Search results for: "PRIVITIZATION"

Texas: Abbott Calls Special Session to Force Vouchers

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2023 //
12

Governor Greg Abbott really, really wants vouchers. The State Senate agrees with him. The House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans but it thus far has refused to pass them. Rural Republicans in the House have allied with urban Democrats because both know that vouchers will harm their community public schools.

But Abbott is pulling out all the stops. He even refused to raise teachers’ salaries or increase public school funding until he gets a voucher bill.

The Texas Observer comments:

Governor Greg Abbott has called lawmakers back to a special legislative session starting this coming Monday, October 9. His message to them: Pass school vouchers—or else.

“There’s an easy way to get it done, and there’s a hard way,” Abbott said during a September 19 tele-town hall. “If we do not win in that first special session, we will have another special special session and we’ll come back again. And then if we don’t win that time … We will have everything teed up in a way where we will be giving voters in a primary a choice.”

From bullying legislators to “co-opting” churches and religious services, Abbott “wants to force a voucher at all costs,” said Patty Quinzi, legislative director of the Texas American Federation of Teachers. Pulling the purse strings of Abbott’s voucher campaign are a handful of billionaires who have invested millions to weaponize far-right culture war propaganda to fund what the governor has branded as “school choice” for parents.

Meanwhile, many public school districts started this school year with a budget deficit after the Senate refused to use the state’s $33 billion budget surplus to increase school funding without the condition of passing universal vouchers.

During the regular session, the House twice rejected proposals for vouchers or “an educational savings account,” citing constituent concerns that voucher programs would siphon money from public schools. When the Senate attempted to force the House to accept universal vouchers in return for passing its school funding proposal, its author, Representative Ken King, pulled the bill.

“In the end, the Senate would not negotiate at all. It was a universal ESA or nothing,” King wrote in his public statement. “I am committed to protecting the 5.5 million school kids in Texas from being used as political hostages. What the Governor and the Senate [have] done is inexcusable, and I stand ready to set it right and continue to work for the best outcome for our students and schools.”

In early August, the House’s 15-member committee on Educational Opportunity and Enrichment issued its interim report, signaling some members’ willingness to compromise on school vouchers if they were limited to students with special needs and if the money to fund a voucher program came out of the state general revenue instead of the Permanent School Fund. Earlier this year, the Observer revealedhow limited voucher programs in other states served as a trojan horse for larger, universal voucher programs, leaving public schools with large deficits and a loss of federal civil rights protections for parents who took their children out of public schools.

“We are $40 billion below the national average for school funding, so we have no business talking about any kind of program that takes more money out of our public schools,” said Representative Gina Hinojosa, who serves on the committee but declined to endorse its recommendations.

Greg Abbott has vowed to keep calling special sessions until the Legislature passes a voucher bill.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Propaganda, Rural Schools, Teachers

Josh Cowen: Texas Doesn’t Need Vouchers. Neither Does Any Other State.

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2023 //
11

Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He has been involved in research on vouchers for two decades. He wrote the following article for The Houston Chronicle.

Every state has versions of Texas’ Snapshot Day: the time early in the school year when districts submit pupil counts to their state education agency. How many students go to school in each district determines how much money districts receive each year, as well as a variety of other services and programs.

Not every state is considering a school voucher program, however, and as the Texas Legislature debates that possibility (officially called an education savings account), details like pupil count are going to matter a lot more than either voucher supporters or opponents are considering right now.

Here’s how we know.

I’ve been studying school choice policy for two decades. That work includes official evaluations on behalf of state agencies, and more recent experience on the research advisory board for Washington D.C.’s federally required evaluation. I’ve also worked as a research partner to states and districts across the country. I know how little, seemingly inconsequential, technical details can have great impacts on how education programs function.

And I know those impacts can be costly — with taxpayers footing the bill.

Consider evaluations of voucher programs like the one before the Legislature right now. I’ve described elsewhere how these studies show catastrophic
academic harm to students who switch to private school with a voucher. That’s because vouchers tend to pay tuition, not at elite providers that don’t need the tax dollars, but at subprime schools needing the bailout — including those popping up to cash in on the new government subsidy.

Here’s something else those programs tell us: Although supporters often describe school choice as a long-term opportunity, the reality is that, for many kids, school choice is just a revolving door in and out of a new academic setting. And that’s especially true with vouchers.

