Steve Hinnefeld posts a blog about a new study of vouchers showing that voucher schools encourage and practice discrimination.
https://inschoolmatters.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/study-confirms-voucher-programs-discriminate/
“Research led by an Indiana University professor confirms what school voucher critics have long argued: Voucher programs receive public funding yet discriminate on the basis of religion, disability status, sexual orientation and possibly other factors.
“The finding is especially timely as President Donald Trump and his designee to serve as secretary of education, Michigan school-choice activist Betsy DeVos, have indicated they will use federal clout and money to push states to expand voucher programs.
“At the time we did the study, we had no idea it would be so relevant,” said Suzanne Eckes, professor in the IU School of Education and the lead author of the research paper. “People are starting to think about these questions, and the topic has not been widely addressed in research.”
“The study, “Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)intended Consequences of School Vouchers,”was published last summer in the Peabody Journal of Education. Co-authors are Julie Mead, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jessica Ulm, a doctoral student at IU.
“The researchers examined 25 programs in 15 states and Washington, D.C., that provide public funding for private K-12 schools, including traditional tuition voucher programs and voucher-like programs called education savings accounts. Indiana is one of seven states with a statewide voucher program. Other programs are limited to cities (Milwaukee, Cleveland) or special-needs students.
“The authors say legislators who authorized the programs neglected to write policies that provide equal access for students and avoid discriminating against marginalized groups.
“We argue that each state has an obligation to ensure that any benefit it creates must be available to all students on a non-discriminatory basic — including the benefit of a publicly funded voucher for attendance at a private school,” they write.
“Indiana’s school voucher program, established in 2011, served 32,686 students who attended 316 private schools last year. Nearly all voucher schools are Christian schools, including Catholic, Lutheran and Evangelical or non-denominational schools. The state spent $131 million on vouchers but provided almost no fiscal oversight, according to a report by the IU Center for Evaluation and Education Policy.
“Indiana law bars voucher schools from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. But state law doesn’t mention discrimination by religion, disability or sexual orientation.
“Voucher schools in Indiana can receive extra state money for enrolling special-needs students. But some of the schools have language on their websites that suggests they may not admit students with disabilities – or that they will provide only limited accommodations for students.
“As the study notes, citing a 2014 Bloomington Herald-Times article, some Indiana Christian schools that receive vouchers welcome only families that embrace their religious beliefs, including a rejection of a “gay/lesbian lifestyle” that is “contrary to God’s commands.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t that their purpose?
Not according to their duplicitous, lying, profiteering supporters.
Of course! THANKS for saying this OUT LOUD, Diane.
A tad off topic. About phony choice and charters in Camden:
“If there were another public school in our neighborhood – that was properly funded – I would absolutely want my boys enrolled there. But there are no other public schools left. My only choice was to get my boys in a charter school. And that’s been a nightmare.”
Lettoyia’s youngest son Joshua attends Camden Community Charter school. So far she hasn’t run into any issues with his enrollment there. Then again, her youngest child doesn’t suffer from the same learning disabilities that plague her oldest son Josias.
“My oldest son suffers with behavior and learning issues that make things very difficult for him. From early on, the Camden school district assigned him with an IEP – an Individualized Education Plan – which gives him access to one-on-one instruction and other services in school so he can keep up with his peers academically and socially. Well…that’s what is supposed to happen anyway.
”Lettoyia first enrolled her oldest son in the City Invincible charter school. “I didn’t really have any issues with City Invincible, except that they just up and closed down. I was surprised because what kind of school just shuts their doors? When I was growing up, closing a public school was a big deal and there would be lots of community meetings, lots of time for the school district to plan, and lots of time for parents to plan. But this school was open at the end of one school year and closed before the start of the next. It was very odd.”
Her story gets horribly worse, for the rest go to the Blue Jersey link:
http://www.bluejersey.com/2017/01/state-run-kids-families-school-the-education-reformers-lettoyias-story/
This not only infuriates me and makes me feel so very, very sad and alarmed by what Lettoyia and Josias are going through, it also fills me with profound despair.
Because this is happening, and will happen, more and more often as the privatizers and charterizers succeed in sucking more funds away from public schools, and closing more and more of them.
Yet most of the private and charter schools do not know how to deal with and teach children with special learning and behavioral needs, nor are they willing to expend the resources to do so. Nor are they accountable under the IDEA, so there are no consequences for them.
I think equity and fairness are paramount. I am against public funding of private schools or even “faux” public schools. But public ed advocates need better talking points because many people aren’t hearing it, or don’t care. I think if we start talking about vouchers and charters ADDING ANOTHER LAYER OF BUREAUCRACY and the INCREASED COSTS of charters and special districts and vouchers, we might get some attention. For example in New York State there are jobs in central administration (Albany) to deal with charter schools only. We are creating another shadow system of schools and it is not just costing $$ to local public schools by way of draining funds, but it is adding more jobs to administer these programs.
It has been difficult for public education supporters to get the message out as the media and many so called representatives in the government take money from “reformers.” That is one reason why the bloggers, especially Diane, have been so busy. I do think we need some simple slogans to reinforce our message, something suitable for a protest sign. Something like: Keep the Public in Public Education, or Corporate Schools Are Not Public Schools. I am sure other people can come up with some good slogans. Sometimes a silly slogan will stick in people’s mind, and that’s why advertisers use them.
“voucher schools encourage and practice discrimination.”
I think this just fits nicely into the general idea that freedoms and democracy are antagonistic to (and duals of) each other
Too much freedom is antidemocratic.
or, with more drama,
Uncontrolled freedom is prison for all but a few.
Indeed, if freedoms (choices) are not properly controlled, then only the strongest, greediest, most selfish people will be free and will proceed to prevent other people to get their share of the freedoms.
This observation applies to vouchers: those who choose vouchers will take money away from public schools, so they prevent public schools to give quality education for the majority.
Or take neoliberalism: only the billionaires are free to compete and realize their dreams of prosperity, because their big companies don’t allow the majority to compete.
I don’t even dare to mention the permissiveness of our Constitution which gives this great freedom to the winning party to take away a multitude of freedoms from the silver medalists.
Clearly, in order to distribute freedoms in a democratic way, the means of obtaining freedoms need to be controlled.
It follows that as soon as we hear people advocating choices as self evident benefits, we can be sure, they want to harm the rest of the population.
Really? We needed a study to tell us this?
….again, a study that no legislator in any state house, or the House of Representatives or the Senate will ever read. Moreover, it will come to the attention of no school boards or municipal elected officials. Beyond that, the media will never cover it.
Study after study….in fact any study not directly funded by reform/privatizing groups, all find that vouchers, charters, data, accountability, VAM, etc etc are all BUNK. Nonsense not supported by anything. In fact, none of those things even pass the smell test of basic thought.
Studies like this, while necessary, are choir-preaching and wheel spinning. Clearly studies are not going to be the vector for having our side heard, let alone vindicated.
We needed to be in front of and dominating these narratives in public and loudly 5-10 years ago.
Can’t change what happened or didn’t happen 5-10 years ago. Must RESIST now.
Kate Snow on msnbc just presented a superficial report from four chicago parents…..horrible. No clue as to what they were talking about.
The entire “education reform/choice/voucher/charter school” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The first outcry for resegregation “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC