The Misssouri Times is a generally right of center newspaper, But it believes in the promise of public schools and recognizes that the latest push for charters and vouchers is rank privatization funded by wealthy elites. After thirty years of pouring billions into charters and vouchers, there is no reason to believe that privatized schools produce better outcomes. We know they don’t.
Opinion: Public Schools are Public Goods
BY TERESA MITHEN DANIELEY ON APRIL 26, 2021
As the parent of three children enrolled in St. LouisPublic Schools, I am deeply dismayed that so many in the Missouri House — including some Democrats — voted in favor of HB 137, which will shift up to $17 million dollars a year from traditional public schools (specifically SLPS) to charter schools, which will not be required to provide the same services as public schools. We must make sure that HB 137 dies in the Senate.
I am also deeply concerned about the statewide ramifications of SB 55, an omnibus bill with many different privatizing provisions — including the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program (aka vouchers), Charter School Funding modifications, establishing a Charter School Revolving Commission Fund to fund new charters, and changing provisions regarding public school accreditation, gifted education, and attendance standards. SB 55 sponsor, Sen. Cindy O’Laughlin let us know in The Missouri Times on April 1: “School choice will have little to no impact on rural schools.” So, in other words, the privatization Sen. O’Laughlin thinks is best for children and families in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia is so good that she definitely does not want it for her constituents or for other rural districts. This is paternalistic and racist thinking meant to further divide Missourians from one another, influenced by privateers such as the Show-Me Institute and the Opportunity Trust/City Fund. It should be noted that Sen. O’Laughlin was also the sponsor of legislation last year that exempted private and religious schools from Missouri’s minimum wage laws. Other pro-privatization bills to oppose right now (some of which may be rolled into SB 55) include HB 349, HB 439, HB 543, and HB 942.
We must reject privatizing education even further and remember that public schools are public goods. Public schools must be embraced and built up, rather than torn down. As Horace Mann, the educator my children’s school is named after, famously put it, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of [people].” We must continue to fight to make it so.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The ed reform echo chamber have promoted and marketed these “microschools” in lockstep, as usual. They jammed the legislation thru with no thought or planning (or regulation) and inevitably and of course there is fraud:
“The Arizona Attorney General’s Office has launched an investigation into microschool company Prenda and its partner EdKey over their relationship, which allows Prenda to educate children at people’s homes with little regulation.
Under the arrangement, EdKey enrolls students in its Sequoia online school and collects charter school funding from the state. The students, however, are taught Prenda’s curriculum by “guides” that Prenda hires.
The two companies then split the $8,000 in per-student funding the state provides, garnering each of them millions in revenue.
The arrangement allows Prenda to educate children with little regulation. It doesn’t have to get a state charter, have its curriculum approved by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools or conduct annual financial audits.”
Keep an eye on this ed reform idea of low wage “guides” to replace teachers- it’s becoming very popular.
What we’re watching is the ed reform ideological goal of privatization crashing into ed reform’s professed interest in quality.
Ideology is winning. Quality control has disappeared. We’ll see more and more of this as the whole echo chamber shifts Right, in unison, and they jam thru “choice” in every state.
In a decade they’ve gone from “great schools!” to “any school or commercial entity that is not a public school”.
This stuff they’re pushing is junk. It’s low quality and it’s riddled with fraud and theft and they have backed themselves into a corner so they can’t regulate any of it.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2021/04/26/arizona-attorney-general-probes-prenda-edkey-microschools/7359925002/
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“Reform” is a way to dismantle public schools and replace it with an array of unproven services from edupreneurs eager to get their hands on all that public money.
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Hall said all EdKey does is provide the state with certifications made by the parents that their children have completed the proper amount of hours each week and pass along their state testing numbers.
“We’re actually seeing state money going into a charter school and then half of it being transferred out to a private corporation with no services rendered,” Hall said. “And no state curriculum, no oversight, nothing.”
The whole echo chamber endorsed this. Not only that, they are furiously lobbying to expand Arizona’s school privatization to other states.
No dissenters, no criticism or analysis at all. These contractors told ed reformers they were the “Uber of education” and the whole ed reform echo chamber swallowed that sales pitch.
We cannot allow these people to run public schools. These are the garbage “systems” they invent with their own schools. They cannot be permitted to do this to public schools.
