This is terribly sad news. Last night, Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers Union, was killed in a car crash. She was 70 years old.

Cameron Vickrey is associate director of Pastors for Texas Children. In this opinion article published in the San Antonio Express-News, she asks the important question: What’s the end game with the privatization push? Texas has 5 million children in public schools, and about 356,000 in charter schools. The drive for vouchers has been blocked thus far by parents, the Pastors, and a legislative combination of rural Republicans and urban Democrats. But Texas is now ground zero for the charter lobby. Why? Betsy DeVos is one reason: As U.S. Secretary of Education, she poured hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal Charter School Program into corporate chains in Texas, such as IDEA and KIPP. And, Texas has its own home-grown billionaires and libertarians eager to destroy the public schools.

She writes:

Let’s have a serious conversation about the purpose of school choice.

A recent Senate Committee on Education hearing in the Texas Legislature revealed a fundamental divergence in our state’s philosophy of education. One senator admitted proudly the reason Texas has charter schools is to provide “pure choice.”

Pure choice is not the prevailing narrative that we have been told. Many public school supporters have made concessions for charter schools so kids who are “stuck in failing schools” have an affordable alternative. But now we know this is not the end game. The end game is simply choice.

The theory behind pure choice is a commodified system of schools, where each school competes against the others in a marketplace. Expensive “edvertising” is used to convince us our kids will get ahead in life if we choose a certain school. Schools will intentionally attract certain kids — not all kids — to boost their test scores and outcomes, making it look like they are winning in the business of education. We will lose the value of education that our traditional school system provides, as part of a democracy, as a public good.To parents whose kids are happily enrolled in charter schools, good for you. I do not begrudge you that choice, and I wish your child a successful and fulfilling education. Having choices in education is not the problem. The problem is the deregulated free market, resulting in too much choice that ends up diluting all schools— including charters.

Back to the hearing. In the witness chair sat a superintendent of a large suburban school district. He testified against Senate Bill 28, explaining it would allow for a proliferation of charter schools without regard to their impact on his district. He told of his district’s loss of revenue because of students leaving his schools for charter schools.

Some senators on this committee — whose responsibility it is to understand the basic formulas of public school finance — were either incapable or unwilling to comprehend the superintendent’s testimony.

A senator insisted that if tax dollars follow the child to the charter school, then it stands to reason that the district has one less child to educate and therefore requires that much less money. The superintendent politely explained that one less child reduces revenue, but he cannot reduce expenditures to make up for the loss.

If you have trouble following this line of thinking, consider: Five students leave a public school for a charter school. Their tax dollars (let’s say, $1,000 each) follow them to that charter school. So now the public school will receive $5,000 less. But the students were spread out across five grade levels and two schools. So the superintendent cannot reduce overhead costs by $5,000. The superintendent cannot cut back on air conditioning or eliminate a teacher. The budget cuts will come in special services such as libraries, art, music, languages and all the other things that make schools good.

What’s more frustrating is that many charter schools are promising to provide these special services and programs that the neighborhood public school can no longer afford to provide.

So, yes, senators, this is an inconvenient truth. We know you want to create a system of pure choice, where each institution only has to look out for itself, “be the best it can be,” as state Sen. Paul Bettencourt has said. But that only works in a fair competitive market. We are not seeing a fair marketplace. And too many bills this session would like to give charter schools even more of an edge, thereby disadvantaging traditional schools.

We cannot sustain two parallel systems of publicly funded schools with our tax dollars. And I think our senators know this. This is the real end game of their pure choice system.

I would like to tell our senators: Try marriage before divorce. You have not stayed true to your vows to make suitable provisions for our existing public school system. Stop flirting with so many charter schools and the idea of a no-strings-attached marketplace for education, and do the work of tending to your marriage.

Cameron Vickrey is the associate director for Pastors for Texas Children. She also co-founded RootEd, a local parent-led advocacy group for public schools.

Maurice Cunningham is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts. He specializes in unmasking Dark Money groups.

He writes:

Radical Right Ramps Up War on School Boards, Superintendents, Principals, and Teachers

A new professedly “grassroots” group called Parents Defending Education has joined the right wing assault on public education. It combines white supremacy with a vicious plan to launch personal attacks on elected officials, administrators, and teachers. Just another day in corporate education reform.  

This group says it is fighting to restore “healthy, non-political education for our kids.” What they mean is anything that critically examines America’s racial history or present. 1619 is out, Trump’s 1776 project to promote “patriotic education” is in. Ibram X. Kendi and anti-racism? Definitely out. Wally and the Beav, in. 

Parents Defending Education is a campaign to direct and manage attacks on educators who candidly raise questions of race and the need for work and sacrifice to place America on the road to racial progress. When I first saw Parents DefendingEducation’s website my thoughts immediately turned to an extremist front named Campus Reform. It’s a slime factory funded by Charles Koch and other billionaires that gins up attacks on college professors—especially those who research and write about race. Professor Isaac Kamola of Trinity University has written an essential piece on intimidation campaigns in the Journal of Academic Freedom, Dear University Administrators: to Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.

Most attacks are leveled against faculty of color, or those whose research and teaching focuses on issues of race. Most start with a handful of organizations explicitly created to monitor and intimidate college faculty (most prominently Campus Reform and the College Fix); from there they travel to sympathetic right-wing websites and news outlets (also created by activist donors committed to undermining public institutions like universities), before arriving at Fox News. Most attacks that gain traction involve college administrations sanctioning faculty and condemning their speech.

