This post is so important that it is the only one I have scheduled today. Please read it and share it with your friends, your local newspaper, your local radio station, your elected representatives, social media, anyone who cares about the future of our society. This is not a reprint. The author, Josh Cowen, wrote this post for this blog.
Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been studying vouchers for more than 20 years. He has been a member of the teams conducting major studies of vouchers. When I read his article in The Hechinger Report, where he declared that he was convinced that vouchers were disastrous for students who use them, I wanted to know more about him and his experience. I wanted to ask him, “Why did you change your mind?” That’s the question that’s been asked of me hundreds of times. I have a simple answer and a complicated answer: the simple answer is “I was wrong.” The complicated answer is contained in my recent books, starting with The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
I invited Josh to explain his views for my blog, and he graciously accepted. I consider this piece to be one of the most important statements I have posted in the decade this blog has been live. Please note two points he makes:
One, vouchers harm the children who leave public schools to use them.
Two, most of the early voucher research was conducted by researchers who were partisan supporters of vouchers.
Josh Cowen writes:
It’ll be a few more days for the final election results to be tallied nationwide, but it seems clear that with midterm wins by voucher supporters in places like Oklahoma, Texas and even Pennsylvania—where even the Democratic gubernatorial victor is on record in cautious favor—voucher opponents are going to have to keep working hard to block public funding of private and religious schools.
School vouchers have devastating effects on student outcomes. Full stop. That’s something even the nation’s voucher advocate-in-chief Betsy DeVos has had to admit, because the data are so stark.
Large-scale independent studies in D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores. That’s also a similar impact in Louisiana to what Hurricane Katrina did to student achievement back in 2005.
Think about that next time you hear a politician or activist claim we need taxpayer support for private schools to offset what the pandemic did to student learning. Here, their cure would in test score terms be quite literally worse than the disease.
There’s another data point you need to know up front: vouchers overwhelmingly fund children who were already in private school without them. In states that have released those numbers—Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin—we know more than 75% of voucher applicants came from private schools.
The bottom-line: most kids using vouchers didn’t need them to go to private school, and the few kids who actually did use vouchers to transfer sectors schools suffer average test score drops on par with what a once-in-a-generation pandemic did to test scores too.
If you’re a picture person, our friends at the National Coalition for Public Education were kind enough to put their considerable talents into two graphics based on these data I provided to them.
Notice the citations these graphs include. They’re the same as the hyperlinks above. These data come from independent sources and from non-partisan journalists. That’s a critically important part of this story.
And then there’s this, before we get into the details: the same people pushing vouchers are the same people working to undermine fair elections and the right to vote.
None of these are metaphors, and this is not a drill.
So how did we come to this?
1. A Quick History of Voucher Research
First let’s talk about the evidence.
I came into the school voucher research community early. It was around 2001 or so, as a young graduate student assistant for a study of privately funded vouchers led by the conservative professor Paul E. Peterson who was based at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford (never heard of Hoover? Think Condoleeza Rice.)
Peterson and his protégé Jay Greene had already done one study of Milwaukee’s publicly funded voucher program, as well as the one in Cleveland that was about to be the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first favorable ruling on voucher funding. That work generally showed positive results for vouchers. As did the research of a young academic named Cecilia Rouse, who is now President Biden’s chief economist.
But they were small programs. What policymakers and researchers call a “pilot phase.” Back then when both parties cared at least nominally about evidence, you wouldn’t expand a program like vouchers without testing it. So those early tests seemed somewhat positive.
The first research I joined was Peterson and team’s next project: multi-site studies in Dayton, New York City, and Washington D.C. Those programs were also pilot-size. And the New York site in particular showed some limited evidence of voucher success. But overall the lead researchers focused as much on things like parental satisfaction and measures of civic engagement as metrics. That work resulted in a book called The Education Gap. You can find my name in the credits if you own a copy. If you don’t own one, don’t waste your money.
No one knew it at the time, but the mixed results documented in The Education Gap were to be the best vouchers were ever going to do—and ever have done since by an academic based team looking at voucher test scores.
Just a short time later in 2005, I joined a new voucher evaluation led by Patrick Wolf, another Peterson protégé and contributor to The Education Gap. Wolf was by then ensconced with Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, a Walton Family-funded academic group that was about to train a new generation of voucher advocates. Most notably Corey DeAngelis, now at Betsy DeVos’s 501(c)4 voucher lobbying group American Federation for Children.
The Milwaukee evaluation, which was officially done for the state of Wisconsin, lasted from 2005-2010. We found no evidence in five years that voucher kids outperformed public school kids. Two exceptions: we found limited evidence that graduation rates and college enrollment were somewhat higher for the voucher kids. We also found that voucher kids improved when the state required private schools to participate in the same No Child Left Behind-style accountability systems as public schools. In particular once voucher schools knew their performance would be made public they—shockingly!—improved their outcomes.
At the same time as the Milwaukee evaluation, Patrick Wolf and other Arkansas colleagues were working on a new evaluation of Washington D.C.’s federally funded voucher program. That study showed no difference in test scores, but large positive graduate results.
That pattern of “no test score benefits, some attainment benefits” has stuck in the research narrative even among voucher skeptics. But as I recently explained in a piece for the Brookings Institution, it’s just that: a narrative. Other studies in New York, Louisiana and Florida all show no real advantages for vouchers on educational attainment.
And certainly nothing to offset the cataclysmic results that began to come out after the early-stage evaluations I just described. The newer D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio studies that took place after 2013 and have showed pandemic and Katrina-sized harm to student test scores are all of at-scale voucher programs.
What do I mean by “at scale?” I mean that despite limited evidence in those pilot programs, vouchers have been steadily expanding across the country, and within states. So those D.C., Indiana Louisiana and Ohio studies represent our best understanding to date of what happens when you expand vouchers beyond the initial test phase. The answer: horrific impacts on student outcomes.
There are a number of reasons this could be, but I tend to argue we need not overthink this. Vouchers just don’t work. The kids who stand to gain from private schooling were and are already there. For the vast majority of kids, they’re better off in public schools. That’s what the latest voucher research shows.
As an example of what I mean: consider that in Wisconsin (which has not had a statewide study since ours ended in 2010), 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and then closed and failed since public funding began in the early 1990s.
That’s what happens when policymakers divert tax dollars to private schools: it’s like venture capitalism for education. It’s like Theranos but for private schooling. New providers race to gobble up new taxpayer money, but most of them have no business near kids.
Now, to fully understand why these terrible policies exist and in fact have never spread faster and further than they are today, we need to understand the politics. And to understand the politics, we need to understand the money.
On the one hand it’s pretty simple. Once you understand that the same people pushing vouchers are the same people funding groups that insist Donald Trump won the election and are now organizing a similar “Big Lie” for 2022’s results, you understand a lot. But read on.
2. Funding Vouchers, Funding Election Lies
It’s difficult to tell how much money has been spent to advocate for school vouchers over the years. But we know perhaps the biggest single funder—perhaps even larger than Betsy DeVos herself—is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation is a little-known group based in Wisconsin and they’ve given tens of millions of dollars to voucher activism over the years.
Bradley not only funds voucher activism, it funds voucher research too. It was a major funder of the Milwaukee evaluation I was part of and described above. I don’t think they directly influenced our results, but generally speaking you don’t want activism and research funding to mix. Think about it this way: should the Sackler family fund research on the addictive properties of oxycontin? Should Exxon fund studies about the existence of climate change?
For me though, the real problem today is that the Bradley Foundation is hardly limiting itself to supporting research and political advocacy for private schooling. As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has meticulously documented in her reporting on financing behind Big Lie activism sowing doubts about President Biden’s 2020 victory, the Bradley Foundation is the convening funder around those activities—the “extraordinary force”, in Mayer’s words, funding and coordinating the Big Lie and other efforts to undermine the integrity of democratic elections.
Bradley is not alone. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing organization known for its pro-voucher advocacy is, according to Mayer, “working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.”
In recent months, Heritage has also distributed talking points that under the guise of objective research attack school diversity and inclusion and directly question health care support for LGBTQ children. Heritage has recently released a report-card style rubric rating state laws on a so-called “Education Freedom” index for tax-supported private tuition. That report card includes the extent to which issues like diversity or sexual preference are components of public school teaching curricula.
The author of each of these documents is a Heritage Senior Fellow named Jay P. Greene. The same Jay Greene who while a conservative scholar at the University of Arkansas was co-director of that Bradley-funded voucher project that hired me back in 2005.
Greene is not alone in the Heritage-Bradley nexus. Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who participated in Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding evidence that would overturn the state’s election results, was actively training poll watchers to question voters leading up to the 2022 midterms in places like my own state of Michigan. The night before the election, the New York Times even ran a story about Mitchell’s work in Michigan. The headline read: “Fueled by Falsehoods, a Michigan Group is Ready to Challenge the Vote.”
Mitchell is a known elections conspiracy theorist, according to CNN, and figures prominently in Mayer’s New Yorker reporting on broader election-related organizing. In her spare time Mitchell is on the Board of Directors of—wait for it!—the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. She’s actually an officer on the Board too.