Studies show that more than 1 out of 5 students give up their voucher every year. In some places like Florida that number is as high as two-thirds of voucher students leaving the program within two academic years. Similarly, the numbers publicly available from Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin range between 20 and 30 percent annual student attrition.

These exit rates matter not only because they underscore the false promise vouchers give to at-risk students — switching from school to school is a well-understood marker of academic or economic duress — but because they imply a huge potential fiscal waste.

Voucher supporters say it’s easy: The “dollars follow the kid” (this already happens with public schools, which is why count days exist). But it’s not that simple. Public programs with price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars never are.

Imagine a parent who spends all of the proposed $8000 of their voucher at a private school nearby. Let’s say that before the last Friday in October — Snapshot Day — she sees the school simply isn’t working for her child and withdraws him. Will that private school keep the money? Or will the “dollars follow the kid” immediately back to the public school?

Imagine that parent waits until the holiday season to make the change. And in January, she enrolls her child back in a local public classroom. Will that local school be forced to enroll her child — a refugee from the voucher program — on its own local dime for the rest of the year?

Do these answers change if instead of the parent deciding to remove her child, the private school has made that choice instead?

If the voucher school has asked or forced her child to leave — something the current legislation permits for any reason along with denying admission in the first place — will it keep her tuition dollars as long as it waits until after Snapshot Day to do so?

These 30 percent of voucher decliners aren’t just numbers. The studies from other states tell us they’re likely vulnerable: kids who are scoring lower on school exams, kids from lower income families, children of color, and children from single-mom households.

Senate Bill 8 only stipulates that parents must notify the state of their exit within 30 business days; it does not establish a process to recover those dollars. And even when state guidance on these questions is issued, who will enact them? The fiscal note on SB8 makes assumptions about staff and legal support to run the program, but the legislation itself is ambiguous on issues like tuition reimbursement, or even the authority that compliance officers have to recover state funds.

Details matter. The ballooning voucher budget in Arizona and controversial new roll-out in Arkansas warn us that making public policy by slogan — however clever “fund students, not systems” might sound — is no substitute for careful planning.

The revolving door of school voucher tuition is one such detail — one that not only affects taxpayers’ bottom-line, but more basic issues of equity and opportunity as well. The bottom line for SB8 then, based on the evidence in other states, is that school voucher-type programs are on average bad for kids and bad for taxpayers. Texas would do well to reject them now.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: State Takeover of Houston Public Schools Is Unfair, Racist, and Wasteful

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2023 //
9

In 2025, Texas passed a ridiculous law stating that if a school district had even one school that was deemed to be “failing,” the state could take over the entire school district. Houston has one high school, Wheatley High School, that has persistently low test scores (and also unusually high percentages of students with special needs and other groups of high-needs students).

The State Department of Education has been trying for years to seize control of the Houston public schools. The state superintendent, appointed by callous Governor Gregg Abbott is software engineer Mike Morath, whose sole claim to educational “experience” is having served on the Dallas school board.

These Republicans do not believe in local control of schools. They believe the state should take away local control, the easier to erode democracy and advance privatization.

Ruth Kravetz, a former teacher and administrator in the Houston Independent School District, now leads an organization called Community Voices for Public Schools. She wrote an editorial in The Texas Observer (where I published my first article) denouncing the threatened takeover as “unfair, racist, and wasteful.”

As a 1956 graduate of HISD, I take this personally.

After years of wrangling and legal battles, the state took control of HISD a few days ago.

Kravetz writes:

I am a parent and teacher with Community Voices for Public Education, a Houston-based nonprofit rooted in the belief that our community schools are a public good, not a commodity to be sold off to the highest bidder. That is why we, along with many other Houstonians, have protested the attempted state takeover of Houston ISD for years—a dramatic assault on local control that may take place this week.

At a February protest, HISD student Elizabeth Rodriguez stated, “Instead of punishing us with a takeover, our schools should be better funded to make sure students have all the support we need and the facilities we deserve. We are not just test scores.”

Contrary to what you may hear from some Republican leaders, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is not a failing district. HISD received a B grade in the most recent state school ratings and is AAA bond-rated.

Why, then, is Houston ISD even under threat of a takeover?