University administrators hear from legislators, alumni, local media, parents, etc. The professor attacked gets inundated with hateful email, phone calls, and social media attacks, including physical and death threats. Professors have had to cancel lectures; Trinity College closed down temporarily due to threats. 

Campus Reform pays student “investigators” to inform on professors who raise what they see as controversial topics. (In one case I’ve worked on, a video tape was obviously edited. That failed to move administrators). 

Parents Defending Education is asking parents to inform on their school boards, administrators and teachers. Here’s a sample from its Expose page:

“These are not easy topics: the indoctrination of children with divisive ideas, the hijacking of our schools, the politicization and corruption of our educational systems. That’s why it is critical to expose what is going on in our classrooms and school systems. There’s a reason people say sunshine is the best disinfectant.”

“At Parents Defending Education, we’re dedicated to investigating and exposing what’s happening inside our schools, and one of the best ways is to follow the money.”

Let me just pause here and issue the “Parents Defending Education Follow the Money Challenge”: who is funding you, Parents for Education?

From the Engage page:

“Why are our schools adopting destructive and radical “woke” curricula

…

“In order to begin reclaiming your school, you and other like-minded parents should also get organized. There many steps that you can take, from asking a question at school up through launching your own local parent organization. Below are some resources we’ve developed to help you get started — from using social media to expose what your school is doing to pitching stories to the media to asking tough, public questions of school officials. Everything you do helps to create accountability and oversight.”

Here’s a page for you to report an incident to Parents Defending Education. Why, the group might even include you in their litigation campaign!

Yes, you can not only trigger online intimidation and threats of physical harm on school board members, superintendents, principals, and teachers, but litigation too! Here’s a link to a civil rights complaint Parents for Defending Education filed against the superintendent of the Webster Groves School District of Webster Groves, Missouri. The key language from Parents Defending Education’s president Nicole Neily (Sourcewatch reports that “Nicole Neily has worked for many Koch-affiliated groups”):

“Attached to this complaint is supporting evidence in the form of a blog post written by the District’s Superintendent, John Simpson, on June 3, 2020. Simpson’s post asserts that that “inequitable systems and structures” exist “within our school district.” “

“Those inequitable systems and structures disadvantage “Black children,” according to Superintendent Simpson, and “[c]learly” require “much” more work to dismantle.”

And what was the occasion of Superintendent Simpson’s blog post that so enraged Ms. Niely? His heartfelt response to the police killing of George Floyd. I can’t make this up.

School board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, this is coming your way. I can’t predict the entire course of these attacks but I can tell you this: they’ll be well funded, with dark money.

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things)].

​

Former President Donald Trump sent out a message spreading Easter joy. He enthused about the message of Easter and waxed eloquent about hope for a better future for all of us. It was heartening to see him sharing the optimism so many have about a better year ahead. Since he has been permanently banned from Twitter, others tweeted his warm-hearted message about Easter.

Robert Kuttner applauds Biden’s proposal for universal pre-kindergarten, while warning of the danger of allowing the program to be partially privatized. The same could be written for K-12 education. In state after state, private corporations are using their political influence to privatize public money and si err it to charters and vouchers.

Kuttner on TAP

Universal Pre-K: Will Biden Do It Right?

There is a great deal in Biden’s American Families Plan to be thankful for. In a stroke, his administration has expanded the bounds of what is politically mainstream. Assuming it can get through Congress, which is by no means certain, the devil will be in the details.

For instance, Biden proposes to spend $200 billion over a decade, or $20 billion a year, for what the White House fact sheet describes as free, universal pre-kindergarten for all three and four year olds, through “partnerships” with the states.

Ideally, these should be true public institutions—an expansion of public school kindergartens downward to younger kids, with teachers compensated accordingly, and the federal government paying the increased cost.

The details are not spelled out in the materials released so far. But reading between the lines, it looks like something more incremental and fragmented.

For instance, the administration says that pre-school teachers are required to be paid at least $15 an hour. That equals $30,000 a year for a full-time teacher. It’s certainly an improvement over what many pre-k teachers currently make, and it sounds good—until you appreciate that the median salary for kindergarten teachers is over $59,000 a year.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild and expand true public institutions. Too many of our human services, from the Affordable Care Act, to for-profit nursing homes, to day care chains, are public-private Frankensteins. Taxpayers pay the costs, but providers operate as proprietary institutions that profit-maximize by squeezing actual care and caregivers.

That, in turn, requires government to play whack-a-mole to enforce complex rules and limit the games entrepreneurs play—and government often gets outplayed. True public institutions are more transparent, more accountable, and fairer to both caregivers and clients.

Do we really want to spend another $200 billion to expand Kentucky Fried child care? Or shouldn’t we seize the moment to reclaim the public realm?

This plan does give progressives the chance to push to have this expansion done via public schools, but the result on the ground is likely to be a crazy quilt. The legislation itself should specify that these must be public institutions attached to local public school systems if the Feds are to pay the costs.

It feels almost churlish to raise any questions about Biden’s bold plans. But, in their efforts to expand human services, Democrats over the years have made too many fatal compromises that come back to haunt them. This time, dammit, if we are going to go big and bold, let’s also do it right.

~ ROBERT KUTTNERFollow Robert Kuttner on TwitterRobert Kuttner’s latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy.