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Jeff Bryant: The Harrowing Story of a Family That Used Vouchers and Abandoned Their Rights

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2023 //
14

Jeff Bryant is a professional journalist who has written extensively about the failures of corporate-style school reform. This story recounts the experience of a family that accepted vouchers in Maine and learned that school choice meant that students abandon their civil rights protections when they enroll in a private school. Please open the link and read the complete article.

The harrowing story of a Maine family shows the potential perils families face when they transfer to privately run schools that are less subject to government oversight.

By Jeff Bryant

“I am the type of parent who always made sure my kids had the good teachers and always took the right classes,” said Esther Kempthorne in an interview with Our Schools. So, in 2014, when she moved with her husband and two daughters to their new home in Washington County, Maine, in a bucolic corner of the state, near the Canadian border, she made it a top priority to find a school that would be the right educational fit for their children.

“We settled in Washington County hoping to give our children the experience of attending one high school, making lasting friendships, and finally putting down some roots,” said Esther’s husband, Nathan, whose career in the military had sent the Kempthorne family traveling the world, changing schools more than 20 times in 17 years. “Both of our children were born on military bases while I was on active duty with the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force,” said Nathan, whose role in military intelligence often meant that he was deployed to high-risk assignments in war zones.

“We said that when we got to Maine, we weren’t going to keep bouncing from school to school,” said Esther.

But after some firsthand experience with the education programs provided by the local public schools, the Kempthornes decided to investigate other options the state offers. One of those options was the state’s provision that allows parents who live in a district that doesn’t have a school matching their child’s grade level the choice to leave the public system and transfer their children to private schools, with the “home” public school district picking up the cost of tuition and transportation, subject to state allowance.

Because the rural district the Kempthornes lived in did not have a high school, they took advantage of that option to enroll their daughters—at taxpayer expense—in Washington Academy, an elite private school founded in 1792 that offersa college track curriculum and access to classes taught by faculty members from a nearby university.

Their decision to leave the public school system for Washington Academy seemed all the better when Esther, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, got a full-time job teaching Spanish at the school.

Thinking back on how the Kempthorne family negotiated the school choice landscape in Maine, Nathan recalled, “I thought we were finally going to be okay.”

But the Kempthornes weren’t okay. Far from it, in 2021, the Kempthornes found themselves in the front seat of their car while they were traveling in another state, using Nathan’s iPhone to call in via Zoom and provide testimony to a Maine legislative committee on why Washington Academy, and other schools like it, pose significant threats to families like theirs and how the state needs to more heavily regulate privately operated schools that get taxpayer funding.

Fighting through tears, they spoke of “racism” and “bullying” at Washington Academy and the school administration’s unwillingness to acknowledge and address the school’s culture.

In his written testimony, Nathan wrote of “a disturbing pattern of systemic racism and institutionalized oppression, harassment, and bullying behavior based on race, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation that has occurred for years at [Washington Academy].”

In her letter of resignation from the school, presented to the committee, Esther wrote of a school environment where she and her daughters, who identify as Hispanic, experienced “racist, anti-immigrant sentiments.” She wrote, “As the racist anti-immigrant rhetoric became more mainstream, we had to teach our daughters how to defend themselves without our intervention, and they did. However, such self-defense has been exhausting and stressful for my children, and it should not be their responsibility to constantly deflect harassment; rather they should be guaranteed a safe educational environment by school leaders.”

Although their daughters eventually graduated from Washington Academy and went on to college, the family became totally uprooted because of their experience at the school. Nine years after building their dream home in rural Maine, they now find themselves living in an apartment in New York City, embroiled in a years-long battle with Washington Academy and Maine officials, which has absorbed countless hours of their time and thousands of dollars of their life savings.

Esther has been unable to reenter the classroom as a full-time teacher due to the lingering effects of the traumatic experiences she had from teaching at Washington Academy, and both parents and daughters speak of long-term adverse mental health effects stemming from the years they spent at the school.

“We sold everything,” Nathan said in his spoken testimony to the committee. “We lost everything in your state and we left for our safety. Our children are completely traumatized. They lost all their friends.”

The Kempthornes’ story about the consequences of leaving the public education system for a private school is a cautionary tale about what can happen when a system designed to provide parents with taxpayer-supported private school options fails to consider the potential risks when students and parents transfer to these schools that are less subject to government oversight.

Their story is even more significant given the current trend across the country where states have increasingly been adopting charter schools, voucher programs, education savings accounts, “backpack funding,” and other so-called school choice options that use taxpayer money to fund alternatives to the public system.

These options are favored by politicians on the right and left, and, at least one state, Arizona, has a voucher program called the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, which every student in the state is eligible to tap.

This rapid expansion of school choice options is taking place even though there is ample anecdotal evidence and a growing body of research showing that parents in a school choice marketplace often make questionable choices they sometimes come to regret.

As the Kempthornes came to learn, private education providers that are not governed within the public domain pose legal problems that parents often either don’t know about or don’t understand, and local and state government officials often either have no authority to intercede on parents’ behalf or are reluctant to assert what little authority they do have.

The Kempthorne family’s saga, which is still enduring, is a sharp counterpoint to advocates who promote school choice as a simplistic solution for families without acknowledging that transferring taxpayer-funded education services from the public to the private realm will actually complicate parents’ and students’ lives.

Bryant goes in to describe a school culture that was implicitly racist and unwilling to act in complaints of racism.

Washington Academy is one of several Maine “town academies” that benefit from what’s known as “town tuitioning,” in which private schools receive public funding from districts that “tuition out” students to the schools rather than paying to educate them in their “home” district. These Maine academies had from 80.4 to 99.3 percent of their student enrollments funded with public dollars in the fiscal year 2020-2021. Most of them also obtain additional income by operating expensive residential programs that enroll students, often from countries outside the U.S.

The practice of using town tuitioning programs as alternatives to providing public schools started in Vermont, according to Education Week, but has since spread to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, as well as Maine.

Supporters of these programs call them a “model of educational choice,” according to Education Week, and although supporters of vouchers haven’t always held up town academies as their ideal, they’ve more recently been describing them as the “oldest school choice program in the nation” and calling for expanding them so that all students are eligible to attend the town academies.

But the rationale for having town academies and funding them with public money seems to no longer hold, if it ever did.

‘A Common Myth’

“A common myth is that town academies in New England exist in rural areas which have a scarcity of public schools due to the relatively low population density of families with school-aged children and a lack of funding to support district schools,” according to Bruce Baker, an education professor at the University of Miami in Florida. “But that’s not the reality.”

According to Baker, many of these schools started in the early 1800s, or earlier, as private secondary schools for their communities prior to the existence of public high schools “and in many cases,” prior to the creation of the nation’s system of public common schools. “Some, like Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, Vermont, were originally funded by local businessmen,” he noted.

Given that origin, town academies that are in operation today are “holdovers,” according to Baker, “of what were once proxy public schools that never converted to district public schools,” although a few have, such as Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans, Vermont, which converted from private to public in 2008.

Contrary to the town academy narrative, some of the schools are in communities that have sufficient populations to educate school-aged children. For instance, New Bedford Academy in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is located in a city with a population exceeding 100,000, according to the 2021 U.S. census. Norwich Free Academy is located in Norwich, Connecticut, a community with a population of more than 40,000.

Also, the notion that town academies are needed in Maine because public schools are few and far between seems hardly the case. “The distances between publicly funded town academies and competing public high schools in Maine is often negligible,” Nathan Kempthorne wrote in an email, pointing out that the distance between Washington Academy and Machias Memorial High School in Machias is only 4.2 miles, and John Bapst Memorial High School, a town academy in Bangor, is only 2.5 miles from Bangor High School and 2.1 miles from Brewer High School.

Public schools in rural communities are quite commonplace. “More than 9.3 million—or nearly one in five students in the U.S.—attend a rural school,” according to a 2019 reportby the Rural School and Community Trust. “This means that more students in the U.S. attend rural schools than in the nation’s 85 largest school districts combined.”

Whereas rural public schools are subject to the same government oversight that all public schools are subject to, that oversight does not extend to private schools, even when they get a substantial portion of their funding from the public.

“In private schools, students end up losing basic constitutional rights and essentially don’t have due process rights,” Todd DeMitchell told Our Schools. DeMitchell is a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester who studies laws governing school policies and the impact of court cases on these policies.

According to him, if the Kempthornes had their children enrolled in public schools they would have had access to certain rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, including Title 6, which addresses race, and Title 9, which addresses discrimination on the basis of sex. Washington Academy, being a private school, is exempt from these protections.

DeMitchell pointed to a 1987 decision by a federal courtthat ruled a private academy in New Hampshire had the right to fire a teacher who, contrary to school policy, grew a beard, because the school argued successfully that it was “not a state actor,” according to DeMitchell. That ruling’s logic has been extended to a potential 2023 U.S. Supreme Court case in which a North Carolina charter school is arguing that it has the right to require girl students to wear skirts at school because it also is not a state actor. (Charter schools are also privately operated schools that are funded almost exclusively with public money.)

Along with their problematic funding rationale, town academies also have issues with being truly diverse and inclusive schools. For instance, they’ve “long struggled” to serve students with disabilities, according to Baker. And the student populations of these town academies tend to be more white and affluent than their surrounding communities, with any purported claims of student diversity being largely due to their enrollments of international students in residential programs.

Please open the link to read this important article.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Failure, Maine, Racism, Safety, School Choice, Vouchers

DeSantis Guts Florida’s Open Records Law

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2023 //
21

Florida has strong laws about giving the public access to public records. A taxpayer recently sued to find out who was advising Governor DeSantis when he selected judicial nominees. DeSantis argued that this information was a matter of executive privilege and was not covered by the state’s open records law. A judge agreed. The Miami Herald was outraged. They sense, as do I, that DeSantis not an ordinary Governor. He wants to be in total control of the state. He wants to do what he wants to do. He doesn’t tolerate dissent. He gives off the smell of a fascist. Since he seems to be a front runner to beat Trump, I watch him closely. Everyone should.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has opened yet another front in his endless war to remake Florida in his image. This time, it’s an attack on the public’s right to know and a claim of “executive privilege” that could result in a new level of unfettered power for the governor.