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I understand that the ed reform echo chamber promote and lobby for charters and vouchers. I get that. They’re permitted to lobby for abolishing public schools if their ideological views bar supporting public schools.
But they ALSO demand to run all public schools. They’re sometimes elected or hired to positions where they direct what happens in the public schools they spend the rest of their time working against.
This just isn’t fair to public school students. They should not be stuck with policy people who don’t support the whole concept of public education. That has not turned out well for public school students and it never will turn out well for them. Ed reformers simply provide no value to students in public schools. We should find and hire people who support public schools and do provide value.
If I told an ed reform echo chamber member that I was going to put a voucher opponent in charge of voucher schools they would scream bloody murder. So why do public school students get stuck with policy directed by people who don’t support their schools? How is that fair to them?
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If you’re an ed reformer and you’re pushing vouchers to unregulated private entities – public funding- then what right do you have to regulate and police and set policy for public schools?
The justification for regulating public schools is they’re a public good. If ed reformers blew up that concept then why are they directing policy in our schools? They don’t regulate or police their own privatized systems. Why should I accept them policing my school district?
They’ve now set up systems where the schools they prefer are completely unregulated and the schools they disfavor are harshly policed, by them, the same people who lobby against our schools also demand to be hired to run our schools. It’s ludicrous. None of us should accept it.
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We should refer to most urban privatization as Jim Crow privatization. Behind all the misleading rhetoric about opportunity, we need to get to the heart of the issue. Privatization is largely about moving Black and Brown students into separate and unequal schools to create profit generating financial products for the wealthy. Students in private schools do not have the same legal protections and services, and they do not have to be taught by teachers that have met state standards. They are separate and unequal Jim Crow schools.
Privatization also undermines the public schools that serve the most students. Making public schools worse to benefit a few students makes no sense. Privatization has failed to deliver better schools for the most vulnerable students. We need to pull the plug on this failed experiment. Public schools are public assets that belong to all of us. We must stop the vandalizing of our common good.
“As Horace Mann, the educator my children’s school is named after, famously put it, Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of [people]. We must continue to fight to make it so.”
Jim Crow privatization is not the “great equalizer.” It is the great divider of our young people. It segregates and promotes separate and unequal schools. As MLK has noted, “separate is never equal.”
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They all tell the same lie about vouchers, and it is a lie.
They all roboticaly repeat that vouchers allow parents to choose the same private schools that wealthy people choose.
This is not true. In no sense is a low value ed reform voucher a tuition payment to any private school, yet they all repeat it.
There’s no thought put into this at all.
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essentially said
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This contradiction will get more and more glaring as they push more and more privatization schemes.
At some point they are going to have to choose, because no public school should accept being policed and directed by people who won’t police and direct the privatized systems they create.
They can’t both “hold public schools accountable” and set up systems where private contractors are unregulated and have absolutely no public duty.
They’ve put the entire public duty on the public systems, while their contractors sashay around picking and choosing what part of “public” they want to recognize.
I don’t see a way out of this for ed reform. “Accountability” has to be jettisoned, trumped by the ideological push for privatization. That has to happen or it just gets more and more incoherent.
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High regs/ accountability for traditional publics, low-to-zero regs/ accountability for charters and vouchers: it’s a strategy, not an ideology. Sweep ‘em out of group 1 into the other two.
Ed-deformers don’t have to make sense. They pitch to every side of the question and tell each faction what they want to hear [while lining policy-maker pockets with $$]. It’s like Heinz ketchup selling their product under various labels and prices so as to capture most of the market. They can pitch “ed reform” to US govt, “accountability” to taxpayers, “school choice” to low-info voters—all the while being in fact “privatizers feeding at the public trough.”
Their backs will only be against the wall when we have publicly funded elections at every level, overturn Citizens’ United, and clamp down on revolving-door lobbyists. Could happen one day, if govt can return us to better distribution of national wealth.
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I hope the Biden administration realizes and has the courage to limit the money in politics. Billionaires have an outsized thumb on the scale that interferes with the functioning of democracy.
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I would like to agree with you. When the public leans how little or no accountability there is for charter and vouchers. If only it were true. There is little accountability for charters, and none at all for vouchers. Does anyone care?
