It is very cool to home school in California! There are charter schools for home schoolers where you don’t have to go to school!
Home schoolers get a list of approved expenses, and they can decide how to spend the public’s money. How cool is that! This is a program that Betsy DeVos must love! True educational freedom on the public’s dime!
In California, there’s a way parents can use money from the government to buy multi-day Disneyland Park Hopper passes, San Diego Zoo family memberships, tickets to Medieval Times and dolphin encounters at SeaWorld.
There are a handful of charter schools that give students’ families as much as $2,800 to $3,200 — tax dollars sent to the charter schools — every year to spend on anything they want from a list of thousands of home-school vendors approved by the charters, according to the schools’ websites.
Some home-school vendors offer tutoring, curricula, books and other traditional educational services. Other vendors sell tickets to theme parks that are billed as field trips, or extracurricular activities that are billed as P.E., including parkour classes, acting classes, ice skating lessons, horseback riding lessons and more.
Forget college-and-career-ready. How about spending tax dollars on family fun?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Importantly, vouchers can be used in many states to pay for private “schooling” that can be, literally, ANYTHING.
I must say, however, that I would love to see some tax dollars spent on family fun for the poorest of our children. But this should be transparent and targeted, of course. What Dr. Ravitch describes, above, is preposterous.
I’ve seen KIPP at Hershey Park, PA. The children MUST stand in lines, they MUST all ride the same ride, they are instructed not to be loud or to laugh, they MUST all walk together with the “leaders” having total control…….I think it’s pretty awful that they can’t get away from the prison atmosphere even in an amusement park that’s supposed to be fun for children. They “proudly” wear their KIPP t-shirts and are instructed often that they are there to represent their program. Probably better that sitting in an un air-conditioned school room, but it still stinks that they can’t be kids.
Most important to understand is that these charters get full funding per pupil. Thus, the $2800-3200 money is simply a loss leader so they can pocket the majority of the rest of the money. And, this article does not point out that the $50-80 million dollar charter scam run by fugitive McManus apparently was charging the state for students who were not actually enrolled.
I live in California and took advantage of this program. You’re right that charter schools use it as a loss leader.
I’ve never understood why public schools didn’t do the same thing too. As far as I could tell, they could have copied the charter schools homeschooling program, at least in elementary school. The cost for educating the homeschooled student would have been much lower than average, and they could have funneled the rest of the money to the kids in public school. It would have been like a perpetual fundraiser for them. The local elementary schools did have a homeschooling program, but it was pretty awful. They were sticklers for using their curriculum. For me that was a deal killer. If I had used their curriculum, the curriculum would not have been as good of a fit for my daughter, and she would have learned substantially less. I think the only reason public schools haven’t taken advantage of this source of income is that they are severely prejudiced against homeschooling and have a bad attitude.
Radical right wingers often portray public education as “socialism.” They refuse acknowledge any investment in the common good as envisioned by our forefathers. They also believe that “parents know best.” If this were true, there would be no need for CPS as parents would always do what is right for their children. Shame on such a progressive state for adopting such a ridiculous right wing waste of public money. If public education is socialism, then paying for Disneyland and horseback riding lessons from public funds is socialism on crack.
Holy cow! My head just exploded. 🤯
Head explosion is the natural physiologic function caused by learning that public funding which should have gone to reducing class size for vulnerable public school students is instead being spent on cotton candy and Mickey Mouse ears. Frankly, if your head failed to explode, you should seek immediate medical attention as there is definitely something very wrong with you. One whose neuronal response was noncombustible may be suffering from DeVositis.
Ed reformers are “unbundling education services”.
Because there is no currently fashionable management fad they will not chase with public dollars. Apparently state legislators are so in thrall to them they are incapable of thinking for themselves and questioning any of this, to the extent of not providing even marginal oversight of public dollars.
I’m not clear why we still have elected representatives. If their role is to rubberstamp public fund transfers to private entities we can replace them all with a bookkeeper. Very efficient.
their role: to rubberstamp. YES.
Ed reformers, having eradicated “field trips” in public schools with budget cuts and their grim, joyless agenda, now offer vouchers for field trips, but only to students who don’t attend public schools.
It’s very innovative. It took thousands of full time, paid adults to come up with it. It results in only those students who have parents who can individually transport and supervise their own children taking part, which they’ll eventually realize. Then they can invent field trips and put them in public schools. Maybe with an app. And a specialized nonprofit, with 11 employees. Gates will fund research that SEEMS to show that taking a 4th grade class on a bus to a museum is a lotta bang for the buck! Then we’ll have come full circle.
I’ve taken many students on field trips. My district made us fill out a form in which we had to explain how the trip connected to curriculum. We were not allowed to take groups to amusement parks. We had to demonstrate a curricular connection for the trip.
I agree with that. I think it should be connected to what they’re learning.