Michigan is important because we have a voucher proposal waiting to go to the state legislature—even though voucher opponent Gretchen Whitmer has won reelection. That proposal, backed by billionaire and privatization advocate Betsy DeVos, exploits a quirk in the state law allowing lame-duck Republicans to pass the voucher plan without the governor’s signature.
The spokesman for the DeVos voucher campaign is a man named Fred Wszolek. Wszolek is also the strategist for a group that tried unsuccessfully to prevent abortion access from becoming enshrined in the Michigan state constitution. And he heads a political action committee (PAC) called Michigan Strong, which has worked to elect now-defeated DeVos-backed GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon.
Also working for Dixon was Kyle Olson of the Education Action Group, an entity devoted to right-wing education reform that’s received money from Charles Koch, the DeVos Family and Harry Bradley—he of the Bradley Foundation.
That’s just one example, but you get the idea: the same people working to push school vouchers are the same people working to undermine elections. And in some cases even reproductive rights.
3. So Why Now?
I’ve spent the last six months writing column after column in opinion pages across the country trying to warn ordinary readers who aren’t education lifers about the dangers of vouchers. You can read samples here or here or here or here if you like. There are more than 10 in all.
Because of my long career working in the middle of all these voucher advocates and researchers, I’ve been asked multiple times what changed my mind. Or, more specifically, why am I speaking out today?
I hope the story I’ve told you above answers some of that. But the reality is, I was also doing other things. I had a young family, other research interests, and other professional tasks like editing the country’s premier education policy journal.
Most of all I had a naïve sense that the facts would speak for themselves. Remember, those pandemic-sized voucher failures began appearing back in 2013. I was an associate professor then, newly arrived at Michigan State University after receiving tenure at the University of Kentucky.
To me, after a decade of mixed-at-best results that I outlined here, I assumed that catastrophic results like those in Louisiana—and then confirmed in Indiana, Ohio, and D.C.—would have killed vouchers a thousand times over.
It’s sort of quaint now, that assumption of mine. In my research community, which is centered in the Association for Education Finance and Policy, we talk a lot about using evidence to inform policy. It’s a nice idea, but vouchers are the big, glaring and alarming counterpoint. We have never seen such one-sided, consistently negative research results as we have for school vouchers in the education research community.
And yet they thrive.
To me, the piece to that puzzle is politics. Negative voucher results aren’t the only thing to happen since 2013.
2016 happened. Donald Trump happened. January 6th happened. Dobbs v. Jackson happened.
Voucher advocates are overwhelmingly on one side of those events. And they’ve racked up some wins.
We know voucher programs exist today not for how they might help some kids, but for how they might exclude others. We know private schools taking public money can and often do discriminate against certain children. In Florida for example, one private school barring LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools refusing to admit LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents!—or about 1 out of every 10 private schools on the taxpayer dime.
I wish I had come around earlier to the level of alarm I’m raising today. Others have even without having to take a kind of road to Damascus like I did.
I’m a tenured full professor now. I’ve had a successful career working hard to bring evidence to public policy. I firmly believe that school vouchers are a fundamental threat not just to student learning, but also to democracy and to human rights.
So on vouchers I’ve come to the same view any number of us would if we stumbled onto a massive fraud in our workplace, or if we saw a young child being bullied simply for being who they are. None of it is okay.
And if you see something, you have to say something.
You can find Josh Cowen on Twitter
@joshcowenMSU
The greatest sin of the voucher and privatization crowd is that they don’t give a damn that private enterprise could never provide the seats needed to educate every child in America. They simply only care about their wealth and power over others. Remember that Devos’ principal means of gaining wealth is the discredited and unethical Amway pyramid scheme that she brazenly uses in her for profit charter business. I cannot understand why the Democratic Party has not exploited this with a full throated advocacy for public schools. Polls, as inaccurate as they may be, indicate that 75% of parents who have children in public schools are happy with their schools. If progressives get to work and advocate real policy for teachers and school communities, the likes of Betsy Devos would fade into the past. Democrats have to stop lending any credibility to privatization and advocate full funding of the public schools. Full stop.
“I cannot understand why the Democratic Party has not exploited this with a full throated advocacy for public schools.”
Nor can I. I keep wondering why the democrats do not dig in particular gardens. Perhaps I am just weird.
The Democratic deal involved the tech moguls (and possibly, Bloomberg). The current threat is that the tech money will go to GOP politicians. What will the political landscape look like when and if that money shifts? Dems need both votes and money.
Gates funded CAP (John Podesta’s political organization).
That work generally showed positive results for vouchers. As did the research of a young academic named Cecilia Rouse, who is now President Biden’s chief economist.”
Ok, now you have my attention.
“they were small programs. What policymakers and researchers call a “pilot phase.”
Which should have been a big red flag, not incidentally.
Anyone who knows anything at all about statistics knows that the validity and reliability of conclusions drawn from a study are highly dependent upon the sample size and whether the sample was representative of the population at large.
“Back then when both parties cared at least nominally about evidence, you wouldn’t expand a program like vouchers without testing it. So those early tests seemed somewhat positive.
Ok. Does the author want us to believe that folks like George Dumbya Bush gave one hoot about evidence? (For education, going to war or anything else)
Sorry,but I’m not buying it.
Not sure why that ended up there.
On second thought, I am sure: WordPress “engineering.”
All Bush et al cared about was the “appearance of support” for their policies.
And just as today, there were lots of right wing think tanks back then who were more than happy to provide such “support” (for a fee, of course)
the current threat
the one with the Musky smell
“I cannot understand why the Democratic Party has not exploited this with a full throated advocacy for public schools.”
Because many Democrats depend for donations upon the same fat cats that Repugnicans depend upon.
True, but the complicity of Democrats in this bi-partisan reform has not helped them politically. Part of the tone deaf response is also due to the overwhelming number of Democrats in Washington who send their kids to private schools. The result of this practice is a Democratic Party culture that has little understanding of what takes place in a public school and the breadth of needs served particularly in schools that serve underprivileged students. Therefore, the Democratic establishment not only ignores the fact that public schools are underfunded, but what that actually means. When they pay over $30,000 per year, some pay far more, for their kids to go to elite independent schools they ignore the fact that $15,000 per pupil, in red states it is far less, does not provide the academic or social needs of students in public schools that would provide equal opportunity.
Many, many years ago, when I was quite young and stupid, I enrolled my daughter in a fancy Washington-area private preschool (on the grounds of a K-12 school). The school had vast gardens, a boathouse and rowing on a pond, stables with ponies. When was the last time you saw THOSE at a public school? Yeah, these people live in a different world. They are like George Bush Sr. being amazed at automatic price scanning technology in a grocery store. They are out of touch, clueless. To my credit, I soon came to my senses and pulled her out of those schools.
This is why Ted Kennedy was so shamelessly hoodwinked in to co-signing on NCLB. It also explains Barack Obama’s clueless support for testing.
Well observed, Paul.
Paul: I have a good friend whose political attitudes are on the right of the political spectrum. Back in the day when NCLB was bringing testing into our school and those of us who were experienced could see the potential harm to the system that would (and ultimately did) occur, he confided in me that NCLB was the brainchild of Ted Kennedy. Being complicit in the implementation of this failed project made people like my friend able to shift the blame from the Republican Party (Bush II et al) to the bugbear du jour. That Kennedy had credentials as a progressive made the matter worse.
the motto for so many of those saying they will “fix” schools: They don’t give a damn
Well! What a relief. I thought politicians had progressed beyond rewarding their constituents with money. Makes me feel at home. Back in the old days, politicians just offered whisky at the polls. Now they figure out ways to help their group so that they look like what they are doing is good policy. This is a case in point.
Republicans are fond of grousing that the democrats are buying votes with their forgiveness of college loans, support for Medicare, and similar programs they call entitlements. Of course, voucher money is promoting excellence in education. Quite different, you see. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander.
Democrats should attack vouchers and charters and backpacks full of cash as what they are: payment for votes.
“Well! What a relief. I thought politicians had progressed beyond rewarding their constituents with money. Makes me feel at home. Back in the old days, politicians just offered whisky at the polls. Now they figure out ways to help their group so that they look like what they are doing is good policy.”
Like this:
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/11/15/opening-the-floodgates-for-profiteers-of-war/
Thanks, Duane. Military profits always seem to lie in bed with crisis.
A significant fraction of American workers depend either directly or indirectly on military contracts, which is why things will never change. They simply don’t care how much money is wasted or where the money goes as long as they get their piece of the ever increasing pie.
They convince themselves that all the trillions are justified for “defense”, but it stopped being about defense a very long time ago.
It is primarily about money.
The perpetuation of the long running F35 boondoggle is a perfect example.
Even Sanders , who claims to support Pentagon cuts, backs the F35 ( which has been dubbed the “flying lemon” because it can’t fly in thunderstorms and has seen several crashes, including one just a few weeks ago) because of the jobs for Vermont.
Have the courage of your convictions and advocate that going forward no parent will have the legal right to do what you did: send your kids to private schools because you were affuent enough to be able to do so. No matter how bad the traditional public schools are in any area, every child must go there, and all teachers must pay union dues to the AFT or NEA.
You present a false dichotomy. In your view, we see the parents required to send their children to horrible places by a tyranny versus the utopia of government providing opportunities through vouchers. Neither of those pictures is accurate.
The only thing ever advocated on this website by anyone I ever read was that government money should pay for schools for all of us, not just some of us. As a regular commentator on this site, I am grateful I got to attend a private school, but mindful of the things I missed out on by doing just that. If you can afford it, send your children to a private school you feel serves your needs. Just don’t expect me to fund it the way we have determined to fund community schools, which are, by law required to serve the community.
You missed your calling. It was in diplomacy. Mine wasn’t, hence the brevity of this comment.
I agree with your general point Roy, but it is a fact, that without vouchers, only those with resources are allowed to attend what are perceived to be the best schools. I agree that government money should pay for schools for all of us, a strong argument can be made that therefore everyone should be able to access a voucher for a private school. In most of the 16 states that have vouchers, they are limited to low-income families, the disabled, or students attending failing schools as measured by standardized testing.
I think the argument that vouchers are evil and should be eliminated is a non starter. They are not going away. Vouchers are common for public housing assistance. The government pays for certain groups to see private medical practitioners. The idea that government should not pay for private services ignores reality. To differentiate between medical care, housing, and education would be to say education is less important than housing and medical care. Is that really what we want to say??
Public services are generally take or leave it scenarios. If I am unhappy with the police, rescue squad or fire department, I cannot shift tax dollars to a private substitute. I pay for police and fire departments, even though I’ve never needed their services. That’s how public services generally work. Privatization turns a common good into a private commodity at the expense of the public schools. Why should the public service suffer for the sake of private interests? When it comes down to vouchers, they serve less than zero educational value, and they are driven by political extremists that want to destabilize public education.
MjGB:
” In most of the 16 states that have vouchers, they are limited to low-income families, the disabled, or students attending failing schools as measured by standardized testing.”
Numerous studies have contested this reality in the application of vouchers. Similarly, studies have shown that voucher schools “cream” the easiest students to teach. How is this teaching all of us?
Greg: Thanks for the compliment. Diplomacy has a name much worse than it deserves. My mother was a person who could tell you hell was in your future in such a welcome that you might have thought you had been invited to the great feast. The reason she was so good at it was that she truly meant to change your mind to agree with her more than you seemed to at the beginning of your relationship with her. Like Gandhi, she truly believed people were good. She wanted you to come toward her position, if only a little.
To AKA… YOU talk about being unhappy with the police… sure you can. If you have he resources, you can hire your own security, or move to a neighborhood that offers private security. Again, the point is only those with the resources can do that. YOu can argue the quality of the policing just like you can argue the quality of public education, but thats a different argument.
MjGB,
The multiplier effect of local dollars spent locally enables my community to survive. My local schools build a sense of community and unity. Recipients of my tax dollars for public schools aren’t living in remote wealthy enclaves. I vote for my school board retaining local democracy. My pubic dollars don’t fund somebody’s mystical church that inculcates the belief that women are 2nd class citizens. And, they don’t fund worthless notions like creationism.
I like to pay for public universities but, not private universities because if my dollars went to schools like Princeton, they would perpetuate the legacy advantage. Legacies already eat the bread for which others toil.
Lincoln warned against people like you.
Liz Collins,
There is a straightforward reason that public money supports public schools: they are public.
You can send your child to a private school, but the public should not pay for it.
You can hire a private security guard, but the public should not pay for it.
You can build a private swimming pool, but the public should not pay for it.
The public pays for public goods and services, not for private choices.
“You have the right to obtain an abortion, but the taxpayers should not have to pay for it.” Do you agree?
Liz Collins:
Abortion rights have been drastically limited in many states and isn’t the Hyde Amendment still in effect? The GOP is working overtime to limit and even ban abortions by the more extreme GOP pols.
Comparing public funding of education to public funding of abortions, it doesn’t compute. Everyone has the right to a free public education K-12 and it is a myth that the schools are failure factories or horrible torture chambers. Sure, in poorer communities or high crime areas the schools may be operating under some very hard circumstances. The answer is not vouchers but better funding of the real public schools. No matter how you slice it, vouchers take money away from the public schools.
Democratic republics cannot survive without strong support for public education.
Our public education system is too often taken for granted by many and much maligned by extremists. Public schools have elevated individuals, informed voters and enriched local communities. Destroying public education is like blowing up a pillar of democracy. Sure, some schools could do better, but they can only do better with investment, not market based lies or misinformation.
No one is advocating that, Ms. Collins, so that wouldn’t be a matter of having “the courage of [one’s] convictions.” Those of us who oppose this nonsense don’t want to REQUIRE that people go to public schools. We want to avoid having people be forced to pay taxes that go to paying for private school, and especially private school for people who would have paid, anyway, to send their kids to private school. And we especially detest the notion of having our tax dollars go to fund Christian fundamentalist madrasas where kids are taught that men are leaders and grown-up “girls” are handmaidens, where whites, and especially, American white Christian cis males, are superior, in general, to everyone else.
If rich people had to send their kids to public schools then they would be adequately funded in a heartbeat.
yes
There are high schools in affluent communities all over the nation that attest to this truth.
That is the case in many wealthier districts. The wealthy do send their kids to those Public Schools .
This is also due to websites like “Great Schools. org” that uses random parent grievance to rate schools. The real estate industry feeds off of this model to jack up property values in districts with schools of high repute over districts that are serving the underprivileged. We should put a spotlight on the negative role real estate companies have played in driving the profound inequality that exists among public schools.
I just looked it up and according to USA Today, less than 50% of teachers are union members. If you include professional organizations, which do not have union power, that number is just above 70%. So no, all teachers do not pay union dues. Politicians target unions because they detract accountability away from their paltry record on school funding.
Since when is 16 nearly half of 50? Maybe thats true in public schools??
Actually, that’s the new math as taught at the Harvard Business School.
Or the Harvard economics department.
Rumor has it that winning the fight
against inequality involves shifting norms.
WHO cedes power because of a great
powerpoint, or brillant argument?
Power by it’s basic nature, demands
inequality, in order to exist.
Petitioning power with concerns of
inequality, works as good as
“Democrats” shoulda-woulda-coulda.
What part of obvious eludes you?
”The Master’s Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master’s House”
So, your advice is, “Stop making rational arguments”?
Uh, no.
Uh, no Bob, wrong guess. My advice involves
shifting norms.
Norms- Plural noun for something that is
usual, typical, or standard.
You have penned volumes of
“rational arguments”.
“Rational arguments” are
posted daily here, as well.
If the “proof” of a strategy, is
revealed in the results,
(meaningful change or not),
what is the point of doing
the same thing over and
over again?
You can’t shift Norm. All the Cheers episodes are in the can.
We are in a dangerous era of deform in which facts and evidence no longer matter. Vouchers are ideologically driven as this post demonstrates. They are a means of sorting poor, mostly minority students into schools that are “desperate for enrollment,” and they are another avenue for shifting tax dollars to white families that already pay for private school tuition. They drain the public school budgets and damage the educational opportunities of students attending them. In smaller, rural districts with bare bones funding, vouchers have the potential to cause public schools to collapse under the weight of voucher and charter drain.
Public schools are public assets that enhance the value of the communities they serve. Both charters and vouchers force communities to disinvest in their local public asset and shift public funds into unaccountable private hands. They force responsible public entities into an uncertain and sometimes risky future through no fault of their own. School choice a smokescreen for moving public dollars out of democratic public schools and undermining local control of community resources while building privatization that collects unaccountable public dollars.
Accountability is critical. Public dollars should not go to unaccountable schools, including public schools. Having said that, if public schools were meeting the expectations of parents and public officials, there would be no demand for alternatives. Test scores are a horrible measure of accountability, however, it is THE only major mesure used in the United States in most locations. Other countries apply different accountability mechanisms that the US should consider. Until that happens, schools that appear to be dangerous and fail to score well on standardized tests will continue to see enrollments drop as parents flee.
Consider accountability undermines responsibility, and so we get the vicious, self-reinforcing, downward cycles of dysfunction we get because: the more accountability, the less responsibility; the less responsibility, the more accountability.
Accountability, imposed from outside; extrinsic. Responsibility, developed within; intrinsic.
Most of the demands for privatization are coming from politicians that work for corporations and billionaires, not parents. A few urban parents may prefer a charter school to their seriously under funded public schools, but there is no real parents’ movement, only clamoring from far right astroturf groups funded by ALEC and the like.
Public schools are accountable not just in terms of test scores, but also through periodic independent audits, state and federal mandates and regulations, local safety and fire codes, etc. They also must answer to a local school board, most of whom are elected by the public.
So right, RT.
Public schools are accountable by law.
Charter schools fight to minimize accountability.
Voucher schools have no accountability.
If the money went away, the demands for privatization would disappear. The so-called “parental rights” groups are astroturf, funded by Koch, DeVos or some other billionaire.
Public schools are accountable and charters count the bullion.
What the charter/voucher really reveals is that the United States, like the rest of the world, has many citizens who do not believe in equity or equality of opportunity. They have theirs and providing money for those they consider beneath them to get the same is unacceptable. Like royalty of old, such kleptocrats believe the rest of us are here to serve them.
That’s human nature. The overwhelming majority of people, including the people writing here are going to send their kid to the best school they can afford, however they define best.
Test scores are invalid measures.
Scores on the federally mandated state standardized tests are invalid measures. Here’s why:
And for this reason, scores from those state tests, and in particular, from the ELA ones, are extremely poor measures of success or failure. If one is going to write a piece like this, one must say, “These programs fail even by the preferred measure used by voucher advocates, state test scores.” That’s an important qualification.
I agree. Test scores are a red herring to justify spending more money on failed systems. NCLB, despite good intentions, was among the worst policy programs ever implemented at the federal level.
Exactly. Thank you, Dr. Guo-Brennan.
“should the Sackler family fund research on the addictive properties of oxycontin? Should Exxon fund studies about the existence of climate change?”
Yes, but those should not be the only studies being done.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Studies (plural – from more than one state) show that vouchers, that take money away from public schools and give that money to private/religious schools, causes children’s math and reading scores on standardized tests to drop more than the impact of the COVID pandemic did to the nation’s k-12 school children and the learning loss caused by Hurricane Katrina to students in New Orleans.
So on vouchers I’ve come to the same view any number of us would if we stumbled onto a massive fraud in our workplace, or if we saw a young child being bullied simply for being who they are. None of it is okay.
And if you see something, you have to say something.
YES, YES, YES
I’m on the AFT mailing list and just watched their self-congratulatory two-minute-plus video and decided to finally unsubscribe. It was terrible. Terrible messaging, terrible connection to real people, just a union self hug. If the union representing teachers can’t get their message focused, if they can’t link it to the idea that public education is as essential to our nation and Constitution as breathing air is to all of us, then it’s no wonder education is not a serious political issue. It’s a political football, but not an issue of national importance. Public ignorance about public education is deadly to our polity. AFT doesn’t seem to understand.
Until the teachers’ unions call for nationwide action to end the federal standardized testing mandate, including strikes and protests and refusal to administer the test, they are COMPLICIT IN CHILD ABUSE. They could end that obscenity tomorrow. But they won’t. But they did take a whole lot of money from Billy Gates to promote the puerile “standards” bullet list hacked together for Bill by Coleman et al. so that Bill could have a single national list to correlate computerized instruction and testing to. So, they gave him a big assist with his business plan, there, and so contributed enormously to the dramatic dumbing down of U.S. curricula and pedagogy that has resulted from that ridiculous list.
All of which is utterly sickening. The unions are supposed to represent the interests of teachers, and teachers care about their kids who have been, continue to be, so dramatically harmed by the mind-blowingly stupid standards and testing regime. And if the union leadership doesn’t grok this, then it is clueless. It shouldn’t be anywhere near an educational policy making desk.
Faculty advocates for pro-charter and pro-voucher K-12 policy who have now changed their minds-
Starting in 2022, would it take revocation of their tenure, the starting of their new families and, 2 decades, for them to fail to understand the big picture, negative impact of policy that takes public money from public universities and gives it to private, legacy admission or religious schools, like Harvard, the University of Dallas, Liberty University or Hillsdale?
Hypothetically, If people, say like those in Michigan, have contributed to future retirement pay during the past twenty years, for pro-charter faculty, what do the states’ residents deserve as recompense when faculty, suddenly, announce their influence (with their complicity) was used to harm education?
What role should the academic departments be playing when public policy is at issue and “philanthropists” push an agenda?
If some of those “changed”, charter supporters at universities (say, like those at John Arnold-funded centers) acknowledged the adverse impact of conservative religion’s K-12 schools on democracy, the consequences of the Koch network’s embrace of Catholic schools, the implication of SCOTUS’ exemption of civil rights employment law for religious schools, etc., it’s possible that a case could be made that the “changed” people actually care about the nation’s future enough to take marginal risk.
Worth a read- Arkansas Catholic’s profile of Patrick Wolfe (mentioned in the post), “A Catholic You Should Know”.
And now, an announcement from Rightful President in Exile, Cheeto “Littlefingers” Trumpbalone
Well, OK. We ready to start now? OK.
