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Jason Garcia: DeSantis Planned Bigger Punishments for Disney

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2023 //
8

Jason Garcia is an investigative journalist who blogs his scoops at “Seeking Rents.” In this episode, he writes about Governor Ron DeSantis’s plan to heap more punishment on the Disney Corporatuon for daring to criticize DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

DeSantis went to war against the state’s biggest employer to demonstrate that no one should disagree with him. If there is one word that best describes Ron DeSantis, it is this one: VINDICTIVE.

Garcia writes:

Just before 9 p.m. on a Friday night late in this year’s session of the Florida Legislature, a Republican member of the House of Representatives suddenly introduced a measure taking aim at the theme-park industry.

The eleventh-hour amendment would have given state regulators the power to conduct ride inspections at Florida’s biggest theme parks — and stripped them of a longstanding carveout in state law that exempts a few industry giants from having to abide by the same ride-safety rules as smaller attractions.

The measure was filed by Rep. Lawrence McClure, a Republican from near Tampa. But records show McClure got the idea from someone else: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the soon-to-announce presidential candidate who was searching for ways to escalate a personal feud with the Walt Disney Co. that DeSantis has used to draw national attention to himself.

An email obtained in a public-records request request shows that an aide to DeSantis sent the precise language for the amendment to McClure’s office just a few hours before McClure filed it.

[To read the text of the amendment, open the post.]

Now, nothing ever come of this: McClure quietly withdrew the amendment less than 24 hours later. He presumably did so with the governor’s blessing, since DeSantis never said peep about it in public. (Both the Governor’s Office and McClure declined to answer any questions about this.)

But the episode reveals a few important points about DeSantis’ nearly two-year-long crusade against Disney, which began after the company criticized an anti-LBGTQ+ law that DeSantis signed in March 2022 and cut off campaign contributions to politicians in Florida.

First, it shows how DeSantis and his staff try to cover their tracks.

The DeSantis aide who sent the proposed amendment to McClure’s office didn’t say anything in the email that might betray what it was about. He provided the language in the form of a scanned image of a hard copy that had been highlighted by hand. And the attachment was identified only by what appears to be an automated filename assigned to it by the scanner.

It’s the sort of email someone might send when they’re trying to make sure it won’t get picked up in a future electronic keyword search — like the kind that gets conducted in response to a public-records request or as part of discovery during litigation.

This email only turned up in one of Seeking Rents’ public-records requests because the request sought all communications between certain staffers in the Governor’s Office and the Florida House of Representatives during the 2023 session — rather than only emails related to specific topics.

(Note that Disney, which is now suing DeSantis, recently accused some of the governor’s political appointees of dragging their feet on discovery.)

Second, the exchange is also another example of DeSantis’ willingness to burn millions in taxpayer money trying to squeeze Disney.

In addition to the proposed amendment, the email from the governor’s office also included a request for another $2.5 million in public money — including another $1 million to spend on lawyers, on top of the millions the Legislature has already given him.

Third, this illustrates the limit of how far DeSantis — or at least the Florida Legislature — is willing to go when it comes to punishing Disney.

Because the proposal the Governor’s Office sent McClure — the one that McClure immediately filed but then quickly withdrew — would have affected all of Florida’s big theme parks.

Yes, it would have taken away Disney’s exemption from ride inspections. But it also would have taken the same exemption away from Universal Orlando, SeaWorld Orlando, Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, and Legoland Florida, too.

That was apparently a bridge too far in Tallahassee.

In fact, just a few days later, DeSantis held his now-infamous news conference at Disney World where he threatened to build a state prison on the property. During that event, DeSantis told reporters he was working on a plan to strip Disney of its exemption from ride inspections.

But the governor made sure to note that only Disney would be affected.

“Under the proposed legislation, would Disney still be conducting its own inspection of rides, along with Universal, SeaWorld and Legoland” asked Mike DeForest, a reporter at WKMG, the CBS affiliate in Orlando.

“No, I don’t think so,” DeSantis responded. “I think what it’s going to be — and, you know, talk to the Legislature because I don’t even know that the draft is final on this particular thing — but I think what it is is that these inspections will be required for amusement parks within special districts. And, as you know, those [other] parks are not necessarily within special districts.”

And that reveals the fourth and most important truth about DeSantis’ war on Disney: He’s lying about the whole thing.

The governor has repeatedly claimed that he’s fighting for good-government reform — to eliminate Disney’s “corporate kingdom” and make the company “live under the same laws as everybody else.”

But all he’s really doing is attacking a company that criticized him, stopped giving him money, and became a convenient culture-war target for a politician desperate to out-Trump former President Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination for president.

Ron DeSantis has gleefully gone after Disney in a variety of ways — from seizing Disney World’s government district to asserting control over the giant resort’s monorail. And Republican leaders in the Florida Legislature have willingly enabled it all.

But this governor and Legislature apparently draw the line at anything that might also disturb other big donors — like Universal Orlando.

It may not surprise you to learn that Universal and its parent company, Comcast Corp., have spent roughly $5 million on campaign contributions just in the five years since DeSantis was elected governor, according to campaign-finance records. Universal has also showered more than $1 million in free park tickets, hotel rooms, meals and other entertainment on Florida politicians.

