A friend in South Carolina sent me this public statement by a fearless district superintendent. He asked questions that most state legislators cannot answer. He knows that vouchers will subsidize the tuition of students already in private schools, and that private schools retain the right to refuse any student they don’t want.
J.R. Green, Ph.D, superintendent of the Fairfield County district sent out this letter:
Do the Advocates of “School choice” really believe in “School choice?”
Recently the South Carolina Senate passed S.39, a controversial voucher legislation that proposes to provide parents up to $6,000/year of state money to attend a private school. At full implementation by year three, the voucher program will cost approximately $90 million/year. Proponents of the legislation suggest that school vouchers empower parents to select the school that best fits the needs of their children. But does this legislation actually empower parents, or private schools that will ultimately benefit from the infusion of state revenue? The undisputed fact is that S.39 will provide private schools with state revenue, yet allow those same private schools to pick and choose the students they elect to serve. In essence, we are providing private schools with public money, without a commitment to serving the public student.
I respect any parent’s right to choose the educational option they see is best for their child. However, receiving public funding should obligate these institutions to serve all public school students, just as public schools are required to do. Private schools who receive this funding should not be allowed to deny students because they are Exceptional Education students, failed to meet qualifying scores on entrance exams, level of parent participation, etc. All students who request admission should be accepted. Amendments were offered during the debate of S.39 that would ban discrimination based on religion or disability. Those amendments were rejected and as a result would allow a private school receiving state revenue to deny a student because of an intellectual disability or physical handicap. This is the current reality for private schools in South Carolina, and I respect their right to restrict enrollment, as long as the school is being funded with private money. However, the acceptance of state money must require a different standard. During the senate subcommittee hearing debating the voucher legislation last year I shared the published admission criteria for a local private school. The school clearly outlined the following:
• Does not provide a program of study and support for students with learning disability, an IEP, or 504 plan.
• Married students, pregnant students, and or biological parents will not be allowed to attend.
• Reserves the right to reject any application for admission or employment and further reserves the right to terminate any association with students if it determines that such association is incompatible with the aims and purpose of the school
This clearly represents private school “choice” not parental “choice.”
Finally, since the Education Accountability Act of 1998, the general assembly has touted the benefits and necessity to administer yearly assessments to public school students. These assessments have been advertised as the key to improving education outcomes in South Carolina, and essential to ensuring the public can readily measure the return on the education investment. I’m perplexed as to why the private schools that would receive public funding would not participate in the same system of accountability? Why would these schools not be required to administer the same state assessments, and publish their data just as public schools are required to do? If this system of accountability is necessary and appropriate for public schools, it should be necessary and appropriate for private schools accepting public funding.
Although I think the legislation is unconstitutional, and represents little value to improving student outcomes, if the South Carolina General Assembly is committed to making school vouchers a reality, these schools must be accessible to all students, and accountable to the public just as public schools. Let participating schools open up their doors to all students, administer and publish the same assessments as public schools, and let the chips fall as they may.
J.R. Green, Ph.D.
Superintendent
Fairfield County Schools
Bravo, Dr. Green!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Are private schools accepting vouchers as full tuition payment?
Bonnie, voucher schools set their tuition. If it’s higher than what the state pays, the state money is a subsidy.
So, we know that 75-80% of the kids who get vouchers are already in private school. They are not being “rescued” from a public school. High-quality private schools charge tuition far larger than the voucher, say, $25,000-50,000. The voucher is a nice gift to affluent families.
The very core of providing public money for vouchers is public support for the ability of private schools to discriminate and for parents to choose to send their children to schools that only accept some kids to the exclusion of others. Segregation is the goal, not a side effect.
Someone’s paying attention to Diane Ravitch…
The difference between real public schools and charter/private schools that demand disproportionate public funding be taken from real public schools and given to them has always been that public schools can’t choose students and charters and privates can.
This is usually where a dishonest and greedy self-serving charter defender posts on here whining about how selective public magnet schools “choose” students, and those dishonest folks hope that they can deceive gullible people into believing that a magnet school that is part of the system is just like a charter school that is empowered by their overseers to demonize, humiliate and dump kids OUT of their system.
These rabidly pro-charter folks are basically trying to convince parents that having any advanced classes in a high school is “just like a charter” because an honors class will “select” kids. Of course, the unmentionable is that the school, or school system, ALSO teaches the other kids. Even when it means they have to pay 100,000/year plus for a severely disabled kid to be in a special school or have full time aides. Whereas a charter refuses to have any responsibility over the education of the students they do not select.