The truth is, in rural lower income areas, it is the only time some of these kids go anywhere outside the county. They get really excited. If the school didn’t take them they simply wouldn’t go. It is the highlight of their year. It’s cheap compared to how valuable it is.
I went on many field trips when I was in K-6 (1969-1977) and many of them were not related to anything that we were doing in school. We seemed to have a field trip every month, plus swimming lessons (gr 3-5). It gave us an idea of what we may want to be someday when we grew up. It made us better learners because we had something to look forward to and it exercised our bodies plus our minds. It’s a shame that kids don’t have this in school anymore.
How do i get the funds for my 4 kids
It’s like the ed reform “movement” wakes up every day and asks “what can we do today to avoid contributing anything meaningful or helpful to the 93% of students in the country who attend the public schools we disdain?”
It’s fine if they’re paid by America’s Billionaires for this, but how do the public employees justify it? They’re either actively harmful or completely irrelevant to the vast majority of students and families, and we’re paying tens of thousands of them on federal and state and county payrolls.
It’s wacky.
That doesn’t even include the public universities! Add the thousands of public university employees who are busy “reinventing” schools so simply do NO work on the existing system or schools.
I don’t know- they’re all about “choice” but are these job descriptions really so flexible one can just exclude 93% of the work?
Would it be a better return on investment to give them shopping sprees at Walmart?
Well, ed reformers will surely increase education funding to cover these experiments in choice. Because there are no trade-offs and everything is “plus/and” and “win/win” in this fantasy world. A world where no one ever has to consider what happens to public school students, because that would be “defending the status quo”, “the status quo” meaning “50 million public school students”.
This reblog post from Diane needs to be amplified. The trips to Disneyland are part of a much larger plot to rob taxpayers.
In May 2019, leaders of the charter school management corporation A3 Education, a Newport Beach firm whose leaders control 13 charter schools across the state, were under indictment for fraud.
A3’s chairman, Sean McManus, and president, Jason Schrock, essentially owned and operated the charter schools at the same time that A3 contracted with those schools, according to the indictment.
I found this report of big-time fraud on the internet while trying to find the 990 for A3’s Valiant charter schools. Th plot thickens because Valiant Academy of Southern California and Valiant Academy of Los Angeles, both part of A3 Education, were “accredited” by an organization called AdvancED, which also accredits online schools operated by K12, Inc., Pearson’s Connections Education, and Responsive Education Solutions. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-edu-charter-school-indictments-20190528-story.html
This scandal that is still evolving
I looked at one of the vendor programs for Valient Prep. on “How to draw. Learn anywhere, anytime with convenient online classes and unlimited instructor feedback. Visit MegapixelsArt.com for a FREE trial. Art, digital photography, creative writing, realistic drawing, paint.”
This vendor has a gallery of student artwork. Many of these examples look like pages from coloring books, lightly modified.
I discovered this statement from the vendor:
“Please note that there may be Christian content on my website / blog, but all classes are non-sectarian and approved for funding – unless specifically noted in the class description. So if you don’t see a note next to the class indicating Christian content, the class is available for purchase with your funding.”
The pitch is big. $300 to $350 per student, per semester from 7 to 17 “lessons.” https://www.megapixelsart.com/classes
This is a great example of how online vendors of “personalized” instructioncan cash in on California’s phony oversight of charter schools.
Newsom should wake up to how the unregulated, unethical state policy is wasting public money while public schools starve. This reckless policy is allowing con artist “Christians” and others to fleece the taxpayers.
I’m no great fan of charter schools. They do no better overall than public and often worse. Some do better. Corruption is a huge problem. But the overtaxation in our state for horrible public ed is robbery too. It’s too political. Our students see very little of the money we send in and spend little time actually learning. Calls for more money do not see better education. The state expenditure per pupil is over $12000 per year. Gifted programs have been gutted in the name of equity. History is being re-written. Excellence in ed is synonymous with privilege. Why?!? We are a multi-ethnic family who wants public ed to serve its sole purpose: to educate!
We DO participate in a public school voucher program. They provide a pittance and collect the rest for the public school. And no, we don’t spend it on theme parks. It is the local public school who sends the kids every year to the water park and a week at an outdoor camp. We spend over $10,000 per year in education related expenses because our public schools do not have any interest in teaching. It is horrifying to see the results of K-6 math, English, and history when we chat with kids from local sports teams. They are so behind it is almost criminal. CCSS and NGSS are at the helm and in partnership with government and assessment companies. Why participate in this scheme?
Sadly, that is what the privatizers want. They want to frustrate parents and students out of the system and into some other scheme. Politicians are enablers. If public schools are CCSS testing factories, many families will seek other options. We need to get outside interests out of the public schools. They have become a political football.
Hi Rick – I went in again to look at the doc and a message said it had been cancelled. I guess we’ll need to deal with this on Monday. Thanks, Diana