I said I would not reproduce blogs, with rare exceptions. Jan Resseger is that one rare exception.

In this post, she explains how the costs of vouchers are destroying and defunding Ohio’s public schools.

Categories Education Reform, Funding, Ohio, School Choice, Vouchers

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Susan Lee Schwartz says:

March 20, 2021 at 10:36 am

Posted at Oped https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Beware-Here-Is-How-to-Wre-in-General_News-Credit_Education_Education-Costs_Education-Funding-210320-540.html#comment787123.
“Ohio provides a stark warning about the potential damage of rapidly growing school privatization at public expense. Publicly funded private school tuition vouchers is sucking up the state funding that Ohio supposedly provides for its public schools:“According to the Ohio Dep’t of Ed’s first Feb. Foundation Funding Report, districts will spend $162 million this school year on these private school vouchers… An analysis last year by News5 Cleveland found that nearly two-thirds of voucher recipients had not previously been students in the public district schools—they were private school students who had not received state funding for their tuitions, and now do.” Many state legislatures are considering new private school tuition vouchers or expanding voucher programs, tuition tax credit vouchers, and education savings account vouchers. “

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retired teacher says:

March 20, 2021 at 10:53 am

Vouchers like these allow public school budgets to be used like ATMs for private purposes. They unfairly target Title 1 schools that have a higher number of minority students in them while the majority of mostly white districts are protected from voucher drain. They are very wasteful since many of the students use the vouchers in private schools students were already attending. It appears that the objective of these vouchers is to dismantle the public schools that poor, minority students attend. Social justice groups should protest this unfair treatment.

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- ciedie aech says:
  
  March 20, 2021 at 1:03 pm
  
  a key understanding: mostly white districts PROTECTED from voucher drain
  
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Chiara says:

March 20, 2021 at 1:23 pm

“The state counts voucher students (enrolled in a private school) as though they are enrolled in the public school district where the students reside. The district receives the state’s basic state aid amount for each of these students. Then the state extracts the voucher—$4,650 for each K-8 student and $6,000 for each high school student—right out of the school district’s budget. The problem is that in many school districts, the voucher amount extracted is larger than the amount of that school district’s state basic aid per-pupil—leaving the school district with a net funding loss for every student who carries a voucher away to a private school.”

They do the same thing with charter funding.

Be aware, the ed reform echo chamber designed these funding systems. They wrote them and state lawmakers rubberstamped them- the thing is DESIGNED to harm public school school students, in the hopes people will “flee” public schools and enroll in private schools.

Ohio sacrifices public school students to meet the ideological demands of the ed reform lobby.

Go look at the legislative accomplishments of the ed reform lobby in this state- there is not ONE benefit to public school students. They simply refuse to perform any work at all for the 90% of Ohio students who attend public schools.

Wat did ed reform deliver for the 90% of students in this state who attend public schhols? Budget cuts and standardized tests.

If you’re a public school parent and you’re hiring or electing ed reformers you’re hiring and paying people who return NO value to public schools.

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Chiara says:

March 20, 2021 at 1:30 pm

The ed reform lobby are designing cheap garbage “apprenticeship” legislation too.

Just look at this crap:

“Next, the White House and Congress should go even further to modernize the current apprenticeship system. First, they could formalize and incentivize intermediaries (public or private) by subsidizing them to create “outsourced” apprenticeships. The intermediaries would be compensated for each placement of a candidate who meets certain criteria (such as eligibility for Pell grants), when the candidate is provided with an apprenticeship that: (1) pays minimum wage or better; (2) trains them with a marketable, relevant skill; and (3) leads to a permanent position in that industry.”

They’re proposing paying private employees with federal funding to sticjk high school students in dead end minimum wage jobs.

If Biden listens to this lobby he’s crazy. They churn out garbage. Please, President Biden- don’t saddle young people with another decade of garbage policy pumped out of these ridiculous “think tanks”. Tell the think tanks to take a hike. Hire some new people.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/543379-to-build-back-better-biden-must-invest-in-a-modern-apprenticeship-system#.YFT7pq0PO-w.twitter

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- retired teacher says:
  
  March 20, 2021 at 2:30 pm
  
  I appreciate your last paragraph. We have been on the dismantle the common good train long enough. Privatization mostly serves the privatizers, not the students. It is bad enough that public schools are undermined for charter schools. Now the red state fools are inventing any way to move money out of public education. They are making pubic schools the host to meaningless, cheap parasitic vouchers, and the local schools have no way to control the loss or manage their finances. If Biden wants to suck up to Gates and company, it is a travesty.
  
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- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  March 20, 2021 at 2:53 pm
  
  Chiara, Good to see that you are exposing the reform lobbies for t these issues and tracking some of Biden’s apparent enthusiasms for them, well beyond the policies in Ohio.
  
  There are many more.
  
  Biden’s Department of Education is stuffed with “reformers.” Many are Obama retreads and with minimal experience in schools.
  
  At least 47 appointees were made before Dr. Cardona was formally in Office on March 1. Some of the brief biographies of these appointees. with names supplied in three rounds from EdSurge and press releases, are not encouraging.
  