Ever since the stolen election, people have been calling me up and saying, Sir, you gotta run again. You gotta. We had a perfect economy. Best economy ever. Then all these ballots started showing up from Venezuela. Every one of them Biden. And look at us now. And I’m like, why? Why should I run? I’m like really, really rich. And I’m actually president anyway, because I didn’t lose. Yeah. The fake news media isn’t gonna tell you that. But they know. They know. For two years now, I’ve been operating the real White House from Florida. And Bedminster. And the Senile Dementia Ward at Sun City. But they aren’t gonna tell you that. No. First it was Russia, Russia, Russia. Then it was something wrong with a phone call I made. A perfect phone call. Then it was Biden got all these votes from Venezuela, so you lost. I know. And I’m like, who needs it? Who needs the grief? But I travel a lot. Ohio. Pennsylvania. Ohio. The Dining Room at Mar-a-lago. Ohio. And everywhere I go, people say, Mr. President, you gotta run again. Or we’re not going to have a country anymore. Some say, aren’t you worried about–what’s that word? Where’s Miller? Oh. OK. Ron DeSanitization. But I’m not worried because I’m a winner. In business. With the ladies. In the legitimate vote count–the ones not for Biden which they just made up. So that’s why I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States and Greenland. So they’ll have to drop all these lawsuits and criminal charges because these are interfering with an election. That’s right. What’s that phrase? Where’s Steve Miller? OK. OK. Charging me for any of this stuff right now would be interference with an official preceding–a presidential election. Am I right? And Marjorie and I will have a very special announcement sometime real soon. So, that’s all. Make sure to buy your plastic Trump 2024 straws at trump.con. It’s time we started beginning to keep America greater than ever before again again.
Trump’s handlers (Miller?) wrote him a statesmanlike, if objectively false, speech and even telegraphed that this wasn’t going to be the usual off-the-cuff rambling by King Con, perhaps in hopes of pressuring him into actually sticking to the script. But boy was he squirming, trying to do that, to read what was on the teleprompter and stick to that. He was SO bored. And so was his audience. And because he lacks all impulse control, he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stick to the script, and so what we got, tonight, was this weird amalgam of the statesmanlike speech written by someone else and the typical utter madness of Trump’s extemporizing. So, it was boring AND crazy–the worst of all possible worlds. Perhaps the worst political speech ever.
Well played!
Faculty at universities who had the intelligence (and, principles) to steer their work efforts to support for public schools, didn’t get their paths to reappointment, promotion and tenure greased by philanthropist-funding.
They deserve our respect… and, IMO, Diane’s.
So much to discuss here and so little time to discuss it while teaching. First and foremost, the privatization of anything from education to Social Security to trash collection results in poorer service at higher cost. Second, privatization is foisted upon us by greedy intellectual lightweights with money. Also, those who see the error of their ways in supporting privatization are intellectual heavyweights. Thank you, Professor Cowen for your thoughtfulness. Additionally, Democrats like Al Gore and Barack Obama can kiss my — okay, insert something really dirty here. Truly dirty. Betsy DeVos can come nowhere near me to kiss anything. I digress, but the fact that even the pandemic did not cause “learning loss” as great as did privatization should be cause for alarm on a scale that does not deserve to be swept under the rug.
It’s never too late to come to the right side. However, the distinction in Diane’s case is important. At the time she changed her position, the waters were unchartered. By the time that DeVos and John Arnold gave Michigan State money to, IMO, promote charter schools, research into the issues was already abundant. Diane changed her view and suffered significant consequences for it. She believed so strongly in her change that she sacrificed to create the Network for Public Education
& now this: MacKenzie Scott (the Good Witch to the Wicked Witch Bezos) just donated millions (billions? I have to find the newspaper article) to…some charter schools. Again, we have this problem: my husband & I were watching the 2021 documentary, “Icahn” (on HBO Max), which I recommend for lessons learned. Icahn is part of The Giving Pledge, Inc. (you know, where billionaires pledge to give their large fortunes to charities, public foundations, etc.), members of whom are, of course, Bill & Melinda Gates & Warren Buffett. My husband commented that Icahn is really a nice guy, such a philanthropist, etc., when my ears & eyes pricked up (we also had the closed caption on, & I backed it up to make sure I’d read/heard correctly) when I saw that he generously donates $$$$$ to “public charter schools.”
Are we Diane readers the only people who know that that is oxymoronic (the larger part of that being just moronic)?
Icahn brainwashed, much, by Bill? Carl may know the financial world, but, like Bill, et.al., knows NOTHING about public education in the U.S.
I’m a couple thousand miles from Wisconsin, but the mention of Scott Walker is still a trigger of rage and pain.
Much closer in Blue (thank G-d!) IL (ILL-Annoy only meant for Rauner’s Reign of Terror & egregious Error). I feel your rage, pain & my intense disgust. I’ll never forget when I went to a St. Pat’s GOP dinner (guests of, well, a Republican member) & they voted on who they would like to most see run for president. Of course, it was Scott Walker, almost unanimously.
&…into oblivion (I hope), which is where I wish Ron Johnson would have disappeared.