the fact that when Hannah-Jones urged her daughter to make her own choice, her only condition was that she had to choose a public school. She did and it is an excellent school.

Please read Peter’s reflections.

Categories New York City, School Choice

Why You Should Attend the NPE Conference This Weekend!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
4

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, explains why this NPE conference will be stellar.

She writes:

A community governs its public schools. Neighbors elect a board, set a budget, and decide what their children learn. That is exactly what privatization threatens, and it is what NPE’s national conference is built to defend. Over two days, September 26–27, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe near Houston, more than 40 sessions take on the fight from every angle. Here’s a taste of what’s on the schedule.

Vouchers and charters. In “Beating Vouchers in Court,” Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel will walk through recent wins in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, where voucher programs were declared unconstitutional. They will also review the live challenges in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri. In “A View from the Trenches,” two Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher offer a candid account of what universal ESA vouchers have already done to how public education is funded and governed. And a session on the federal tax-credit voucher scheme, set to launch in January 2027, lays out what advocates in opt-in and opt-out states can do right now. 

In “Taxation Without Representation — Using a Conservative Argument to Combat Charter Schools,” Gregory Walace, Alison Chaplar, Betsy Flanagan, Daniel Marcano Jr., and Jennifer Simões will show how that framing sparked a grassroots movement, moved public opinion, and helped drive proposed legislation. “What’s Next for Charter Schools? A Review of Charter Strategies Across State Lines,” Patti Everitt, Gregory Walace, Carol Burris, and Dave DeMatthews lead an interactive look at how charters keep expanding in key states with few guardrails and little public engagement, which national initiatives fund that growth, and the research and messaging advocates can share across state lines to push back.

Takeovers are where democracy gets stolen outright. Houston high schoolers will describe how they organized against the HISD takeover. Parents from Houston (CVPE) and Fort Worth (FORT) share how they are fighting to win their voice back. An Indianapolis panel will dissect the sharpest trick of all — an elected board left in place, but stripped of control over buildings, transportation, and property taxes. “The Struggle to Govern Ourselves” will confront the research showing takeovers overwhelmingly target majority-Black districts, while organizers from New Orleans share hard-won lessons from years on the front lines. And in “The People’s Board,” presenters will take on Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the corporate model quietly sidelining elected members in board after board.

Follow the money. Maurice Cunningham, Mercedes Schneider, Mike DeGuire and David Armiak teach their best techniques for tracing dark-money networks back to the billionaires and foundations bankrolling privatization in two sessions. Other sessions map the private firms profiteering off vouchers and spotlight Wisconsin’s campaign to get voucher and charter costs printed right on taxpayers’ bills. 

The money grabs keep getting more creative. Texas advocates expose SB 1882 “partnership” charters as a fast-track privatization grift. Another panel takes on corporate tax breaks — energy-hungry data centers now the worst offenders — draining billions from schools. And with 17 states cutting or capping property taxes in 2024–25, national and state experts lay out how to defend the local revenue public schools depend on.

Faith, nationalism, and the classroom. Sessions on building school–congregation partnerships and mobilizing faith leaders in hostile states sit alongside a hard look at Christian Nationalism and its playbook for defunding and reshaping public education.

The newest battlegrounds. Randi Weingarten joins experts to debate AI’s role in classrooms — cognition, privacy, mental health, and the environment. A separate panel takes on ed-tech overreach and the lawsuits challenging how it commercializes student data. And student organizers from SEAT share how they’ve carried the fight to school boards, the legislature, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The skill builder sessions are the reason you will leave with more than notes. Charles Siler, a former Goldwater Institute lobbyist who helped build the privatization playbook before turning on it, joins Manny Garcia to teach what messaging actually moves people. Rachel Coyle and Susan Spicka show how to win over hostile legislators. Others cover new-media strategy, gathering community input at scale, and getting real press traction beyond the press release. 

The keynotes anchor it all: Diane Ravitch and Texas AFT’s Zeph Capo open Saturday; Southern Education Foundation CEO Raymond Pierce speaks at lunch; investigative journalist Katherine Stewart headlines Sunday brunch; and Howard University’s Dean Emerita Leslie Fenwick closes us out.

You’ll meet the students, parents, teachers, clergy, researchers, and organizers who are actually winning in courtrooms, at statehouses, and on ballots. Privatizers have the money. We have the people, the passion and the plan. Register now here, book your room here in the hotel block, and join us in Conroe, Texas, right outside Houston.