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English teacher to the rescue! ‘Accountability’ is a defined word in English. It means liability for one’s actions. States and the federal government are NOT holding public schools accountable by making schools and teachers liable for the actions of others: of students, of their families, and of an unequal society and economy. Public schools are not accountable. What public schools are is well regulated. Public schools have elected boards and plenty of rules to follow regarding open meetings, and restricted and transparent spending.
The problem is not that charter and voucher schools are not accountable; public schools are not accountable either. Accountability is an empty word. The problem is that charter and voucher schools are not well regulated. They take public money and do not have rules to follow on how to spend it. We must fight for regulation to make privatization less profitable and appetizing. ‘Regulation’ is the word, a concept Wall Street and other neoliberals despise.
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I don’t know about your school system, but mine is held accountable by the voters. It’s not a perfect system but it works most of the time because voters are interested in how their tax dollars are spent. I imagine that it is much harder to hold large urban districts accountable but not impossible. Charters and private schools answer to no one outside their closed little universe. Then there is the test and punish culture…
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We really need to “clip the wings” of very wealthy people. Their power makes a mockery of democratic institutions based on the “one man one vote” principle. It is well past time for the Supreme Court to realize that their ruling in Citizens United has gutted the democratic process. They must have had to twist themselves into pretzels to declare corporations persons.
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The FB page for the Missouri Catholic Conference states the organization is in partnership with the Missouri Council for American Private Education. In 2018, the neighboring state, Kansas, had a Director of the Kansas Catholic Conference who left to become director of the Council for American Private Education in D.C. He listed as one of his successes, the 2014 passage of Kansas’ first school choice bill (and pro-life bills). His role at the D.C. Council is to “do advocacy work for education on the larger stage of the federal government”.
In 2013, the archdiocese of St. Louis provided funding for the passage of a bill to benefit private schools ($300,000). The Missouri Catholic Conference contributed $11,000 to the goal.
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And the Archdiocese is NOT an equal opportunity employer. If they’re going to get public money, they need to start playing by the rules !
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The official Catholic and collective evangelical leadership relies on specialized law firms to successfully exempt religious organizations from American law. In the 2020, Biel v. St. James Catholic school case, the majority conservative Catholic SCOTUS decided that civil rights employment law does not apply to religious school employers. The Little Sisters of the Poor case about employer-paid insurance for birth control provides another example of a recent legal win.
The USCCB filed an amicus brief in favor of Espinosa in the critical legal case, Montana v. Espinosa, which was won by Espinosa.
An example of religion’s exercise of power in the public square can be found in an article, “Electing Republicans is no guarantee of protecting Christian values.” (4- 20- 2018, The Leaven)
I’ve concluded, based on observations, that the conservative religious apparatuses are the most substantial U.S. segment in thwarting Democratic Party wins. The tribalism of religious followers makes politicians and media fearful. The promise of their votes propel the GOP.
IMO, it’s doubtful that western democracy can co-exist with conservative religion. The battle being waged in this century, particularly in the U.S., is between authoritarianism and democracy. Questions should have been provoked by biographical info. about John Eastman who stood with Giuliani on Jan. 6. Cleta Mitchell shared a board membership with Eastman. Questions haven’t been raised.
Jefferson said, in all ages, in all countries, the priest aligns with the despot. The plan for parallel schools to destroy public schools can be found at Theocracy Watch in the Paul Weyrich training manual. Weyrich’s work was funded by Charles and David Koch. Weyrich is credited with founding the religious right, ALEC, the conservative religious, Council on National Policy, and the Heritage Foundation.
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As you know, Diane, I have monitored st. louis for years….with special interest in the takeover of the schools at the urging of Mayor Slay and other white democrats along with danforth, in 2006—knocking a good, freshly chosen school board including a brilliant man named Peter Downs. The takeover has resulted in a drift of 12000 of the more than 30,000 students into charters, with irresponsible reporting by the Post Dispatch and other media. There has always been many republicans who do not trust charters, especially with white kids, for the old fashioned reason that they do not like government getting over involved. This is something well worth keeping an eye on, and having people talk to each other and get a realistic grip of what is going on….it is an area upon which both parties have divided views—that might not be a bad thing.
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Missouri Times: Stop the Demolition of Public Schools: They Belong to the Public | Diane Ravitch's blog
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