That includes roughly $900,000 in cash and $400,000 in freebies for the Republican Party of Florida — which DeSantis campaign strategists once described as “interchangeable” with DeSantis’ own political operation. It also includes nearly $50,000 just to McClure and his own political committee.

This is why, by the way, Florida politicians have for years turned a blind eye as Universal abuses a tax break that was supposed to help Florida’s poorest urban communities.

Please open the link to finish reading about DeSantis’s unethical war against Florida’s largest employer.

We now know for sure, writes Garcia, that DeSantis had only one goal here: Claiming a pound of flesh from Mickey Mouse.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, DeSantis, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Funding

Arkansas Recruits Students to Enroll in Fundamentalist Christian School

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2023 //
9

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has wasted no time in pushing her evangelical, fundamentalist Christian views and diverting public money to religious schools that teach her views. Sanders, who was Trump’s press secretary, is the daughter of fundamentalist pastor Mike Huckabee, who also was governor of Arkansas.

Sanders pushed through a voucher law, and now the state will pay tuition for students at private and religious schools. As in other states, the overwhelming majority of vouchers were claimed by students already enrolled in nonpublic schools.

The state education department went a step beyond making vouchers available. It’s now using taxpayer money to advertise on behalf of a fundamentalist school that does not admit LGBT students, and is certainly not likely to enroll students who are Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, or modern Protestants.

David Ramsay of the Arkansas Times wrote:

Last week, we noted that the Arkansas Department of Education had released a video promoting Cornerstone Christian Academy, a K-12 private school in the southeast Arkansas town of Tillar.

It’s not unusual for a state agency to promote a new law or policy initiative, which this video does by highlighting the voucher program available under Arkansas LEARNS, the state’s new education overhaul. But what is unusual is for the state’s education department to use public resources to create such an explicit advertisement for a private school. As Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University and a nationally prominent expert on education policy, told us: “[U]sually they pretend it’s about parental choice more broadly. What’s less common — what I’ve yet to see, in fact — is a state agency leaning this heavily into promotion of private education. And Christian education at that.”

The publicly funded promo for a private school is made even more awkward given the religious affiliation: Cornerstone uses a Bob Jones University curriculum known for teaching “young-Earth creationism,” the belief that the planet and universe are only a few thousand years old. It requires students to take a Christian studies class and attend chapel. The application asks parents about church affiliation and about their child’s “personal experience and faith in Jesus Christ.”

The application also asks about whether a student has ever been involved with “sexual immorality” and requires that parents agree to “maintain the basic principles of biblical morality in my home.”

I left a message with the school’s administrator to find out whether its admissions policies explicitly discriminated against LGBT students. I never heard back, but after a little further digging on their website, I found a student handbook that directly states LGBT students are not allowed to attend the school:

The significance the Bible places on the severity of sexual immorality, and our commitment to a “Christ-centered” environment demands certain standards for admittance to CCA. Therefore, students will NOT be permitted to attend CCA who professes any sort of sexually immoral lifestyle or an openly sinful lifestyle including but not limited to: promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc.

This sort of policy is not uncommon at some Christian private schools, but it raises some thorny questions about the state’s voucher program. LEARNS vouchers are  funneling somewhere in the neighborhood of $419,000 in public funds to Cornerstone this school year, part of $32.5 million projected to be spent on private school vouchers across the state. It remains unclear whether the Cornerstone promo video was made directly or funded by the education department, which has not responded to questions.

The video sells vouchers as a vehicle of parental choice, but ultimately it’s the schools themselves that decide who can — or cannot — attend. The only obligation these schools face in terms of admission is that they cannot discriminate based on race, color or national origin, which would violate federal law. But unlike traditional public schools, they are under no obligation to take all comers. 

They are free to discriminate against LGBT students. They are free to impose religious requirements. They do not have to admit students who struggle academically or have behavior problems. They do not have to offer necessary services for disabled students. We have no way of knowing how many students might be rejected from applying to a school, or what the reasons were. There is no transparency and there are almost no rules. To receive a publicly funded voucher under Arkansas LEARNS, a student must gain admission to a private school — but the entire admission process is an unregulated Wild West. 

Kicking a student out of a private school likewise leaves wide latitude to the schools. To expel a voucher student, a private school must follow clear, pre-established disciplinary procedures. But so long as they don’t discriminate based on race, color or national origin, schools are free to follow their own policies.

Among the 94 private schools participating in the voucher program, many are Christian. It’s likely that a significant number, like Cornerstone, close their doors to LGBT students. That has been found to be the the case in voucher programs in Wisconsin and Indiana. The vouchers are publicly funded, but not all schools are open to the public: The vaunted principle of school choice is, in fact, the school’schoice, and some families may find themselves shut out.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Ignorance, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Brilliant! Houston Chronicle: Gov. Abbott, Give Up on Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2023 //
3

The Houston Chronicle editorial board advised Governor Abbott to abandon his determined fight for vouchers. Fund the public schools instead. Abbott tried and failed to pass vouchers in the regular session. He then called four special sessions and failed every time to pass vouchers, despite threats and bribes. Abbott refused any increase for public school funding or teachers’ salaries. The Educatuon of the more than 5 million children in public schools meant far less to him than the chance to subsidize the tuition of the tens of thousands of children already enrolled in private and religious schools.