I can’t promise that hotel rooms are still open but Carol will help you if you made a terrible mistake and forgot to sign up.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Childhood, Closing schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Parent Groups, Privatization, Religion, School Choice

Stephen Dyer: Charter Schools in Ohio Are Failing When Compared to District Schools. Does Anyone Care?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, a former legislator, keeps count. His blog is called 10th Period:

Ohio’s charter schools have underperformed for years, as compared to district public schools, but Republican legislators and state officials don’t care. Charter schools open, fail, close, and are replaced by more charter schools. Public money sustains them regardless of their poor performance.

Dyer wrote:

So if you’re paying $1.6 billion a year for an education sector whose graduates make 20% less upon graduation than public school graduates, can we really call that an option? Or is it just a waste of money. 30 years. $20 billion. And THIS is what we get in return? Outrageous.

I have now written this post in one form or another for 20 years.

Ohio Charter Schools get smoked on state report cards by Ohio School Districts.

I know, Charter School honks, you only want your performance to be compared with the Big 8 urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. 

See, here’s the problem: 53% of the kids in Ohio charter schools come from those 8 districts. 

That means 47% do not.

You can’t take $1.5 billion in state aid from kids attending all but a handful of school districts and then demand your performance be compared with 8 of those 607 districts — the 8 that are typically among the state’s lowest performing¹.

Here’s what this piss-poor Charter School performance looks like in charts:

The second chart kind of says it all. 

Even though Charters received less than 1 in 4 of all the stars given, they received 2 out of every 3 1 Stars (F), all of the 1.5 Stars (D-) and about 2 out of every 3 2.5 Stars (C-).

Meanwhile, districts outperformed their overall grade share in every A, B and C category. Just a horrific performance by Charter Schools, considering they’ve had 30 years, $20 billion, just a fraction of the government oversight and incredible legislative and gubernatorial protection to achieve these gawd awful results.

In only 3 categories are more than 40% of Charter School grades C or higher: Overall (53%), Gap Closing (52.2%) and Progress (79%). 

On the District side, the only categories where less than 86% of their grades are C or higher are Early Literacy (66%) and Progress (58%). That’s right. In all categories, the vast majority of School District grades are C or higher. 

Take it easy, Charter Honk. 

Just because Charters do better on the Progress rating² does not mean they’re better schools. Why can I say that with confidence? 

Because Charters do so fantastically worse on the 6 other measures, including a stunning 58% 1 Star ratings on College, Career, Work and Military Readiness!

That CCWMR rating seems to be keeping in line with my post from this morning outlining how Charter School graduates make 20% less over their lifetimes than traditional public school graduates, which costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Look, guys. All I can do is keep pointing all this out and hope that elected officials in Columbus stop drinking the Charter School Kool-Aid at some point.

To recap, here’s all we’ve found out over the last couple weeks about these things:

  • They receive 2 out of every 3 of failing grades on the most recent state report card
  • More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.
  • More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.
  • About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.
  • More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.
  • They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.
  • They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.
  • They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.
  • They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).
  • They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.
  • Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.
  • That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.
  • More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.
  • More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.
  • They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.

Will any of this finally break through?

I guess we’ll find out in a couple months.

1.

I also don’t compare public school building performance with charters because the money for charters comes out of the same money pot meant for kids in districts. So the money comes out of the state aid to every building in a district — the lowest-performing and highest-performing ones. That’s why I’ve always only compared performance between districts and charters. Because if charters are going to be a worthwhile public policy endeavor, then they have to be worth taking state money away from kids in the state’s highest-performing buildings, not just the ones in the lowest-performing ones. I would argue that taking any state money from any public school kids, regardless of report card rating, to fund charters and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies is public policy disaster. But that’s another argument for another day. 

2.

About 43% of school district grades that are C or higher are Cs. Nearly 1/2 of all charter grades that are C or higher in Progress are Cs.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice

Inside the Collapse of a “Montessori Ponzi” Scheme

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
6

In the new world of school choice, parents have to be savvy shoppers. Opening up K-12 education to all comers, regardless of their background or qualifications, is a risky business. And when the “business” of school is run for profit, parents should beware. They and their children are usually pigeons, drawn in to fatten the founders’ bank account.