  My analysis is still in the works for each office in USDE. The press announcements have too often been puffed up. My tentative judgment is that supporters of public education may be facing Obama/Arne Duncan reformy policies, version 3.0.
  
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- retired teacher says:
  
  March 20, 2021 at 5:46 pm
  
  It is up to Dr. Cardona to set the tone for the administration. He needs to serve the students of the nation, not the Gates’ appointees he was given. Dr. Cardona needs to stand up to those that oppose him and work to remove those that will not work with him.
  
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    March 21, 2021 at 10:56 am
    
    I don’t think Cardona will stand up or make waves.
Laura H. Chapman says:

March 20, 2021 at 2:57 pm

Posted on Jan’s website.

“And perhaps, if legislators had to budget transparently for the full cost of the program instead of shifting the burden to local school districts, they would have an incentive to curtail the outrageously expensive growth rate of vouchers in Ohio.”

Yes, but…
State legislatures dominated by Republicans are hell-bent on defunding all pubic services and perfectly fair financing for public schools, or as we are now forced to say, “traditional public schools.” They are also on a tear to destroy the right to vote, state by state, and at the federal level, which they claim should have no role in federal elections.

Several Republicans in Ohio have co-signed the following bill. It begins with Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. It is brazenly called “Save Our Democracy Act.” The bill began with over 50 cosponsors. At last check, there were 61. H.R. 322 , 117th Congress.

There is no alternative but doing the good work you and so many others are doing: Exposing the greed and reminding us of the distance from Paul Wellstone’s ethical stance. THANK YOU.

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- retired teacher says:
  
  March 20, 2021 at 4:27 pm
  
  Biden needs to face up to the fact he must cut the filibuster, or he will get nothing else accomplished. Today’s Republican party wants to take a wrecking ball to all things public, and they want to suppress the vote to stay in power with minority rule.
  
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Catherine King says:

March 22, 2021 at 7:54 am

Diane and all Here is a glimpse of what Republican politics is doing to our campuses, from The Chronicle of Higher Education/Educational Review:

SNIP: “She describes an ugly incident at her own institution, Portland State University, in which, as she puts it, two professors ‘outsourc[ed] the harassment of a colleague’ to a mob of online trolls. Other say that the real threat comes not from campus activists but from conservative state governments, which, as our Nell Gluckman describes, seem increasingly willing to interfere in university curricula. (For his part, Whittington, of the AFA, lists ‘state legislatures … considering proposals to restrict what can be taught in a college classroom’ as an area of concern.)*

ARTICLE:

*”‘Free speech is an aberration.’ So begins a magisterial 2016 essay by David Bromwich in the London Review of Books. Its social or political enshrinement is the exception, not the rule; everywhere, censorship and its primordial revulsion from blasphemy stalk the perimeters of acceptable speech. (In adumbrating the connection between blasphemy and censorship, Bromwich relies on the legal scholar Leonard Levy’s Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie.) Nevertheless, Bromwich goes on to say, ‘The freedom to speak one’s mind is a physical necessity, not a political and intellectual piece of good luck; to a thinking person, the need seems to be almost as natural as breathing.’

“The claim is historical. The type of person for whom free speech feels like a physical need appeared at a certain time and place, enabled by certain kinds of institutions — including, in our time, the university. According to Keith Whittington, today those institutions must be reminded of commitments they’ve let lapse. As Whittington, the chair of the academic committee of the newly founded Academic Freedom Alliance, explains to Academe’s blog, ‘”I suppose the Steven Salaita episode at the University of Illinois was a wake-up call to me on how likely universities were to cave under pressure when faculty speech became the source of a public controversy.’ (And at the Review, Wesley Yang broke the story of the AFA’s founding.)

“Not everyone is convinced that organizations like the AFA are necessary. In her essay for this week’s Review, Jennifer Ruth argues that, while ‘we must support the academic freedom of people we disagree with,’ such groups are stalking horses for the politics of the conservative donor class. She describes an ugly incident at her own institution, Portland State University, in which, as she puts it, two professors ‘outsourc[ed] the harassment of a colleague’ to a mob of online trolls. Other say that the real threat comes not from campus activists but from conservative state governments, which, as our Nell Gluckman describes, seem increasingly willing to interfere in university curricula. (For his part, Whittington, of the AFA, lists ‘state legislatures … considering proposals to restrict what can be taught in a college classroom’ as an area of concern.)

“The smoke of the culture wars risks obscuring some real differences in principle. As Salaita explained a couple of years ago in ‘My Life as a Cautionary Tale,’ ‘I do question the wisdom of allowing a civil liberty to dominate notions of freedom.’ On this view, free speech (as expressed in the institution of academic freedom) achieves a range of positive goods (it ‘preserves democracy,’ ’emboldens research,’ and ‘facilitates faculty governance’) but should not be seen as an end in itself. Bromwich’s ‘thinking person,’ for whom ‘the freedom to speak one’s mind is a physical necessity,’ would presumably disagree. These are fundamental problems; they will not evaporate with the passing of the current campus dust-ups.”

Whole article:

https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/chronicle-review/2021-03-22?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2124970_nl_Chronicle-Review_date_20210322&cid=cr&source=ams&sourceId=4910003

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