The Chronicle wrote:

If at first (and second, and third, and so on) you don’t succeed, try strong-arming and threats.

That was Gov. Greg Abbott’s strategy to try to pass school vouchers in the fourth special session so far. He’ll need to find another trick.

Tucked inside an omnibus school spending bill in the House, vouchers made it the farthest yet this year: all the way to a floor debate Friday. Once again, however, a bipartisan alliance stood in Abbott’s way, passing an amendment 84-63 that removed vouchers from the bill.

In the first full House discussion on the issue in decades, voucher advocates repeatedly appealed to the needs of the most disadvantaged students who they claimed would be most impacted by such a program: low-income students, bullied kids, sexual assault victims and students with special education needs. House Bill 1 author Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, promised the bill would prioritize “the most vulnerable,” including those with learning challenges.

We’ve seen the failures of such promiseselsewhere. But consider the numbers here in Texas.

While most private schools say they serve students with some sort of special education need, only 63 across the entire state actually cater to those students, according to testimony from Andrea Chevalier, director of government relations with the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education.

Those 63 schools, identified by the online database Private School Review, serve approximately 4,510 students in Texas. That’s compared to 700,000 students in the public school system currently enrolled in special education services.

Those private schools are mostly in urban centers, have an average tuition of more than $19,000 and can, of course, reject anyone they want based on their own screening criteria.

“Do you think even 5% of special ed kids that we’re proposing to do the most for would qualify or that there would be a place in a private setting for them?” asked state Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, during a committee hearing on the bill.

Special education experts know vouchers won’t help the neediest. By now, lawmakers should know better too.

Still, it gets worse. The governor has also held hostage desperately needed increases to public special education budgets until he gets what he wants. As part of an omnibus bill, vouchers were mixed with badly needed boosts to public education funding — fine arts dollars, more per-student funding, new teacher stipends and raises and more.

King asked several witnesses how much sugar might be enough for them to swallow his poison pill?

“There is no dollar amount for us that would justify the long-term damage,” said Chevalier.

In the proposed program’s first wave, some 40,000 students would get $10,500 each at an estimated cost of $461.8 million in fiscal year 2025. But the costs balloon, especially, as many fear will happen, if the Legislature looks to expand the program after getting a foot in the door. Importantly, students currently attending private schools would be eligible for those dollars, betraying the promise made repeatedly Friday that vouchers offered a lifeline to low-income families stuck in their failing zoned school.

We’ve complained — as Abbott has given us ample opportunity to do — about the financial ramifications of vouchers, the lack of accountability and clear, persuasive data showing achievement boosts. But we also oppose vouchers because of the absolute disservice they would do to many students with special needs, students who, even if accepted to a pricey private school, surrender their federal protections against discrimination when they leave public schools.

Friday, Buckley told heart-rending stories of hard-working families struggling on behalf of their special needs students. The government does offer those families not well served by public schools an option: they can challenge their school district in a due process hearing before a state education official, seeking to either force the district to provide appropriate accommodations or to pay for the cost of private schooling. For too many parents, that rare option is still out of reach and requires time and legal savvy to be successful. We’d rather see access to that process strengthened than a sham of a private-school handout.

If Buckley and others really want to help our special education students, they should fully fund our public school system. No poison pill required.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Texas, Vouchers

Florida: Why a Librarian Quit

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2023 //
24

The Washington Post published this story of a librarian in Florida who “couldn’t take it anymore.” The book bans and censorship imposed by Governor Ron DeSantis and his compliant Legislature violated her professional ethics. Her job became impossible.

Governor DeSantis insists that no book is banned in his state. Maybe he should interview a school librarian.

Florida is the state where freedom to read goes to die.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the last one.

Inside were books. She didn’t know how many, or what they were, only that she would need to review each one by hand for age-appropriate material and sexual content as defined by Florida law, just as she’d been doing for months now with the 11,600 books on the shelves outside her door at Tohopekaliga High School.

Last box, and then after this week, she would no longer be a librarian at all.

She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.

“What’s the name of this thing?” he said. “Freedom Week?”

She exhaled loudly. “Freedom Week.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “You know about this.”

Yes, Tania knew about it. It was one more thing the state had asked of them, a mandatory recitation of parts of the Declaration of Independence “to reaffirm the American ideals of individual liberty,” along with something else she had heard from the district. “They asked us to please not celebrate Banned Books Week,” Tania said.

She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.

Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.”

That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students.

It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.

And sometime in the middle of all that, as she showed up every weekday at 7 a.m. and tried to focus on the job she had signed up for, which was, she thought, to help students discover a book to love, Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did — all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same.

A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.

On her desk was a purple folder containing the laws and regulations imposed on librarians by the Legislature.

Inside, there were printouts of 79 pages of Florida law and statute that told her how to think about what students should and should not read. One law made it easier for people to challenge books they believed contained sexual conduct or age-inappropriate material. Another defined that term, “sexual conduct,” in layer upon layer of clinical specificity.

When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.

All of this took time. The librarian’s job was expanding even as she felt it was shrinking to a series of rote tasks: She would copy a book’s ISBN number into a peer-review database. She would decide whether to mark it with the thumb-size red sticker, provided to her by the district, that read “M” for “mature.” If a book wasn’t listed in a database, she would review it by hand, and then she would start again with the next book. In those hours, the job became a series of keystrokes, and she began to feel more like a censor than a librarian.

It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries.

This reign of terror has spread from Florida to other red states. Students can see whatever they want on their cell phones. But what they read must be scrutinized and censored, and librarians must abandon their professional ethics.

Categories DeSantis, Florida, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literacy, Literature

PEN America: The Spread of Gag Orders and Censorship Across the States

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2023 //
4

PEN America has published a state-by-state study of gag orders in education.

Has your state passed gag orders banning books or topics? Check the PEN listing.

PEN wrote:

Over the past three years, state legislators have launched an onslaught of educational gag orders—state legislative and policy efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities in educational settings.1 PEN America tracks these bills in our Index of Educational Gag Orders.

During the 2023 state legislative sessions, 110 bills that PEN America defines as educational gag orders were introduced, and 10 became law. Four more gag orders were imposed via executive order or state or system regulation: two in Florida, and one each in Arkansas and California. These developments bring the number of educational gag orders that have become law or policy to a total of 40 across 21 states as of November 1, 2023.

While it is difficult to guess the total number of educators affected by these laws and policies, a conservative estimate would put the number at approximately 1.3 million public school teachers and 100,000 public college and university faculty.2 The students who have been directly affected—through canceled classes, censored teachers, and decimated school library collections—likely number in the millions. The chilling effect on public education across the country is certainly much larger.

In this report, we analyze the educational gag orders introduced and passed in the 2023 legislative sessions, as well as the impact of laws passed in 2022 and 2021. We find the following trends:

  • In 2023, educational gag orders changed dramatically in their shape. Their supporters, who remain overwhelmingly politically conservative, have learned from past mistakes and have new and more insidious strategies for silencing America’s educators.
  • Backers of these laws in K–12 schools have shifted their emphasis to bills that restrict speech about LGBTQ+ topics and identities, including numerous copycats of last year’s HB 1557 in Florida, known to critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
  • In higher education, legislators have introduced a new set of bills that attack the traditional support network that underpins academic freedom and free speech,including proposed restrictions on university governance, curricula, faculty tenure, DEI offices and initiatives, and accreditation agencies.
  • New surveys of K–12 and college teachers affected by educational gag orders show for the first time the extensive toll such laws are having on educators.
  • Fortunately, resistance to educational gag orders is rapidly growing. Increasing majorities of Americans have had enough, and organized opposition to educational censorship has increased across the country, with some notable successes.
  • In 2024, legislative efforts to censor educational institutions are likely to continue. Each of the past three legislative sessions has seen greater and more varied proposals to impose prohibitions on the freedom to learn and teach in schools, colleges, and universities. The 2024 general election is likely to contribute to ongoing escalation of this trend.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Teachers and Teaching

Jeff Bryant: Vouchers Are Busting State Budgets

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2023 //
6

Jeff Bryant writes frequently about education issues. He is based in North Carolina but writes about controversies across the nation. Jeff Bryant is the chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. In this post, he explains how universal school vouchers—vouchers for all students, regardless of family income—is wrecking state budgets. The marquee example of vouchers’ fiscal impact is Arizona, where the voucher program is now nearly $2 billion a year.

He wrote:

In 2023, Republican state governors went to unprecedented lengths to enact universal school voucher programs in legislative sessions across the country and made support for these programs into rigid party ideology. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for instance, went so far as to recall the state’s legislature for a fourth special session, a historically unprecedented action in the Texas Legislature’s 176-year history, according to a November 7 article in the Texas Tribune. According to the report, “[t]he biggest point of contention” is a universal school voucher bill that House Republicans have repeatedly rejected. Previously, Abbott warned any Republican holdouts that they would be challengedfrom within the party in the 2024 primary elections if they didn’t get in line and extend their support for vouchers.

Abbott calls his voucher plan “education freedom,” echoing a term favored by former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who used her office to push for a federally funded nationwide school voucher program.

School vouchers can take on many forms, including tax credit programs—which give tax credits to anyone who donates to nonprofits that provide school vouchers—and so-called education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow parents to withdraw their children from public schools and receive a deposit of public funds into an account that they can tap for education expenses. Abbott is attempting to push through an ESA in Texas.

When voucher programs were initially enacted in early adopting states, such as Florida and Arizona, eligibility was limited to low-income families or to children with special needs or circumstances.

When voucher programs were initially enacted in early adopting states, such as Florida and Arizona, eligibility was limited to low-income families or to children with special needs or circumstances. But the trend over the last few years has been to make these programs open to all or nearly all families. What Abbott is proposing, in fact, would allow all families to apply for vouchers.

Nine states have enacted universal school vouchers as of November 2023, including Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia, according to State Policy Network, a school choice advocacy group. Indiana’s voucher program is “near universal,” as 97 percent of families are eligible under the scheme.

Republicans who oppose universal school vouchers, in Texas and elsewhere, have expressed concerns about diverting tax dollars from public schools, especially in rural communities, to private education providers that have little or no accountability for how they spend the money. They’ve also questioned the constitutionality of giving parents public funds to spend on private religious schools.

But Republican state lawmakers who claim to be strict watchdogs on government purse strings should also be concerned about another consequence of enacting these programs—their potential to quickly run through estimated costs and produce sizable deficits.

According to multiple reports detailed below, states that have been among the earliest to adopt universal voucher programs are finding that their costs are far exceeding estimates primarily due to the high numbers of families taking advantage of the programs. These families mostly never had their children enrolled in public schools.

In state after state, the number of families using vouchers to “escape” so-called failed public schools—an original argument for vouchers—is dwarfed by a larger population of families who already had their children enrolled in private schools and are using voucher money to subsidize their private school tuition costs.

Another large percentage of voucher users are parents who homeschool their children and use voucher funds to cover expenses they would previously have been shouldering themselves. Vouchers also appear to be incentivizing parents with rising kindergartners to choose private schools instead of their local public schools.

Other reports have raised concerns about the financial wisdom of giving parents free sway over how they use voucher money, citing evidence that parents have used the funding to make extravagant purchases or buy products and services that have dubious educational value.

In the meantime, policy leaders and experts alike warn that universal voucher programs are sending states, which are constitutionally obligated to balance their budgets, into uncharted financial waters.

‘It Depends on the State and Is Hard to Know’

Where will funding to cover cost overruns of voucher programs come from?

“It depends on the funding mechanism in the voucher law,” according to Jessica Levin, an attorney and director of Public Funds Public Schools, an organization that opposes efforts to redirect public funds for education to private entities.

“For programs that divert funds earmarked for public schools… the voucher funding would dip further into public school funds and/or appropriations,” Levin explained in an email to Our Schools. “For vouchers that are funded with general revenue funds, more money would come out of the state general fund.”

Funding for Abbott’s proposed voucher plan, for example, draws from the state’s general revenue rather than the main source of funding for K-12 education.

Levin added that there could be other mechanisms to prevent cost overruns, including spending caps written into the voucher law and separate appropriations laws that could limit the total funding.

But in terms of what a state might cut to balance out the impact of voucher costs, Levin said, “It depends on the state and is hard to know.”

So far, Republican lawmakers have either denied the existence of these cost overruns, or they’ve been unclear about where money to cover the deficits will come from.

“I haven’t seen coverage of that question,” said Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, who replied to a query from Our Schools.

Cowen has been an outspoken critic of voucher programs primarily because of their tendency to have a negative impact on student achievement.

Cowen has also expressed concerns about the potential financial impacts of these programs, noting in an April 2023 interview, that “[T]he real issue is that you’re getting the state standing up new budgetary obligations to prop up private school tuition where otherwise [those costs] have been borne by the private sector.”

And he has warned of the dangers of vouchers to incentivize a market for “sub-prime” private schools that would quickly open to get the money but then prove to be unsustainable and just as quickly close.

On the issue of voucher program cost overruns, Cowen told Our Schools, “I assume states have different rules about what amounts to deficit spending. But I’m not sure. Arizona is obviously the massive one.”

‘Arizona… the Massive One’

In Arizona, the first state to pass a universal school voucher program, according to the New York Times, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs has raised an alarm about the enormous cost overruns coming from ESAs, according to KTAR News.

In a memo issued from her office, Hobbs declared that the voucher program “may cost taxpayers up to $943,795,600 annually, resulting in a potential $319,795,600 general fund shortfall in FY 2024.”

It would appear that these cost overruns would have to eventually be covered by the state’s general fund. According to Common Sense Institute Arizona, an organization that advocates for school vouchers, “The ESA program is fully funded by the state’s general fund.”

For that reason, Hobbs maintained that the impact of these costs will go beyond funding for public schools, KTAR reported. “Public safety, all the big budget priorities are going to be impacted if [the cost overrun] continues to grow at this pace,” she said.

In May 2023, Andrés Cano, who was then the Democratic state representative and House Minority Leader, seemed to agree with Hobbs and told ABC15 Arizona, “We’ll either have to tap into the rainy day fund, or we’ll have to cut core state priorities.”

Despite these unplanned costs, “Republicans who have the majority in the state legislature refused any attempt to cap or cut ESAs,” ABC15 Arizona reported. Arizona’s universal voucher program was created by the state’s former Governor Doug Ducey who called it the “gold standard of educational freedom,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Please open the link to finish this important article.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Vouchers

Fortune: DeSantis’ War on Disney Is Stupid and Vengeful

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2023 //
13

Back in the day, Republicans believed in deregulating business and keeping them free of government pressures, demands, and mandates.

Not so in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis wreaked his vengeance on Disney by ousting the board that controlled Disney’s self-governing district and putting his own hand-picked team in charge. About 10% of employees have quit, complaining of low morale. The hand-picked pal of DeSantis, Glen Gilzean, who runs the Governor’s board, claims that morale has never been higher. Gilzean was formerly CEO of the Central Florida Urban League. He’s paid $400,000 a year to run the district board.

DeSantis controls the Legislature, the state’s Supreme Court, the State Board of Education, the state board of higher education, the state board of K-12 education, and now the Disney district. He has unilaterally removed elected district prosecutors whom he thought were too liberal. He has intervened into local school board elections and backed his preferred candidates.

Fortune magazine took a close look at the Disney empire in Florida, now controlled by an angry little Governor.

Fortune wrote:

Disney on Tuesday released a study showing its economic impact in Florida at $40.3 billion as it battles Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his appointees over their takeover of the district that governs the entertainment company’s massive resort in central Florida.

Disney accounted for 263,000 jobs in Florida, more than three times the actual workforce at Walt Disney World, according to the study conducted by Oxford Economics and commissioned by Disney, covering fiscal year 2022. Besides direct employment and spending, the study attributed the company’s multibillion-dollar impact to indirect influences, such as supply chain and employees’ spending.

The jobs include Disney employees as well as jobs supported by visitor spending off Disney World property. In central Florida, Disney directly accounts for one in 8 jobs, and for every direct job at Disney World, another 1.7 jobs are supported across Florida, Oxford Economics said.

The time period in the study is before the takeover earlier this year of Disney World’s governing district by DeSantis and his appointees after Disney publicly opposed a state law banning classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. The law was championed by DeSantis, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Disney officials in the past year have said the company plans to invest an additional $17 billion over the next decade in central Florida, including potentially adding another 13,000 jobs. However, the company has shown a willingness to pull back investing in the Sunshine State. Earlier this year, Disney scrapped plans to relocate 2,000 employees from Southern California to work in digital technology, finance and product development, an investment estimated at $1 billion.

Disney World already has four theme parks, more than 25 hotels, two water parks and a shopping and dining district on 25,000 acres (10,117 hectares) outside Orlando, Florida.

Disney is battling DeSantis and his appointees in federal and state courts over the takeover of what was formally called the Reedy Creek Improvement District but was renamed the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District after DeSantis appointees gained control. The district was created by the Florida Legislature in 1967 to handle municipal services like firefighting, road repairs and waste hauling, and it was controlled by Disney supporters until earlier this year.

Before control of the district changed hands from Disney allies to DeSantis appointees, the Disney supporters on its board signed agreements with Disney shifting control over design and construction at Disney World to the company. The new DeSantis appointees said the “eleventh-hour deals” neutered their powers, and the district sued the company in state court in Orlando to have the contracts voided. Disney has filed counterclaims, which include asking the state court to declare the agreements valid and enforceable.

Disney also has sued DeSantis, a state agency and DeSantis appointees on the district’s board in federal court in Tallahassee, saying the company’s free speech rights were violated when the governor and Republican lawmakers targeted it for expressing opposition to the law dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics.

What kind of Governor goes to war with the biggest employer in his state? What kind of Governor takes control of that employer’s domain? Is DeSantis a socialist?

Categories DeSantis, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Florida

Florida: DeSantis Cronies Win Lucrative Disney Contracts

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2023 //
8

A quick recap: Governor Ron DeSantis declared war on “woke” in Florida, and the Legislature obligingly passed laws criminalizing the teaching of certain topics, like anything to do with gays, Black history, or attention to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Disney Corporation, the biggest employer in the state, spoke out against the law known popularly as “Don’t Say Gay,” because some of its employees at Disney World in Orlando were gay. DeSantis was outraged that Disney defied his will, so he persuaded the Legislature to dissolve the Reedy Creek District, which was controlled by Disney and provided services to DisneyWorld and contiguous communities. In the future, Disney World would be controlled by a special board appointed by DeSantis. The members of the new board were friends and allies of DeSantis. Disney is suing to regain control of its district, but in the meanwhile DeSantis’s board is dispensing contracts to loyal friends of the Governor.

Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel reported:

Some winners have emerged in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ongoing battle with Disney: political insiders who scored lucrative six-figure jobs and contracts as the culture war fight unfolded.

DeSantis vowed to bring a new era of accountability, but more than eight months into a state takeover, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District’s new administration is facing mounting scrutiny and scathing employee exit surveys.

“You do see a pattern here that people who are politically connected are getting work,” said Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor and author of the book “Married to the Mouse” on Disney World’s origins. “Maybe that shouldn’t be shocking. Is that insiderism? I guess you could call it that.”

Glen Gilzean, a close DeSantis ally, landed a $400,000-a-year job leading the district, which provides government services to Disney World. His candidacy was helped by Michael Sasso, a DeSantis-appointed board member who also was the best man in Gilzean’s wedding over the summer.

The DeSantis-appointed board chose Gilzean overseveral other candidates, including William Sturgeon, a former city manager of St. Cloud, a city with a population of more than 60,000.
“It was political,” Sturgeon said. “The place is falling apart. My professional opinion is they have too many state-orientated people in there, and state and municipal government are two different things.”

Sturgeon said he likes Gilzean, but the district needs a leader with a background in local government. Before landing the job at the district, Gilzean served as CEO of the Central Florida Urban League, a civil rights and advocacy organization.
Another applicant, Winter Park City Manager Randy Knight, said he had a brief conversation with the tourism oversight district’s board chair before submitting his resume, but he never heard back.

As administrator, Gilzean selected Paula Hoisington, chairwoman of the Central Florida Urban League’s board, to serve as his chief of staff at the tourism oversight district. Public records show she started at an annual salary of $195,000 and was recently promoted to deputy district administrator, getting a $55,000-a-year raise.
Ronald Haag, a legislative aide to former state GOP Rep. Fred Hawkins, was brought in to serve as Gilzean’s executive assistant.

Hawkins, R-St. Cloud, sponsored the legislation overhauling Disney’s special district. He’s since left the Legislature, landing a job to lead South Florida State College despite having no experience in higher education.

The district also hired Brandy Brown, who worked as director of strategic initiatives in DeSantis’ office. Public records show, though, that she only worked briefly as the tourism oversight district’s director of external affairs before leaving. The district did not respond to questions about her departure.

The governor’s office defended the new administration and dismissed the characterization that political favoritism has permeated the district, which since 1967 was effectively controlled by Disney.

DeSantis has said the arrangement allowed Disney to enjoy a “special privilege” that no other theme park operator enjoyed in Florida.

The Governor pushed to seize state control of what had been called the Reedy Creek Improvement District after Disney criticized what critics call the “don’t say gay” law that bans discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools.

“CFTOD [Central Florida Tourism Oversight District] appointing those they believe are qualified for certain positions isn’t cronyism,” Jeremy Redfern, a DeSantis spokesman, said in an email. “Cronyism is a local government that served as a Corporate Kingdom for over 50 years. The ‘criticism’ from the cronies indicates that the District is doing the right thing.”

No-bid contract under fire

The district’s purchasing decisions have also raised questions.

Most recently, the district backpedaled on a $242,500 no-bid contract awarded to a DeSantis’ appointee to help upgrade the 911 network. That work went to Freddie Figgers, who served alongside Gilzean on the Florida Commission on Ethics.

Facing scrutiny after media reports, the district canceled that contract at Figgers’ request. District officials, though, say the deal met exceptions for competitive bidding outlined in their purchasing policy.

The district also agreed to pay conservative George Mason University law professor Donald J. Kochan $110,000 to help produce a report and make recommendations to the Florida Legislature.
The district’s purchasing rules include competitive bidding exceptions for consultants and experts hired to prepare reports for the legislature.

Conservative all-star legal team

Two politically connected law firms stand to make millions in legal fees from the district as part of the state’s court battle with Disney. One is a boutique Washington, D.C., firm favored by DeSantis in his culture war legal battles, and another is an upstart firm launched by a retired Supreme Court justice.

The DeSantis-aligned board hired Washington-based Cooper & Kirk, agreeing to pay its lawyers $795 an hour. One of the partners in that law firm is Adam Laxalt, a longtime friend of DeSantis who was hired to lead the Never Back Down super PAC supporting the governor’s presidential campaign.

Lawson Huck Gonzalez, which was founded by three legal heavyweights earlier this year, bills $495 an hour. The firm’s founders include Alan Lawson, a retired Florida Supreme Court justice; Paul Huck Jr., once called the “godfather of the Federalist Society in Miami”; and Jason Gonzalez, who’s advised DeSantis on judicial picks.

In another column following the one just posted, Maxwell wrote about new revelations of no-bid contracts at the new DeSantis entity.

He wrote:

Two weeks ago, we learned members of the governor’s new Disney district awarded a $240,000 contract to a a political insider without letting other companies even bid on the job.

The fact that this no-bid contract went to one of the state’s top ethics officials was vintage Florida.

But it turns out that was the tip of the insider-dealing iceberg at the former Reedy Creek district.

As the Sentinel revealed Sunday, another political pal scored a no-bid deal under even more suspect conditions when the district’s board chairman helped award a $495-an-hour legal contract to a lawyer who helped the chairman get his powerful post overseeing Disney in the first place.

Yes, back when Martin Garcia wanted to impress the state Senate, which confirms all of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ appointments to the Disney board, Garcia listed plugged-in GOP attorney Jason Gonzalez as a reference. Then, after Garcia got the job, he voted to give Gonzalez’s law firm a $495-an-hour contract without letting other firms even apply.

Seems the most magical thing about this new Disney board is how it made any premise of ethical government disappear.

And there’s more. As the Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reported, a former board member who helped district director Glen Gilzean score his $400,000-a-year job was also the best man at Gilzean’s wedding.

This looks less like a public agency and more like a fraternity of political profiteers — the Florida chapter of Tappa Tappa Trough, where the only thing being chugged is tax dollars.

The editorial board of The Orlando Sentinel called on members of the Legislature to stand up to DeSantis and limit his power to damage DisneyWorld. The editorialists fear that DeSantis might return from his failed presidential campaign and impose his rage on DisneyWorld. To prevent this, the Legislature must act.

It’s time for lawmakers to break the spell DeSantis has cast, and rewrite the law to curb his power and restore some semblance of ethics, accountability and trust to the district’s operations. After this editorial was published, we learned that Sen. Linda Stewart is working on legislation to undo the attack on local control. Other lawmakers should stand with her. If they don’t, Central Florida’s economy could be so devastated that not even wishing on a star will save it.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, For-Profit

North Carolina: Traitor Tish Gets Her Reward

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
5

In North Carolina, Tricia Cotham won election as a Democrat in a Democratic district. She campaigned on a pledge to protect abortion rights and to oppose vouchers. Soon after winning election, Cotham flipped her party affiliation. Her flip gave Republicans a supermajority in both houses, meaning that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper could not veto anything passed by the far-right Republican General Assembly.