Claire Suddath of The New York Times dug deep into the story of a chain that expanded too quickly and became “a $440 million fiasco.”

I attach a gift article so you can read the story in full. It is not behind a paywall.

Suddath wrote:

A man with a vision set out to revolutionize preschool. It became a $440 million fiasco.

Ten years ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn had a vision. He wanted to bring high-quality, child-led education to as many babies and toddlers as possible, with a chain of for-profit schools that would grow at the pace of a tech start-up. He spoke about doing for preschools “what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved,” and he raised $335 million from investors, including venture capital and private equity firms, to make it happen.

For a while, Mr. Girn’s schools, which operated under the brand Guidepost Montessori, appeared to be successful, with 150 locations that served tens of thousands of children. But they also ran up an astonishing $440 million in losses. The parent company, Higher Ground Education, filed for bankruptcy in June 2025 and shuttered about 60 schools.

In Oregon, parents received an email notification on a Sunday afternoon that their school effectively no longer existed. In Wisconsin, a father went to drop off his 5-month-old son at a Guidepost only to find it had closed. In California, a mother learned that her children’s Guidepost had been sold and that its Montessori curriculum would be replaced with artificial intelligence. Guidepost teachers and parents lit up Facebook and Reddit groups with horror stories — allegations of neglect and mistreatment that made a lot more sense now that everyone knew how mismanaged the company had been.

For-profit education ventures are notorious for disappointing investors and leaving parents fuming. But even in this context, the Guidepost story is striking. “Schools close sometimes, but usually not this many, and not all at once,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

What could have caused such a collapse? More than two dozen former teachers, administrators and corporate employees told me that they were deeply concerned by the company’s business model. Seven independently described it as a pyramid scheme. “We were calling it the Montessori Ponzi scheme internally,” said Alex Richardson, a teacher at Guidepost’s first school, in Orange County, Calif.

When Higher Ground opened new Guidepost schools, it often received large advances from landlords to improve their properties. As long as the company kept expanding, it seemed from the outside as if it were thriving. But when it came time to repay the landlords, and growth was no longer an option, the company collapsed. By the end, some Guidepost locations were losing $50,000 a month.

Mr. Girn is still active in the education industry. Last year, he and his wife, Rebecca Girn — the other founder of Higher Ground and its general counsel — welcomed me at a converted ranch-style house outside Austin, Texas, where they’ve already opened another school, called Fulcrum. Their three children are among the students…

Guidepost was not the first school chain that Mr. Girn had run at an unsustainable pace. Back in 2003, when Mr. Girn, a Canadian native, was a psychology and philosophy student at the University of Toronto, a friend suggested he come work at a school in Orange County called LePort Montessori. It was founded by a wealthy bariatric surgeon, Peter LePort, who sat on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute. Mr. Girn had no formal training in education, but he ran a Rand-focused club on campus. That was enough for Mr. LePort, who hired him to help start a new elementary school.

Mr. Girn became devoted to the Montessori method, which encourages children to direct their own lessons, with teachers as guides. “It’s as close to perfect as human education has ever gotten,” he once said at an Ayn Rand Institute conference. Traditional schools stifled children’s innate love of learning, he thought, and day care programs could be especially oppressive. “They’re literally putting the child behind bars, moving them from rocker to high chair to container,” he said. Montessori could free them.

In 2009, Mr. Girn became the chief executive of LePort. He envisioned turning the company into a national chain (“We had the opportunity to become the child care provider for SpaceX,” he said). But he was more focused on growth than Mr. LePort was comfortable with. In 2016, Mr. Girn was fired.

He resolved to try again, this time with a chain of schools that he could control. He and Ms. Girn formed Higher Ground and hired several of LePort’s corporate staff members. Some LePort parents soon followed, including Greg Mauro, a founding partner of Learn Capital, a venture firm known for backing education start-ups. Learn Capital invested about $1 million, and Mr. Girn opened his first two Guidepost schools. Within three years, the company had 27.

Guidepost employees describe these early schools as thoughtfully planned. White-walled classrooms were outfitted with charming, toddler-sized furniture made of pale, unfinished wood. “Everyone cared so deeply,” said Kiana Kometani, who in 2019 became the first head of school at a Guidepost in Folsom, Calif. Teachers spoke about fostering each child’s intellectual curiosity, of giving them agency before they could tie their shoes.

Mr. Girn was a skillful pitchman. He promised parents something rare: the rigorous education of a high-end preschool, but with the hours of a commercial day care. Most Guideposts were in wealthy places — Walnut Creek, Brooklyn Heights — and appealed to the kind of dual-income families who could afford the equivalent of a small sedan in preschool tuition.

“Guidepost catered to the elevated intellectual type,” said Emily Tkaczibson, who paid about $4,000 a month for her two children to attend a Guidepost in Tigard, Ore. “We would have recommended the school to anybody.” Matthew Espie, another parent in Tigard, considered himself “lucky” that his youngest child got off the waiting list after only 10 months.

There were signs, though, that the company was trying to do too much too soon. Mr. Girn expanded abroad, opening schools in Hong Kong and mainland China in 2019. Mr. Richardson, the Orange County teacher, said around that time, three Chinese toddlers came to his school for reasons that were never explained. None of them spoke English, and the Guidepost teachers didn’t speak Mandarin.

“One toddler would stand there and cry and say the same word over and over again,” Mr. Richardson said. “We learned later that she was yelling for her mom, but at the time we didn’t know. We couldn’t understand her enough to help her.”

Please open the link and finish reading this fascinating article. Turning education into a business opportunity is dangerous.

Categories Childhood, Education Industry, For-Profit, School Choice

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
7

Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.

He writes:

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.

Shocked. Absolutely shocked.

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.

For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.

The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.

As the Big Education Ape’s deep dive into school funding makes devastatingly clear, the playbook was never subtle:

Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.

The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.

Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:

Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.

Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told

Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion

Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated

The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.

That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.

Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.

Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.

To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.

The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:

  • Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
  • Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
  • Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data

They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.

As Big Education Ape’s piece on reading struggles frames it with characteristic bluntness: if you’re struggling to read this, you have some very rich friends to thank.

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.

The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:

  • Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
  • Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
  • Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.

The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.

The Bottom Line

The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.

Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.

The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.

Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Corey DeAngelis: Are Public Schools Unconstitutional?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2026 //
15

Corey DeAngelis hates public schools. He has spent his professional life attacking and demeaning them. I tried to identify the source of his contempt for these great engines of democracy, but was unsuccessful.

Corey graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio, then received a Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Educational Reform. This is a program funded by the Walton Foundation, dedicated to the proposition that public schools are illegitimate and the government should give every family vouchers to escape them. Gene Glass, one of the giants of education research, described this program as one of the strangest in academia, because of its decided slant towards school choice.

Corey attended public schools in San Antonio. When he started high school, he applied and was accepted to a public magnet school on the campus of his zoned high school.

DeAngelis attended Communications Arts High School (CommArts), a magnet school operated by Northside ISD. It was founded in 1995 and was located inside the William Howard Taft High School campus. CommArts had high admissions standards, small classes, and an enrollment of about 500. Taft accepted all students and enrolled about 2,800 students.

Having enjoyed the privileges and perks of an elite public school, Corey must have been contemptuous of the large public school he avoided.

Taft was not a failing school. It accepted everyone, so of course its student body included all kinds of youth, including students who were low-performing, students with disabilities, students who were rebellious. The magnet school Corey attended screened out students who did not have high test scores or high grades and were not highly motivated. 100% of its students graduated from high school.

His life experience might have made him a supporter of public school choice, but he somehow evolved into a far-right hater of public schools who is certain that students would be better off if they received a voucher for religious schools, private schools, homeschooling, or anything else.

Corey doesn’t care that some religious schools teach racism, have no certified teachers, and are unaccountable for meeting any state standards. He doesn’t care that some homeschoolers are poorly educated. He doesn’t care that a sizable number of students attend for-profit charters that care more about profits than learning.

In this article, which appeared in The Washington Post, he argues that public schools are unconstitutional, despite having been treasured by most Americans for two centuries, and despite the Founding Fathers having included provision for them in the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 (also called the Land Ordinance of 1785), which set aside land specifically for a public school in every town in the newly created states.

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785 established the federal township survey system: each township was divided into 36 one-square-mile sections, and Section 16 (640 acres) was reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.”

The specific provision of land for public schools should end any doubt about their constitutionality, unless you think that today’s far-right zealots know more about the Constitution than the men who wrote it.

As a graduate of Houston public schools, none of them selective, I strongly reject the claim that public schools are inherently evil. Unlike Corey, I will always be grateful to the public schools that educated me: Montrose Elementary School (six years, including kindergarten); Sutton Elementary School (one year); Albert Sidney Johnson Junior High School (three years); and San Jacinto High School (4 years). They gave me a solid foundation in every subject; i became friends with a wide variety of students; I had some spectacular teachers; and I was able to gain admission to an elite women’s college.

Think about it. Ninety percent of Americans went to public schools, and most graduated from public schools. These are the very people who turned the United States into a successful nation. If you spit on public schools, you are spitting on the engine of American success. That’s crazy.

DeAngelis writes:

In 2021, Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger argued that the U.S. public school system violates the First Amendment. “Education,” he wrote, “consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.” Forcing families to accept government messaging — or pay a steep price to escape it — amounts to unconstitutional pressure.

A lawsuit filed in Nebraska on Aug. 13 brings that argument into court — and could open a path toward universal school choice.

Justin Jacobsen and Timothy and Joanna Menter, parents in the Lincoln Public Schools district, are suing state and local officials in Lancaster County District Court. Represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, they are challenging Nebraska’s combination of compulsory education and public-school-only funding.

Nebraska law requires parents to enroll children in a “public, private, denominational or parochial school” or to home-school them. Noncompliance is a Class 3 misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.

Yet the state offers educational benefits — roughly $19,000 per student statewide in 2024-25, and about $17,400 in Lincoln — only to families that enroll their children in public schools, thus accepting the government’s preferred viewpoints. Nebraska ranks near the bottom nationally on school-choice indexes and provides no scholarships, tax credits or charter schools. (Gov. Jim Pillen has opted Nebraska into the new federal tax credit scholarship program, effective Jan. 1, 2027).

Families that opt out of the public system shoulder the full cost of their children’s education themselves. Average private school tuition in Nebraska runs about $7,800 a year. The resulting penalty, over a K-12 career, exceeds $100,000.

The Menters now home-school their school-age children after pulling the two oldest out of Lincoln Public Schools. The Jacobsen family home-schools one child, sends the two youngest to a private religious school and has another trying public high school. It would send all four to private schools if it could direct its tax dollars to the education providers of its choice.

Both families withdrew most of their children because remaining in public schools meant adopting educational speech they reject. The Menters’ elementary school displayed a classroom door sticker promoting alternative sexuality and transgender ideologies and pressed climate-change views the parents found fear-based. The Jacobsens’ school taught transgender ideology; the children were also exposed to divisive narratives suggesting certain races were victims and others were oppressors because of their skin color.

The parents’ complaint rests on three theories. First, the combination of a criminal education mandate and funding limited to government viewpoints directly abridges parents’ free-speech rights under the First Amendment. Education is inherently speech, and parents hold the primary right to speak or to choose who speaks on their behalf. Second, the same facts violate the Nebraska Constitution’s free speech clause, which state courts treat as mirroring the federal guarantee. Third, the arrangement creates an unconstitutional condition: that is, the state may not condition a valuable public benefit on the surrender of a constitutional right.

This combination of a compulsory mandate and exclusive public school funding is viewpoint discrimination, not a neutral funding decision. Nebraska mandates educational speech, then funds only the government’s perspective and withholds support from any other. That arrangement fails strict scrutiny. The state has no compelling interest in government-run education specifically, as opposed to education generally, and less-restrictive alternatives exist. The government could still fund education with taxpayer dollars, for example, while allowing the money to follow the child to the school or program that aligns with the family’s values.

The lawsuit does not ask the court to invent a new system or order the legislature to adopt any particular program. It seeks only a declaration that the current structure is unconstitutional as applied to these plaintiffs, an injunction against continuing the unconstitutional conditions, and prospective damages from the city of Lincoln and Lancaster County equal to the per-pupil value of local benefits directed to Lincoln Public Schools, continuing until the violation ends or each child graduates from high school, earns a GED or turns 19. The plaintiffs do not challenge the content of any specific curriculum — the claim is structural, concerning funding and compulsion.

Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education. Nebraska can keep its compulsory-education laws and continue to provide education with taxpayer funding. The difference is that families, not the state, would direct that money to the schools or programs that best align with their values — public, private, religious or home-based. Funding would follow the child rather than force every family to be indoctrinated in a single government viewpoint.

This approach respects free speech. Parents who prefer the public system’s messaging can remain there. Parents who do not can exit without financial penalty. Every child still receives an education funded by the public, and no family is compelled to underwrite or accept speech it rejects for its own children. Force gives way to freedom.