The latest effort to control our state goes to the heart of what government is supposed to do: Represent the people. Governors are not kings. They cannot do whatever they like. Their work is our work. Their records are our records.

We paid for them with our taxes — just like we pay for all the work that is done in Tallahassee, work done in our name and to which we should have almost complete access, except for rare situations in which the government can prove the reason for a (narrow) exception.

But now we have a ruling in a lawsuit, John Doe v. Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Executive Office of the Governor, that runs counter to all of those well-defined concepts of government-by-the-people.

As the Miami Herald reported, an anonymous person filed suit last year asking for documents showing any communication between the governor’s office and “six or seven pretty big legal conservative heavyweights” that DeSantis revealed on a podcast that he’d consulted when making judicial picks for the Florida Supreme Court.

DeSantis’ legal team (which we are no doubt paying for) argued in court that he shouldn’t have to hand over the documents because such things should be kept secret.

The governor needs to be able to talk to anyone and everyone in private if it helps him make good decisions for the rest of us, or so the argument went. In other words, just trust DeSantis, voters. He knows best. Now run along outside and play.

DeSantis is claiming that he does not have to reveal the names of what may amount to a shadow Cabinet because he has executive privilege, a hazy concept even on a federal level, though many presidents have tried to assert it.

Perhaps Florida’s governor has gotten confused about which job he has, amid the talk of a 2024 presidential run.

But the fact remains: No such thing was ever agreed on by voters in this state. Executive privilege is not in the state Constitution or statutes; DeSantis’ lawyers just want it to be so. They want it so badly they’ve tried it in other cases. This time, though, the judge bought it.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

In a Jan. 3 ruling, Leon County Circuit Judge Angela C. Dempsey said the governor does indeed have executive privilege and therefore John Doe — and the rest of us — aren’t entitled to see what he does behind closed doors. How does he select judicial nominees? None of your business, you annoying voters. (We’ll be over here cashing your checks, though.)…

And while executive privilege isn’t in the Florida Constitution, public records laws are. Florida voters in 1992 amended the Constitution to include open records and open meeting laws.

Only the Legislature can make exceptions. Take a look at Article 1, Section 249(c) of the Constitution if you want to read it for yourself. The exceptions must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses.

And any exception must overcome high hurdles including that it be a “public necessity” and narrowly tailored to fit only the specific bit of information to be kept secret.

It’s not supposed to be used just because the governor doesn’t want people to know the identities of his secret advisers.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article271924982.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Florida

Florida: Sports Association Cancels Question About Female Athletes’ Menstrual Cycle

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
14

I accidentally posted this in the middle of the night, so am reposting.

In a surprising rebuff to Governor DeSantis, the Florida High School Athletic Association canceled a proposal to require all female athletes to supply information about their menstrual cycle. Presumably, the purpose of the question was to identify transgender athletes. But Florida reacted with outrage to the possibility that the school abd state would demand such personal and intrusive information about their daughters. Republicans like to claim that they want to curb the interference of government in people’s lives. But the GOP seems to have a fixation with controlling the bodies of girls and women. What could be more offensive than the question that was just rejected?

The Florida High School Athletic Association Thursday walked back a controversial proposal to require female high school athletes to disclose information regarding their menstrual history, following scathing criticism from students, parents, physicians, advocacy organizations and some lawmakers.

The FHSAA Board of Directors voted 14-2 during an emergency meeting to instead require students to submit just one page to schools to indicate if they are healthy enough to compete, or only able to participate partially, with their doctor signing off.

Board members Chris Patricca and Charlie Ward cast the two dissenting votes. The menstrual questions will be removed from the form.

The vote came after the board listened to emails from more than 150 people during the public comment period, the overwhelming majority of them deriding the board for its initial proposal.

The majority urged the board to adopt the recommendation to omit questions related to a student’s menstruation. Most speakers said the information should be kept between the parents, student and medical professional — not the schools.

“It is a gross and an extremely sexist invasion of privacy,’’ wrote one Miami-Dade parent of the board’s proposed mandate requiring female high school athletes to report their menstrual history or potentially be banned from playing sports in Florida.

The new one-page physical evaluation form, recommended by the association’s executive director Craig Damon earlier this week, omits any details about a player’s menstrual cycle. The school will still keep the form.

Notably, a question requiring student athletes to report their “sex assigned at birth” appears to have been quietly approved with no mention of the change by board members during the meeting, as first reported by the Palm Beach Post Thursday.

The previous form — which included the optional, though now rejected questions about a student’s menstrual history — asked athletes only to indicate their sex.

The FHSAA governs all high school sports in Florida, both at public and private schools. Its 16-member board is made up of 14 men and 2 women. Florida’s education commissioner, handpicked by Gov. Ron DeSantis, sits on the board and appoints three members.

The other 12 are elected from schools and include school athletic directors.

Member Doug Dodd, who is a father of three daughters, said he had “a real problem” with mandating the menstrual questions, and as a school board member in Citrus County, he said he didn’t believe the information needed to be shared with schools.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article272271043.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Extremism, Freedom, Gender

Missouri: GOP Rejects Ban on Children Openly Carrying Weapons Without Adult Supervision

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
43

This is one of the most bizarre stories I have ever read. The Republican-dominated Missouri legislature voted down a ban on children openly carrying weapons on public grounds without adult supervision. To this insane political party, no one is too young to carry a weapon.

The Washington Post reported:

The Republican-controlled Missouri House of Representatives rejected a proposal Wednesday that would have banned children from being able to openly carry firearms on public land without adult supervision.

The proposal, which was part of a long debate in the chamber on how to fight crime in St. Louis, was defeated by a vote of 104-39, with just one Republican voting in support of the ban. After the amendment on the open-carry restrictions for minors was initially supported by the Republican legislator sponsoring a broader crime bill, GOP lawmakers on a committee that he leads removed the firearms provision last week.

“Every time we talked about the provision related to guns, we knew that was going to be difficult on our side of the aisle,” state Rep. Lane Roberts (R) said Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
State Rep. Donna Baringer (D), who represents St. Louis and sponsored the amendment to H.B. 301, said she brought the proposal to the chamber after police in her district requested tighter regulations to stop “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s.”

“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”

While critics and Democrats denounced Republican lawmakers for defeating the proposal, some GOP lawmakers, such as state Rep. Tony Lovasco, defended the decision.

“Government should prohibit acts that directly cause measurable harm to others, not activities we simply suspect might escalate,” Lovasco, who represents the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, told The Washington Post in a statement. “Few would support banning unaccompanied kids in public places, yet one could argue such a bad policy might be effective. While it’s reasonable to be wary of minors’ carrying guns, any solution to juvenile crime needs to be crafted properly and respectful of individual rights…”

Since 2017, Missouri residents have not been required to have a permit for concealed carry, after lawmakers in the Missouri House voted to override a veto by then-Gov. Jay Nixon (D) of a broad gun-rights bill. The law does not require gun owners to take safety training or have a criminal-background check to carry concealed firearms in most public places. The move was celebrated by Republicans, but law enforcement officials warned that the law was “going to make officers a lot more apprehensive,” St. Louis Public Radio reported at the time….

The Republicans must figure that a child is a citizen, and every citizen has the right to bear arms. Even if that citizen is only six years old.

One Republican, Rep. Lane Roberts supported the bill.

“This is about people who don’t have the life experience to make a decision about the consequences of having that gun in their possession,” Roberts said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Why is an 8-year-old carrying a sidearm in the street?”

But Roberts’s sentiment was not supported by his GOP colleagues on the House Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee, who removed the provision.

“I just have a different approach for addressing public safety that doesn’t deprive people, who have done nothing to any other person, who will commit no violence, from their freedom,” Republican state Rep. Bill Hardwick, who represents Pulaski County and Fort Leonard Wood, told the Post-Dispatch.
Critics noted how quickly the momentum shifted on the proposal.“I am old enough to remember when Missouri Republicans were pretending to care about gun violence in St. Louis. Like, 2 days ago,” Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger tweeted on Friday. “That was short-lived.”

On Wednesday, Baringer offered an amendment to try to add the provision back into the broader crime bill that was being voted on by the chamber, but it was overwhelmingly voted down.

The vote was met with blowback from Democrats and gun control advocates. Among those was Shannon Watts, founder of the gun violence prevention nonprofit Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “Republicans can’t claim to be tough on crime when they’re soft on guns,” she wrote on Twitter.

State Rep. Peter Merideth (D) argued that the state cares more about drag shows than children openly carrying guns. One bill currently proposed in Missouri notes that it wants to change “the definition of a sexually oriented business to include any nightclub or bar that provides drag performances.” Another proposed bill would categorize drag performances on public property or viewed by minors as Class A misdemeanors.

You do have to wonder what legislation the House Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee passes. What do they do?

Categories Guns, Insane, Missouri, Republicans

Miami Herald: Legislature Holds Special Session to Clean Up After DeSantis Blunders

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
7

Time and again, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has exceeded his authority by one-man stunts, created to win national publicity and demonstrate that he’s more fascist than Trump.

Now, his puppet legislature is meeting in special session to clean up the mess DeSantis left behind.

The Miami Herald editorial board excoriates his authoritarian control of weak-kneed legislators.

With Gov. DeSantis’ iron-fisted control of the legislative process in Florida, it’s not elected officials who must conform to the limits of the law; it’s the law that gets modified according to the whims of elected officials.

If you pass a half-baked bill in vengeful haste, someone will clean up your mess. When you get sued for allegedly violating your own migrant-relocation program, no worries, your friends in the Legislature will expand that program and give you ample power — and cash — to make it “right.” When you tout illegal voting arrests of people who the state allowed to vote, and it turns out you might have chosen the wrong prosecutors to bring those charges, you simply change the law.

That’s the story of the special legislative session that began this week in the Florida Capitol. The urgent matter the Republican-controlled Legislature must address is cleaning up the governor’s most controversial policies. Lawmakers couldn’t even wait another month until their regular two-month session that starts in March.

To be fair, there are other valid issues being discussed: providing relief for Hurricane Ian victims and expanding a law that allows college athletes to sign endorsement deals. But this is no ordinary special session. The bulk of it is about giving DeSantis more — and unchecked — power.

Take the law that tried to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida last year. Created in the 1960s, the special taxing district is controlled by Disney and serves as the governing body for the Walt Disney World Resort. Was it time to revisit this unusual arrangement that ceded so much power to a private company (the district can even build its own nuclear power plant)? Maybe, but good governance wasn’t really top of mind. The Legislature, egged on by DeSantis, was retaliating against Disney for opposing the parental-rights law critics nicknamed “Don’t say gay.”

When lawmakers passed a bill to dissolve Reedy Creek last year, they didn’t hash out what to do with Disney’s $1 billion debt that, without the company’s ability to tax itself, would fall on the residents of Orange and Osceola counties.

There’s no mea culpa on the part of Republicans, though they did give themselves until June 1 to make changes to the law. They now want to maintain the district under a different name, take away Disney’s power to control it and give it to our almighty governor, who would nominate the five people who make up the district’s board. We suppose there’s one silver lining: The board would lose the authority to build a nuclear plant.

House Bill 5B and Senate Bill 6B are another gift to the governor from lawmakers. The state is defending a lawsuit filed by a Democratic state senator challenging the taxpayer-funded flights of mostly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. Those migrants were duped into believing they would find jobs and resources on the island.

The lawsuit centers on a key component of the relocation program lawmakers funded last year at DeSantis’ urging: that it relocate migrants from Florida, not other states.

Republicans want to get rid of that fine print and give DeSantis the unchecked authority to relocate migrants from anywhere in the country as long as they have been released by the federal government pending the resolution of their case. He also would get $10 million and the possibility to access $500 million in emergency funds because he signed an executive order declaring an immigration emergency in January, the Herald reported.

This gives DeSantis the ability to tap into millions of dollars to target any voter-rich Republican primary state in his expected presidential run, courtesy of taxpayers. The premise of the program is that the border crisis presents a threat to Floridians, but whether or not those migrants would ever make it to the Sunshine State is inconsequential at this point.

The other legislative clean-up relates to the state’s new election-crimes office, created by the Legislature after Donald Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election became a major plank in the Republican Party platform. Last year, DeSantis proudly boasted the office had arrested 20 felons who voted illegally.

Those voters told the Herald and other news outlets they were given voter registration cards by their local election offices. DeSantis’ own administration didn’t flag them as ineligible. Some cases were dismissed by judges who found that the statewide prosecutors who filed the charges didn’t have the jurisdiction to do so.

The Legislature’s first order should be to prevent more ineligible voters from slipping through the cracks. Instead, its solution is to make it easier to prosecute them after they have already cast ballots. Legislation would clarify that the Office of Statewide Prosecution can investigate voting-related crimes. The office reports to a Republican, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and is a safer way for DeSantis to score wins than going through Florida’s 20 states attorney, prosecutors who are elected locally.

One-party control of Florida’s government is nothing new. What’s new is that the Legislature has become just another arm of the governor’s office. Its role isn’t to serve as a check on the executive power anymore, but to rubber stamp and inflate the man whose ambition and thirst for the spotlight have turned governing into a power-grabbing spectacle.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Vouchers

David Dayen: Biden Delivers on Program to Limit CorporatePower

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
11

David Dayen writes in The American Prospect about President Biden’s efforts to limit corporate power and spur competition.

Dayen begins:

On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.

Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”null

The executive order outlines a whopping 72 different actions, but with a coherent objective. It seeks to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras. Breaking up monopolies was a priority then, complemented by numerous other initiatives—smarter military procurement, common-carrier requirements, banking regulations, public options—that centered competition as a counterweight to the industrial leviathan.

It’s been a year and a half since Biden signed the executive order; its architect, Tim Wu, has since rotated out of government. Not all of the 72 actions have been completed, though many have. Some were instituted rapidly; others have been agonizing. Some agencies have taken the president’s urging to heart; others haven’t. But the new mindset is apparent.

Seventeen federal agencies are named specifically, tasked with writing rules, tightening guidelines, and ramping up enforcement. I wrote to each agency, asking how they have complied with the order; all of them answered but one (the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, whose role is admittedly tangential). Even Cabinet departments that weren’t mentioned wrote in to explain their approach to competition. Clearly, agencies are aware of the emphasis being put on reorienting their mission.

Bringing change to large bureaucracies is often likened to turning around a battleship. One way to get things moving is to have the captain inform every crew member of the intention to turn the battleship around, counseling them to take every action from now on with that battleship-turning goal in mind. The small team that envisioned and executed the competition order put the weight of the presidency behind it, delivering a loud message to return to the fight against concentrations of power. It’s alarming and maybe a little disconcerting that you have to use a high-level form of peer pressure to flip the ship of state. But that battleship is starting to change course.

TIM WU WAS THE FIRST OF THE TRIUMVIRATE of Wu, Khan, and Kanter (a motto emblazoned on mugs by advocates) to actually get appointed in the Biden administration, joining the National Economic Council (NEC) to work on competition policy in early March 2021. Hiring the author of The Curse of Bigness signaled the administration’s strong anti-monopoly thrust. Khan (Lina, chair of the Federal Trade Commission) and Kanter (Jonathan, heading the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division) would arrive later.

The competition order was released four months after Wu’s appointment, but in reality, it was laid out over the previous five years. In that time, a collection of policymakers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and experts, sometimes known as the New Brandeis movement, warned of the dangers of economic concentration. Wu, Khan, and Kanter were part of this crusade, and prior to the 2020 election, they and others strategized about how to reinvigorate competition policy if Democrats took the presidency.

This is an unusual story about an accomplishment or series of accomplishments that have gone unnoticed. Read on to the end.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economics, Economy

Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Vouchers in Texas

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
9

This article by Dominick Anthony Walsh in Houston Public Media is an excellent, even-handed description of the voucher debate in Texas. The issues and arguments could apply to any other state. He interviewed Josh Cowen, who spent close to 20 years as a voucher researcher but has since become a voucher critic. He also interviewed several voucher researchers who continue to support them.

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy with Michigan State University. He’s spent years studying vouchers, and eventually announced that he opposes the policies.

“They were small programs — a couple thousand kids at the most,” he said. “Those studies did tend to show some small benefit to kids academically.”

As vouchers expanded, research results began to expose problems.

“Once you got to the real ballgame and created the fully scaled up voucher programs, the results were really catastrophic,” Cowen said.

Researchers found that voucher programs in some states led to worse test score results than natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and even the COVID-19 pandemic.

To sum it up: early voucher studies with small sample sizes showed mostly positive results, while the past decade or so of statewide results have largely shown poor outcomes, especially around test scores.

School choice research can be difficult to parse because there’s a lot of money and ideology involved.

Cowen worked on some of the early studies with Patrick Wolf, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

The former collaborators disagree about how to interpret findings.

Wolf has found some positive results around high school graduation and college completion. He also pointed to the effects of competition in Florida, where he said public schools’ test scores improved after they were forced to compete for students. But he has also observed negative impacts on test scores, including in Louisiana.

It’s worth noting that Patrick Wolf’s department and chair are funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the biggest private funder of school choice programs. when he cites high school graduation rates, he fails to mention the very high attrition rates in voucher schools. If 100 students enter a voucher program but only remain to 55 graduate from high school and 45 go to college, is the graduation rate 45/55 or 45/100?

Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher proposal would cost the state hundreds of millions, perhaps billions. And most of the money will fund students already enrolled in private and religious schools, as it does in every other state that has a voucher/ESA program.

Towards the end of the month, Governor Greg Abbott clarified for the first time what he means by school choice.

He spoke in Corpus Christi at a “parent empowerment night” hosted by Annapolis Christian Academy, where the high school tuition is almost $11,000 per year.

“Schools are for education, not indoctrination,” he said, to a round of applause.

“Now is the time to expand ESAs to every child in the state of Texas,” he continued.

He put his stamp of approval on a specific form of vouchers — education savings accounts, where families who pull students out of public education receive money. One bill in the legislature would give families about $10,000 a year that they can spend or hold on to.

The policy would mean that the Annapolis Christian Academy parents Abbott was speaking to could use taxpayer dollars for their kids’ religious private school tuition.

Now, where do you think students are more likely to be indoctrinated? At the Annapolis Christian Academy or the local public school?

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Research, Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Indiana: Parents Are Satisfied with Their Schools

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
5

Steve Hinnefeld reports on a recent Gallup Poll that shows high patent satisfaction with public schools. Parents are not seeking “choice,” yet the legislature keeps enhancing legislation to create more school choice.

He reports:

  • Indiana parents are happy with their children’s schools. A remarkable 88% said they were satisfied with the quality of their child’s school. Figures were even higher for some groups: 90% for parents of elementary children and 96% in rural areas and small towns.
  • Parents know what schools are teaching and support it: 81% say they know what their children are learning in school, and 78% say they agree with it.
  • Those who disagree with what schools are teaching are a tiny minority of parents. Only 7% don’t approve of what the schools teach, and two-thirds of those admit they don’t know what that is. In other words, “I don’t know what they’re teaching but, whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

Yet a tiny and uninformed minority – much of it unconnected to schools — seems to have the ear of Republicans, who keep pushing legislation to restrict what schools can teach about race, gender, sexuality and other made-up controversies. They’ve also promoted “curriculum transparency” bills, apparently in the idea that schools are keeping parents in the dark.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Fake News, Hoax, Indiana, Opinion Polling, Parents, Propaganda

New York: Schools Lose $1.8 Billion Per Year to Corporate Tax Breaks

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
10

An organization called Good Jobs First released a study about the economic impact of corporate tax breaks on public schools. They are working with state legislators to stop this harmful practice. Investing in better schools is key to economic development and social capital. Unfortunately, politicians get campaign contributions when they give generous corporate tax breaks.

Contact: Ron Deutsch at 518-469-6769 or rdeutschnyff@gmail.com

Greg LeRoy at goodjobs@goodjobsfirst.org or 202-494-0888

NYS Schools Lose $1.8 Billion Per Year to Corporate Tax Abatements, Far More than Any Other State

Economic Development Committee Chairs Senator Sean Ryan and 

Assemblyman Harry Bronson Introduce Legislation to Stop Such Abatements 

 

Washington, DC — Schools in New York State lost at least $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2021 to corporate tax abatements. That makes New York schools by far the biggest known losers to abatements, more than three times second-place South Carolina.

The study arrives as NYS legislators introduce a bill(S.89/A.351) that would prohibit Industrial Development Agencies (IDAs) from abating the school share of property taxes.

This study’s findings were enabled by a new government accounting rule that requires — for the first time ever — that most school districts, cities and counties disclose how much revenue they lose to such corporate tax breaks.

The study was released today by Good Jobs First, a Washington-based non-profit group focusing on economic development tax policy. The new reporting rule is Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) Statement 77 on Tax Abatement Disclosures.

The $1.8 billion in revenue losses are spread among 318 of the state’s 685 public school districts. In all but five of those 318 districts, the losses are reported directly by the independent school district. In the “Big Five” cities (New York, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers), the school losses are computed as a share of overall city losses.

Tax abatements cost an average of $541 per pupil per year among the affected school districts, which puts New York in the country’s top five. But that average masks a wide range. For example, losses are just $3 per student per year in West Genesee, where the student body is 85% white, but over $5,000 for Peekskill, where nearly nine out of ten students are of color and over three-quarters qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. And from $5 per student per year in Hoosick Falls, which is almost all-white, to $2,000 per student for Uniondale where almost all attendees are of color.

 

“Our findings are the latest evidence of New York State’s failed economic development system,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which led the campaign to win the accounting reform. “When governments disinvest education in the name of economic development, they actually harm their business climates. If New York aspires to be a ‘sticky’ place for promising companies in the 21st century, it must have a highly educated workforce.”

State Senator Sean Ryan, Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Economic Development and Small Business, said, “We all know that our state’s schools are engaged in a constant battle for the resources they need to provide our children the quality education they deserve. What most people would be surprised to learn is that property taxes are their primary source of revenue. When IDAs promise to waive a corporation’s property taxes, they are stealing money meant for school districts and exacerbating budget gaps. This forces us to increase school funding to close those gaps and sticks taxpayers with the bill. Prohibiting IDAs from waiving school taxes will support education, lower New Yorkers’ tax bills, and prevent corporations like Amazon from playing IDAs around the state against one another to get the best deal.”

Assemblymember Harry Bronson, Chair of the Assembly Standing Committee on Economic Development, Job Creation, Commerce and Industry, said: “Public education is key to opening opportunities; that is why I have fought so hard to secure funding for our schools and for our children. Public education is largely funded through real property taxes. Schools rely on this revenue, yet they lose it when IDA’s reduce business property tax obligations. These deals made by the IDAs may benefit business, but any supposed benefit is on the backs of our students, and all too often students of color. The report from Good Jobs First shows the damage to school funding and the educational process when school districts are excluded from the IDA negotiating process. The report is a clarion call to action, and I am pleased to sponsor this vital legislation introduced with Senator Ryan.”

 

“Our students, communities and educators deserve to receive the funds that are due to them so we can focus on what is our most important goal: educating the next generation,” said Andy Pallotta, president of New York State United Teachers, a statewide union with more than 600,000 members in education, human services, and health care. “As pointed out by Good Jobs First’s research, this is an issue of equity and we support efforts to make sure all of New York’s students have the opportunity for a world-class education. Education is not only the great equalizer, it is the real economic driver into New York’s future.”

“We strongly support the Ryan/Bronson bill. IDA tax breaks are a triple whammy of terrible tax policy. They do not work, they are unfair to other taxpayers, and they take funding away from public schools. IDA tax breaks aren’t free money. Economists call them ‘tax expenditures’ because they are a form of off-budget spending that takes public funding away from schools and other basic services,” said Dr. Elizabeth Marcello, Senior Research Analyst for Reinvent Albany.

 

Ron Deutsch, director of New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness noted, “This groundbreaking report from Good Jobs First should be a wake-up call for legislators and parents alike. Nearly $2 billion in property tax revenue is being diverted from our schools and provided to wealthy corporations with highly dubious outcomes and benefits to the community. Kudos to Senator Ryan and Assemblymember Bronson for introducing legislation that would prevent IDA’s from doling out school revenue like candy and giving away our kids future.”

 

“State lawmakers need to take action: it’s time to stop wasteful giveaways by local IDAs that defund our local schools and drive-up property taxes,” said Michael Kink, executive director of the Strong Economy For All Coalition. “We call on the Senate and Assembly to include the Ryan-Bronson legislation in their one-house budget bills and make them a top priority for this year’s state budget, due April 1.”

“The State is finally fully funding Foundation Aid to conclude a 30-year legal and legislative fight. It’s rather unfortunate that all this time, it’s been giving billions away in the form of unnecessary local IDAs. All this money could be better spent in our public schools, to expand early childhood education, not as giveaways that return nothing to the local community,” said Jasmine Gripper, Executive Director of Alliance for Quality Education. “Senator Ryan and Assemblymember Bronson’s bill will ensure schools and teachers have the public funds necessary to support every student’s well-being. It’s time for New York’s long history of prioritizing corporations over communities to end.”

“There are far more beneficial ways to foster economic development than giving 1.8 billion away from our public schools for corporate tax breaks. A better approach is to keep our public schools strong and well-funded so that communities are more attractive to corporations wanting to relocate or remain in the community. Our children should not become unwitting philanthropists for ill-conceived economic development projects. Moreover, homeowners, who pay the highest property taxes in the nation, expect municipalities to be good stewards of the tax dollars they receive and do not look kindly on the upward pressure placed on their tax bills from unwarranted corporate tax breaks,” said the Reverend Peter Cook, Executive Director, New York State Council of Churches.

Note: Good Jobs First is a non-profit, non-partisan policy research center founded in 1998. See more about GASB Statement 77 at https://goodjobsfirst.org/tax-abatement-disclosures/ .

 

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1380 Monroe St NW 405, Washington, DC 20010 ·202.232.1616 · goodjobsfirst.org

Categories Accountability, Economy, Funding, New York

The College Board Lied about Black Studies AP Course. It Had Frequent Exchanges with Florida Officials

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2023 //
49

Governor Ron DeSantis and his Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. denounced the new AP African American Studies course in January. They listed specific objections to the syllabus. When the College Board released its final draft on February 1, everything that Florida opposed had been deleted.

The College Board insisted that it did not bow to political pressure because the revisions were made before Florida officials denounced the original.

The New York Times reported that the College Board and Florida officials were in frequent contact between September and February 1. The first attack on the AP course was written by Stanley Kurtz and published in the National Review on September 12. Kurtz warned that the AP course was “NeoMarxist” and takes “leftist indoctrination to a whole new level.”

About the same time, the College Board and Florida officials began negotiations.

The Times said today:

While the College Board was developing its first Advanced Placement course in African American studies, the group was in repeated contact with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, often discussing course concepts that the state said it found objectionable, a newly released letter shows.

When the final course guidelines were released last week, the College Board had removed or significantly reduced the presence of many of those concepts — like intersectionality, mass incarceration, reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement — though it said that political pressure played no role in the changes.

The specifics about the discussions, over the course of a year, were outlined in a Feb. 7 letter from the Florida Department of Education to the College Board.

The existence of the letter was first reported by The Daily Caller, aconservative news site. A copy of the letter was posted on Scribd. Its authenticity was verified by a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education, which released a copy early Thursday.

The College Board responded to the letter with one of its own, released on Thursday, saying that Florida’s concerns had not influenced any revisions to the course, which had been shaped instead by feedback from educators.

“We provide states and departments of Education across the country with the information they request for inclusion of courses within their systems,” the letter said, adding, “We need to clarify that no topics were removed because they lacked educational value. We believe all the topics listed in your letter have substantial educational value.”

The discussions between the College Board and the state took place as right-wing activists across the country were increasingly taking aim at school lessons that emphasize race and racism in America. Governor DeSantis, who has presidential ambitions, has cast himself as the voice of parents who are fed up with what he has called “woke indoctrination” from progressive educators.

The back and forth between Florida and the College Board is sure to add to the controversy over the Advanced Placement curriculum, which has prompted a debate among academics in the fields of Black studies, U.S. history and beyond. It has also cast suspicion on the College Board, long criticized for producing exams that seemed to favor white and affluent students.

Supporters of the new A.P. course — which can yield college credit for high school students who do well in it — say it encourages the study of Black history and culture, which have often had only a limited place in high schools. They see another advantage as well, saying that the class will attract Black and Hispanic students, who have not enrolled in A.P. classes as frequently as white students, enriching their study skills and potentially enabling them to amass college credit.

The Florida letter suggests discrepancies with the College Board’s account of events. Florida publicly announced that it had rejected the A.P. course in January, a few weeks before the College Board released its final guidelines — too little time, the board said, to make any politically motivated revisions. But according to the letter, the state informed the College Board months before, in September 2022, that it would not add the African American Studies class to the state’s course directory without revisions.

The Florida letter also outlines a key Nov. 16 meeting to air differences between the state and the College Board over the course. In the meeting, the state claimed that the A.P. African American Studies course violated regulations requiring that “instruction on required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events.”

According to the state, the College Board acknowledged that the course would undergo revisions, while pushing back against the state’s request to remove concepts like “systemic marginalization” and “intersectionality,” which the College Board saw as integral to the class.

Nevertheless, by the time the course’s final framework was released on Feb. 1, those terms had largely been removed, except that intersectionality was listed as an optional subject for the course’s required final project, in which students can choose their area of focus.

In its response to the Florida letter, the College Board said, “We are confident in the historical accuracy of every topic included in the pilot framework, as well as those now in the official framework.” The board has also said that students and teachers could still engage with ideas like intersectionality through optional lessons or projects and through A.P. Classroom, a free website that will serve as a repository for important texts for the class.

Even so, many scholars have noted the omission of terms that, according to the College Board’s own research documents, are considered central to African American Studies as it is taught on college campuses.

Intersectionality, for example, is an influential theory first laid out by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It posits that race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity intersect in ways that shape individuals’ experience of the world.

Professor Crenshaw’s work is important to several disciplines, including African American studies, gender studies and legal studies. She is also closely associated with critical race theory, a concept that has become a lightning rod among conservative curriculum activists, who object to schools emphasizing the concepts of racism or white privilege.

Ron DeSantis threw his weight around, and the College Board capitulated. He is now the official arbiter of what history may be taught to advanced students in American high schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Failure, Florida, Race, Racism
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