Having “selective” honors classes is NOT the same as a charter or private school. Having selective honors classes and dumping the kids who can’t keep up in the street and telling their parents that the public school system has no responsibility to teach these kids and they better find a charter school that will IS being like a charter. If a charter defender knows of a public school system that dumps all unwanted kids into charters, let me know.
Vouchers are the ultimate “bait and switch” scheme in which young people are lured into schools that fail to deliver. When they understand the grave error they have made, they often return to public schools in worse academic shape than when they left.
One goal of vouchers in the South is to send Black and Brown students to a different school from white students that have their own separate segregation academies. Public money should not be used for religious or segregated schools. If a bakery can refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple, taxpayers should not be forced to send their public money to schools that exclude students based on color or religion and violate civil rights. Public money should be reserved for secular schools that accept all students, and the most efficient and effective examples of these are well-funded public schools.
The New Yorker shines a spotlight on the work Quinta Brunson is doing on “Abbott Elementary” to expose the charter school scam of privatization. You love to see it.
Brunson is the daughter of a veteran public-school teacher in West Philadelphia, and “Abbott” doesn’t flinch from the decrepitude of the city’s education system. (For one thing, an out-of-date calendar hanging in Abbott’s main office covers up a hole in the wall that appears to be choked with asbestos.) But the show also dismantles the benevolent narrative of “escape” promulgated by the Yasses and other charter-school advocates—the notion that a public-school system cannot be rallied around and improved, only bled out and abandoned. “Abbott” grabs this idea around the neck in a conversation between Jacob (Chris Perfetti), who teaches history at Abbott, and Summer (Carolyn Gilroy), an Addington teacher who tries and fails to recruit Jacob to her school, where he’d be, she says, “with the brightest kids from the neighborhood,” “the cream of the crop from all over the city.” “We’re all about focussing on the kids who have the best chance of making it out,” Summer says. (“Out of what?” Jacob asks. He receives no answer.)
In this exchange, as when Addington offers a chance of “escape” to Josh and just as quickly rescinds it, “Abbott” is building a cogent, legally grounded argument against charter-school practices. According to Pennsylvania law, a charter school cannot discriminate “based on intellectual ability or athletic ability, measures of achievement or aptitude, status as a person with a disability, English language proficiency, or any other basis that would be illegal if used by a school district.” But, as Summer openly admits, these prohibitions are not reflected in charter schools’ student populations. In 2019, the Education Law Center found that Philadelphia’s district schools enrolled about five times as many students with intellectual disabilities as charters. They also enrolled twice as many autistic children and three times as many English-language learners and students experiencing homelessness.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-abbott-elementary-takes-on-the-charter-school-movement?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker&utm_social-type=earned
I just read it this morning. It’s a great article!
I think what Brunson has done so effectively is build the audience’s affinity with her characters. When she presents her case, it’s not a polemic like “Waiting for Superman”.
I nominate Quinta Brunson for the blog’s Honor Roll!
Great idea!
Jeanne Allen is in her sads on twitter – and Quinta Brunson responded.
She is right. Quinta did attend a charter school. Yet she is wise enough to know that the game was rigged.
Only a little right, according to Quinta’s response:
Jeanne Allen can’t do something many charters insist on from children: be still.
Quinta responded that she attended a public elementary school in Philadelphia, then attended a charter high school. Her elementary school, she wrote, has been closed, and the charter school where she was a student also closed. Scores of comments came in on Twitter chastising Jeanne for telling Quinta what she should write.
While those of us on your blog well know who Allen is, few of Brunson’s followers do. Allen was chastised for “clout chasing” i.e. trying to raise her profile by coasting off Brunson’s fame.
Can think of few who deserve this derision as much as Jeanne Allen.
A refresher: Jeanne Allen is founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform in D.C. She previously worked at the very conservative Heritage Foundation. Jeanne despises public schools. She supports every kind of choice and rates states by the freedom they give to choice schools. In her view, the best state is one that sends public money to charters, religious schools, etc. and has no requirements for transparency or accountability. Any attempt to regulate publicly-funded charter schools, religious schools, etc. is treated as an unnecessary intrusion on their freedom to do whatever they want.
Christine is right about “clout chasing.” Allen has only 8,000 followers on Twitter.
Quinta Brunson has 824,000.
Quinta has deleted the exchange from her Twitter feed but you can still see it on her replies.
Allen criticized her for portraying charter schools in a bad light because, she claimed, you went to charter schools for your entire education.
Quinta responded:
“you’re wrong and bad at research. I only attended a charter for high school. My public elementary school was transitioned to charter over a decade after I left. I did love my high school. That school is now defunct- which happens to charters often.”
Quinta’s avid followers proceeded to thrash Allen for daring to speak badly about Quinta.
Allen even claimed ”Money talks.”
That puzzled the commenters.
Those of us who have seen Jeanne over the years know she was implying that Quinta was paid off by “teachers’ unions,” her all-purpose demon.
But this was so ludicrous that Jeanne didn’t spell it out, leaving commenters to wonder who allegedly paid off their hero. Sensibly, they were having none of it.
The irony of course is that the Center for Education Reform and its CEO collect big dollars from billionaires like Jeff Yass, whose top priority is destroying public schools even though he attended NYC public schools. Yass also funds election deniers and candidates who oppose teaching of CRT. See my recent post “Who is Jeffrey Yass?” He’s a major funder of far-right politicians.
Yahoo Entertainment posted a story about the whole exchange. Allen did not come off well:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/quinta-brunson-shuts-down-critic-151809283.html
OMG Jeanne Allen has a lot of chutzpah saying “money talks”! She is the one who – according to the 2019 tax return (990) of the CER made over $300,000! And I wonder how much she made in 2022 – did she get generous raises for being the shill of the billionaires who donate to her organization?
FYI, she also paid her own spouse $11,000 to work for her in 2019! (Schedule L, PT IV) She justified it in the tax return by saying she would have to hire more expensive employees to do the work!
nyc
Another “irony” to add to the list- an Evangelical Lutheran-affiliated college gave Mrs. Yass an education award for her privatization campaign. Yass is proud of the Latin charter school she founded in Philadelphia. In Ancient Rome, advancement in education was reserved for the wealthiest and those deemed most promising. A lot of “others” who are in a minority e.g. religious, race, etc. have experienced the judgement of being, not promising. The prejudice has also escalated as in Nazi Germany.
I wish Eliza Shapiro at the NYT and Elizabeth Green at Chalkbeat could read the New Yorker piece for an understanding of how journalism is supposed to be practiced. (Hint: It isn’t presenting the entire pro-charter narrative uncritically with a short disclaimer that a biased person with connections to the teachers’ union “disagrees”. It also isn’t writing a fawning book about a charter CEO achieving miracle results which completely misses the elephant in the room — or worse, intentionally ignores it since those in power don’t like to mention it — that charters only want to teach profitable kids who give them bragging rights and allow them to get complicit reporters and writers to amplify their lies that they are miracle workers).
Jessica Winter didn’t have to spend weeks or months gaining the confidence of connected sources. She didn’t have to scour records going back years.
She merely reported what is IN PLAIN SIGHT that both Eliza Shapiro and Elizabeth Green clearly believe is not newsworthy. High attrition rates.
I am guessing that if Jessica Winter was assigned to report on a supposedly fantastic charter high school that began with only the students who came from their K-8 schools where 99% of the students were at or above grade level, and yet that charter only managed to graduate fewer than 2/3 of those supposedly “certified ready for high school by the charter themselves” 9th graders 4 years later, she would ask questions. I doubt very much that she would practice the laughable faux journalism of Eliza Shapiro and Elizabeth Green who seem to believe that the only newsworthy fact is for the reporter to ALWAYS mention the miraculous results of a charter and NEVER to ask questions of where the missing kids are. It’s pretty shocking that education reporters have gotten away with such shoddy reporting for so long. A science reporter as ignorant of statistics and how vital accurate attrition rates are in evaluating any medicine or treatment or education would be fired on the spot. So would a higher education reporter, because unlike charter school reporter/cheerleaders, higher education reporters understand that 4 year graduation rates include all of the students that originally began at the college, not the ones who were still there senior year (and no higher education reporter would be so ignorant of statistics that they would include lots of transfer students who came in to replace some of the starting cohort to conclude that attrition rates were absolutely normal.)
Interesting enough, on Abbott Elementary last night, the push was to turn Abbott into a Charter School. The parents yelled, “My kid went to your school and you kicked him out (Leadership Charter). So are you just going to pick and choose who gets to attend?” And, when I taught/tutored at one time I had students with brain injuries and all attended private schools. I told the parents, “You do realize your child will be entitled to more help in a public school.” When I asked the children, “What did the teacher tell you to do to improve?” Focus more.
BTW, Leslie Odom, Jr. grew up in Philadelphia where he attended the public schools including The High School of Performing Arts. He played the foil in this episode to highlight that public schools can better serve diverse students and diverse interests better than a “one size fits all” charter or voucher school.
😍
When my mid-size metro area’s main newspaper had a comments section on its website, I would post about this notion constantly. The anti-public school crowd didn’t care. The argument went unanswered.