The Nebraska case makes plain that the status quo cannot stand. Universal school choice is the path that honors both education and the Constitution.

Corey DeAngelis is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment. He also worked for Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He is known as an evangelist for vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Privatization, School Choice

Florida: How Vouchers Are Destroying Public Schools and Violating the State Constitution

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2026 //
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Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida constitution:

a) The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require. 

Article I, Section 3;

Religious Freedom

There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.

The Florida state constitution explicitly requires that the state provide a free public education for all children. It explicitly forbids the use of any public funds for religious schools. In 2012, then Governor Jeb Bush promoted a referendum to change the constitution and allow vouchers for religious schools. Florida voters resoundingly said NO. But the voice of the people did not dissuade Bush and his friends.

Florida now has a full/blown universal voucher system where the state funds children who attend religious schools, private schools, even home schools, regardless of family income. Most of the children who use vouchers were already in nonpublic school.

The state now spends billions of dollars every year on charter schools and vouchers. Many charter schools operate for profit. Their lobbyists work in tandem with the legislature, which seems eager to defund public schools.

Ironically, Jeb Bush used to boast that Florida was successful because of its toughs count ability. Yet this is the same governor who pushed through vouchers, even though voucher schools have NO accountability.

Go figure.

Stephanie Vanos wrote the following article for the Orlando Sentinel. She is a member of the Orange County School Board, where her children are enrolled.

She wrote:

There is an alarming misuse of public funds in Florida that isn’t just unfair and irresponsible, it undermines our state’s constitutional obligation to provide a high-quality, uniform education for every child and erodes trust in the very system meant to serve all of Florida’s children.

The taxpayer-funded voucher program has created a shadow educational system, one where billions in taxpayer funds move with little oversight, leaving families and communities in the dark about how their money is spent. This lack of accountability and transparency has created a fractured, unequal  education landscape, robbing students of stability and opportunity no matter where they go to school.

Approximately $5 billion in taxpayer money is being siphoned away from our traditional public schools into voucher systems. Private schools that accept vouchers are held to a tiny fraction of the standards our public schools must meet, if any at all. Nearly a quarter of all state funding for education is now drained by voucher programs that serve only 15.3% of Florida’s students and overwhelmingly benefit families who were already paying to send their child to private school. How is this fiscally responsible?

The consequences of this system are clear in Orange County, where my kids go to school.

This year, our county was forced to close seven public schools and cut hundreds of positions despite the district earning high grades. An estimated $315 million of education money will be diverted from Orange County Public Schools to vouchers just this year. These closures and loss of funding are a direct result of a state system that puts politics and profits ahead of students.

Traditional public schools across the state are held to incredibly high standards on how and what they teach students, who they hire, how they report grades and more. However, the taxpayer-funded voucher program and charter schools are not held to the same standards and measures of accountability despite receiving public tax dollars.

Charter schools, deemed public schools by law, sometimes serve an unmet need in a community, and may operate transparently under a fully nonprofit model. In some cases, they can benefit our larger communities. However, charter schools operate with far fewer requirements and accountability measures than traditional public schools, and far too many are franchise operations, run by for-profit management companies that benefit affiliated for-profit entities with our tax dollars.

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, School Choice, Vouchers

Carol Burris: The Hoax of “School Choice”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2026 //
8

I posted the link to Carol Burris’s terrific article about school choice yesterday but was unable to copy the text. Carol sent the text to me.

Here it is:

Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new reportfrom the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.

For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.

This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio. 

In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.

Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country.  Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.

Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five. 

Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.

In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.

Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.

The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.

Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.

You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.

The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.

None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.

What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

The Century Foundation: Federal Voucher Program Will Increase Segregation

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2026 //
1

It is a well-established fact that the school choice movement was created in the South in the 1950s to protect segregation. After the Brown decision of 1954, whites resisted desegregation with e Rey strategy they could dream of. One such was to offer vouchers to every student to attend the school of their choice. The predictable result was to protect segregated schools.

In this century, voucher promoters sell them as parental choice, “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” etc.

But unless an effort is made to enrcuage racial integration, choice will lead to segregation.

Halley Potter of The Century Foundation wrote this report. I urge you to open the link and read it in full.

Potter wrote:

In rural Northampton, North Carolina, a private Christian school called Northeast Academy is 99 percent White in a county that’s 40 percent White. It receives about half of its tuition from taxpayers, through the state’s private school voucher program. Northeast is one of a number of private schools known as “segregation academies,” because they were founded during desegregation so that White parents could avoid having their children educated in an integrated setting.

Segregation academies ought to be a thing of the past, but they could experience a resurgence—paid for with taxpayer dollars—under the new federal private school voucher scheme enacted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA). Bringing back segregation academies using taxpayer dollars is part of the Trump administration’s radical two-pronged approach to undermine public education. The first tactic in the Trump administration’s plan to undercut public school systems is to dramatically reduce the federal role in education by dismantling federal programs, reducing oversight, attempting to cut federal funding for K–12 schools, and working to close the U.S. Department of Education. The second tactic is actively working toward privatization through an unprecedented federal private school voucher program.

How the Voucher Plan Would Work . . .

In July 2025, OBBA established a new federal tax credit—known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit—that, in effect, serves as a private school voucher program. The program allows individuals, beginning January 1, 2027, to contribute up to $1,700 per year toward private entities known as scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) and receive a dollar-for-dollar return of their money in the form of a federal tax credit. SGOs then would then be able to decide how to distribute the funds as scholarships to applicant students for them to spend on education. There is no cap on the size of such scholarships, and no limit on the number of individuals that can claim the tax credit. While recipient students may be able to use scholarship funds to pay for some things like tutoring or activity fees at public schools, because public schools are essentially free, it is anticipated that the vast majority of these funds will go toward private school enrollment.

There are very few requirements of SGOs in the statute, and it appears that any organization in a participating state that meets the criteria will be allowed to participate. SGOs must give scholarships to ten or more students who do not all attend the same school, must spend at least 90 percent of the income on scholarships, must give priority to students who received scholarships the previous year and to siblings, cannot earmark funds for a particular student, and must ensure that students come from families earning no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Essentially everything else will likely be up to the SGO, as the program’s regulations are not expected to add additional guardrails. It appears an SGO could, for example, be set up to fund scholarships to Christian schools only. Because private schools are not subject to all of the same civil rights laws as public schools, SGOs could also likely discriminate against students based on disability or sexual orientation.

While starting the process with individual donations gives the program the veneer of a charity operation, this is a ruse. All this does is mask who is truly bearing the cost of the program. In actuality, the donors to SGOs bear no cost, as they are later fully reimbursed by the federal government through the dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The federal government—using taxpayer dollars sent to the supposed donors—bears the entire cost of the program. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers range from around $4 billion to over $50 billion annually.

Moreover, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s language regarding the tax credit program is very misleading. Their fact sheet states: “A recent report estimates that the Education Freedom Tax Credit will generate an additional $24 billion in education funding annually.” That makes it sound like this is a revenue-creating program rather than one that bears a huge federal cost.

States and the District of Columbia have to decide annually whether or not to opt out of or into the voucher program. As of July 6, 2026, twenty-nine states had indicated that they plan to opt in for the first year of the program. However, federal regulations guiding the program are not expected until September. Further complicating matters, at least eighteen states will have new governors and the District of Columbia will have a new mayor when the program launches in 2027 because of term limits, and that number could be as high as thirty-six after this fall’s elections.

. . . To Increase Segregation and Undermine Public Education

One of the dangers of private school voucher programs—alongside their well-demonstrated negative effects on students’ academic outcomes, civil rights violations, and destabilization of public school funding—is that they can exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.

Diverse learning environments that bring students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together are one of the most powerful educational tools we have. Integrated schools help encourage critical thinking, boost academic achievement, and build the skills for working across lines of difference that are essential for our democracy. The growth of private school voucher programs threatens to roll back progress on integration, limit educational opportunity, and further fracture the educational landscape by race and class.

As state leaders and advocates weigh whether or not to opt into the federal voucher program, they should consider the evidence on how the program could deepen inequality and further racial and socioeconomic divides. New analysis in this piece shows that in some metro areas in states that are still deciding whether to opt out of or into the federal voucher program, private schools already drive more than 40 percent of the racial segregation in schools.

The Segregationist History of Private School Vouchers

Private school enrollment nationwide is disproportionately White and wealthy. As of 2021, 9 percent of American schoolchildren attended private schools. Sixty-five percent of private school students are White, compared to 45 percent of public school students. Private school students are about twice as likely as public school students to come from higher-income households, and private school attendance is concentrated among the highest earners.