Thanks to Cotham, the Republicans tightened restrictions on abortion (to 12 weeks) and expanded the state voucher program.

Having betrayed the people who elected her, Cotham needed her district to be adjusted. Republicans complied, giving her a district with more Republicans.

The AP reported:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham, whose party switch earlier this year blindsided state Democrats and gave Republicans veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers, announced Saturday she will run for reelection.

Cotham’s announcement ends speculation over her political future after Republicans last month redrew maps for the state’s congressional and legislative districts that seemed to reward her with options if she chose to run for office in 2024.

The redrawn state House map places Cotham’s Mint Hill residence in a new district where Republicans appear to have a slight advantage, according to statewide election data. Had her district gone unchanged, she would have faced an extremely tough path for reelection.

It remains to be seen whether her new district likes double-dealers.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Lies, North Carolina, Politics

Peter Greene: The History the Christian Nationalists Want

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2023 //
28

Peter Greene writes here about the demand by Christian nationalists to rewrite history to their satisfaction. Whatever promotes the religion of their choice is good, whatever contradicts it must be left out. They want fairy-tale history.

Greene writes:

Recently Oklahoma’s education Dudebro-in-Chief Ryan Walters went on another tear, this time warning textbook publishers that they’d better not try to sell any wokified textbooks in Oklahoma.

“If you can’t teach math without talking about transgenderism, go to California, go to New York,” he told Fox News Digital. He even sent out a letter, just so they’d know. “Listen, we will be checking for these things now. Do not give us textbooks that have critical race theory in them.”

Walters said lots of things. Maybe he’s auditioning for a media spot. Maybe he wants to be governor. Maybe he’s just a tool. But he says all sorts of things like “In Oklahoma, our kids are going to know the basics. We want them to master it. We want them to do exceptionally well academically. We’re not here for any kind of Joe Biden’s socialist Marxist training ground.”

But somewhere in this conversation, Walters lays out a succinct summary of our nation’s history as he believes it should be taught.

“So as you go through, you talk about the times that America has led the free world, that we have continued to be that light. We’ve done more for individual liberty than any other country in the history of the world. And those belief systems that were there in place, it allowed us to do it. You’ve got to talk about our Judeo-Christian values. The founders were very clear that that was a crucial part of our success. Then you go through and you evaluate. Are these times we lived up to our core principles? You’ve got to be honest with kids about our history. So you talk about all of it, but you evaluate it through the prism of our founding principles. Is this a time we lived up to those principles?”

Most of the elements of the christianist nationalist version of US history are here. American exceptionalism– the light that led the free world, the very most ever done for individual liberty. A nation founded on Judeo-Christian values.

With that as a foundation, it’s safe to note some of the lapses, all of which are framed as an aberration, a lapse from our foundation and certainly not part of it (take that, you 1619 project-reading CRTers). In the CN view, every good thing that ever happened is because of our God-aligned nature, and every bad thing is in spite of it, quite possibly because Wrong People were allowed to get their hands on some power.

There are plenty of implications for this view of history. One of the biggest is that these folks simply don’t believe in democracy, because democracy allows too many of the Wrong People to get their hands on power. As Katherine Stewart puts it in her must-read The Power Worshippers—

It [Christian nationalism] asserts that legitimate government rests not on the consent of the governed but adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage.

Or, as she quotes Gary North, a radical free-market libertarian christianist who developed the Ron Paul Curriculum,

Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then we will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

The idea of individualism is also important in the CN view of US history. There’s no systemic anything–just the work of either good or bad, Right or Wrong individuals. And if everything is about the individual, then your problems are strictly your problems; your failures are all on you, not on society or community (the village has no responsibility to raise your child). That emphasis on the individual runs all through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, both original flavor andthe Jordan Adams stealth version.

The rejection of systemic views of society and history matters. It goes along with the view that we pretty much fixed racism in the 1960s (even we got a little too socialist in the process). From which we can conclude that all attempts to talk racism now are just attempts to grab power with made-up grievances.

To take another angle– the underlying idea of the Classical Education that is so popular with the CN crowd is that there is One Objective Truth. Back in classical times, great thinkers understood this Truth, but the 20th century brought a bunch of relativistic thought and the evil notion that there are different, subjective truths. But our Founding Fathers knew the Truth and encoded it into the Constitution and our founding principles, and as long as we are led by people who follow that Truth, which is somehow both a Christian Truth and an American Truth, we are okay. People who don’t follow that Truth are a threat to the integrity and fiber of our country; consequently, they have to be stopped.

People who claim that history is complicated, that our founders were complicated, that humans are complicated–those people are just trying to confuse the issue, to draw others away from understanding The Truth.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Let me add that I don’t want to go back to 1776. The guys who wrote the founding documents were brilliant, but not on subjects like slavery and women’s rights.

Categories Curriculum, Extremism, History, Lies
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