Private school voucher programs were started by segregationists across the South in the 1950s and 1960s as part of efforts by Southern leaders engaged in “massive resistance” to avoid integrating their schools in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Many communities opened all-White private schools, which became known as segregation academies. Local governments slashed public school funding and instead created public subsidies for these private schools—including voucher programs to reimburse tuition as well as tax credits.

The courts eventually struck down many of those voucher programs tied to segregation academies, but current voucher programs still show troubling patterns of segregation. Roughly 300 private schoolsthat were founded as segregation academies still receive money from publicly funded voucher programs. Most voucher money goes to students who are already attending private schools, and data has shown that private schools tend to raise their tuition after the introduction of voucher programs. For example, when Iowa started a new voucher program in 2023–24, two-thirds of vouchers went to students who were already attending private schools. By 2026, tuition at some of the state’s largest private high schools had grown by as much as 50 percent. It is important to note that vouchers typically do not cover the full cost of tuition, making private schools still out of reach for most low-income families, and so the voucher programs tend to function mostly as cost-reducing schemes for wealthier families sending their children to private schools. In Arizona, for example, half of all voucher recipients come from the wealthiest quartile of zip codes.

There are some private school voucher programs that target low- to middle-income students and enroll mostly students of color, such as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest operating school voucher program in the United States. However, research shows that even students in these programs, which arguably have the highest potential for integration, by and large did not give students greater access to integrated schools.

Furthermore, some voucher programs that started out serving mostly students of color have now seen an increase in White students in recent years. When North Carolina’s private school voucher program launched in 2014, for example, a majority of students receiving vouchers were Black, and just 27 percent were White; however, as the program expanded incrementally from one serving only low-income students to one with no income limits, the percentage of vouchers going to White students grew to 73 percent, in a state where only 51 percent of school-aged children are White. A 2024 investigation by ProPublica into North Carolina’s private school voucher program found thirty-nine schools that fit the profile of segregation academies that were receiving public money through voucher programs.

The new federal private school voucher program specifies that participation is open to families earning up to 300 percent of area median gross income, which means it would be open to roughly 90 percent of students nationwide. With near universal eligibility, the federal program could easily be susceptible to similar patterns of segregation, disproportionately benefiting White students and furthering segregation between public and private schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nevada: Charter Schools Are the Trojan Horse of Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2026 //
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Kelly Edgar taught music in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) for 25 years. She recently wrote this article in The Nevada Independent about the dangers of charter schools.

She wrote:

Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our “failing public schools.” To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren’t thriving in traditional educational settings. 

But that’s not what’s happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I’ve developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it’s now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.

Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they’re free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.

Moreover, they do not have publicly elected school boards. In other words, we have no say on how our tax dollars are spent in charter schools because oversight is lax. Yet a charter school principal, a charter school founder and members of Moms For Liberty (which has direct ties to the school privatization movement) can sit on our school board.

Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy. 

What I didn’t realize was that we were being sabotaged by the very people selling taxpayers the solutions. 

According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there’s a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada’s education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite “historic education funding” being passed in 2023?

Because you can’t pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward “private alternatives” such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, “Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand.”

The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan’s administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with “apocalyptic rhetoric” and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” 

What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson’s paradox. Students weren’t actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush’s own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.

Rather than addressing systemic poverty, which we know affects educational outcomes, politicians and corporate philanthropists wasted billions of dollars micromanaging teachers and student learning with policies and programssuch as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core.

And when public schools didn’t crumble under those “reforms” as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.

The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.

But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of “school choice,” and “save” Americans from the crisis they created.

In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.” This “Education Reform Report” became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025. 

And while we haven’t seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing “lax classroom discipline” and “poorly performing public schools.” One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents’ concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child. 

And where are those tax dollars going? To Academica-managed schools, and more ideologically driven ones such as Founders Classical Academy, run by Hillsdale College, whose leadership has ties to the CNP network that wrote the privatization blueprint. 

The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicate that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide. 

This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren’t charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight? 

That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It’s in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities. 

Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.

The paradoxes of “school choice” can’t be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the “choice schools” didn’t have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services. 

Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don’t blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let’s not repeat the same mistake with our children’s education.

Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Nevada, Privatization, School Choice
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