In 2015, Texas passed a law that allows the state to take over an entire school district if even one campus is rated F in standardized test performance for five years. The state says the rationale for the takeover is Wheatley High School’s low 2019 accountability rating and problems with the HISD school board. Since 2019, when the takeover bid began, Houston ISD had successfully delayed Texas’ efforts, but the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court cleared the state’s legal path in January.

In the past few years, HISD already proved that local control works: Since 2019, voters elected an almost entirely new school board, and students and teachers worked to bring Wheatley’s state score up to a C in 2022. Since 2015, HISD reduced its number of low-performing schools from 58 to nine, which is fewer than are found in Dallas ISD. Even using the state’s deeply flawed accountability system to rate schools, Houston ISD comes out fine.

Nevertheless, the state’s takeover efforts persist. If successful, a state-appointed board of managers will make all policy decisions with Texas Education Agency (TEA) Commissioner Mike Morath pulling the strings behind the scenes. HISD’s democratically elected board will only have a ceremonial role with no voting authority. And the kicker is that the unelected Morath, who’s appointed by Governor Greg Abbott, has full discretion to expand the takeover. The superintendent could also be replaced, and individual schools could be parceled off to charter school operators—such as YES, KIPP, IDEA, and churches—with the usual consequences as seen around the country.

Charter schools often purposefully underenroll students with disabilities and other at-risk children, inflating their state accountability ratings. Should this occur in Houston following a takeover, the state will likely take the credit in its accountability shell game.

A takeover may also lead to teachers leaving the district, creating more classroom vacancies. The chances for a bond to replace older elementary schools will go out the window. If other takeovers are any indication, we can also expect more of our taxpayer dollars to go to costly consultants than to the needs of children.

If all this doesn’t make you mad, how about this? Over and over again, the governor and the TEA commissioner have moved the goalposts in the middle of the game.

In 2019, Wheatley High initially received a passing grade from the TEA, but the agency later changed its scoring criteria and applied them retroactively. And in January, TEA publicly announced more rule changes that will be implemented immediately and applied retroactively to last year’s seniors, whose data is counted in this year’s accountability rating. At the high school level, schools that were projecting a B rating are now projecting a D. School districts around the state are raising the alarm about the change.

We tell our children they have to be honest and to play by the rules; we should expect the governor and TEA commissioner to do the same.

Unfortunately, the state takeover of Houston ISDhas nothing to do with student needs. It is about power, profits, and a willful disregard for children living in poverty.

As I ponder the district’s future, I am reminded of a student I once taught. When I went to his house to help him think about college, he had no electricity and the only furniture in the house was a bed, an engine block, and a chair. He did his homework by a street lamp outside. The last thing he needed was more pressure to meet arbitrary standardized testing goals or for the state to punish his school for serving low-income students like himself.

From Beaumont to New Orleans to Detroit, takeovers—which disproportionately target districts with high Black and Brown political participation—do not improve student achievement and experiences.

Please open the link to finish this excellent article.

Governor Abbott and Mike Morath don’t have any idea how to improve schools or districts. They do know how to loot them and privatize them for the benefit of their cronies and campaign donors.

Shame on you, Governor Abbott and Mike Morath!

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Houston, Texas

Houston Chronicle: All the Reasons Why Vouchers Don’t Work

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2023 //
11

Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick want vouchers in Texas, just like other red states. So they swallow a bunch of myths about the benefits of choice. They want a subsidy of $10,000 for every child who wants to attend a private or religious school, and they ignore research that tells them their assumptions about vouchers are wrong. For one thing, if every one of the 300,000 plus students asked for a voucher, it would immediately cost the state $3 billion! But they are indifferent to actual evidence. Is it wishful thinking or the desire to please their hard-right funders that drives them to overlook the needs of the more than 5 million students in public schools?

The editorial board of the Houston Chronicle, one of the state’s largest newspapers, dissected the shabbiness of their claims:

Here are the best arguments for vouchers — and why they’re wrong.  

Claim: Vouchers increase choice.

Who could be against choice? Not us. We’re just against a lack of accountability.

Texas is already awash in choice.

Take Houston ISD, with its mix of magnet schools, charter schools and traditional public schools. Texas also allows districts to participate in interdistrict open enrollment. And even if the districts don’t participate, students in certain low-performing schoolscan still request a transfer to another school in their district or even in another district.

If lawmakers want more choice, the state should be looking for ways to double down on what’s already working —and in some people’s eyes, that includes charters. Research is mixed there, too, on whether charter schools really perform any better than traditional public schools but at least there’s a thin layer of oversight. Over private schools, there could be none.

Claim: Vouchers increase choice for all students.

As more states adopt large-scale voucher systems, a clearer picture of who tends to benefit first is emerging: families already enrolled in private schools. “The only people it’s going to help are the kids who don’t need the help,” was how one rural Republican representative put it in November.

In Arizona, 80 percent of recipients were already enrolled in private schools. And when private school tuition at the top schools is tens of thousands of dollars, the benefit of a $10,000 subsidy might close the gap for a middle-income family, but is decidedly less able to do so for a low-income one. Those top tier private schools aren’t, by and large, the ones suddenly within reach. And they’re still able to reject students.

So what does that leave?

“The typical voucher school is what I call a sub-prime provider,” Joshua Cowen, a policy analyst and professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said. “They often pop up once a state passes a voucher program.”

Claim: Vouchers improve outcomes.

In the early days of smaller, more targeted voucher programs, the research seemed promising. But that promise has largely evaporated as programs have scaled up.

“I’ve been in both eras of this work,” Cowen explained. The early studies “are still the best evidence we have that vouchers work and they are 20 years old.” Instead he said more recent studies of Louisiana, Ohio and other large-scale voucher programs have shown “catastrophic, devastating outcomes” in student test scores, on par with the disruption caused by disasters including Hurricane Katrina.

Why? In part, lack of accountability.

“They don’t have to take STAAR, they don’t have to fall under A-F, they don’t have to accept all kids with a voucher,” said Bob Popinski, the senior director of policy at Raise Your Hand Texas, a public policy nonprofit that advocates for public education.

There are some programs that have added accountability guardrails with some positive effect, but without knowing what might take shape in Texas, a state that already struggles to regulate the proliferation of choice that exists today, we’re not hopeful.

Claim: Vouchers fight indoctrination.

In Texas, this latest fight for “school choice” has been tied just as often to supposed fights over curriculum and library books as it has been to improving learning.

It’s a dubious argument, alleging that public schools are indoctrinating children with what Abbott called “woke agendas.” Meanwhile, private schools that actually do follow a particular dogma of one stripe or another would actually stand to benefit the most through expanded voucher programs that suddenly mean public dollars can, in fact, support private religious schools free to teach whatever they believe.

That fight has been funded by conservative groups with deep pockets and focuses on buzz words and book titles – things that most parents aren’t really concerned about.

Literacy. Math. Bullying. Responsiveness.

Those are the issues that Colleen Dippel, director of Families Powered, hears most often from the parents who rely on her service to help navigate the many school choices currently available. Her organization supports more choice, including in the form of an effective voucher program, but she stressed that she’s equally likely to steer a parent to a public school as she is a charter or private school.

“It’s not the job of the parents to fix the schools,” she said of helping parents find the best fit for their child. “We have to start listening to them.” We agree but we believe the solutions should and can happen within our public schools.

Claim: We can fund both vouchers and public schools.

“We can support school choice and, at the same time, create the best public education system in America,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wrote in support of vouchers back in 2022 when he was gearing up for this legislative session. “These issues are not in conflict with each other.”

In the State of the State, Abbott promised that public schools will remain fully funded if the state expanded its limited education savings accounts available to families with students with special education needs.

These statements are laugh-to-keep-from-crying wrong.

Despite Abbott’s repeated “all-time high” claims about school funding, Texas already fails to support schools adequately now, falling well below the national average in per pupil spending. Other states, meanwhile, are already showing just how costly voucher schemes are and how they can further drain public education in the long-term.

At first, school district funding looks stable, maybe even stronger thanks to occasional sweeteners such as a boost in the basic allotment or a one-time teacher pay increase, according to Cowen.

“Those are all short-term ways to make it harder to vote against,” he said. “But you can’t sustain that in the long-run.”

Within two or three budget cycles, he said, the state can’t keep up funding two parallel education systems. And eventually the state aid to school districts takes a hit. That’s what public school districts say happened in Ohio in a lawsuit that claims the state’s voucher system has siphoned “hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions.”

Here in Texas, one-ranking official even confirmed as much in a secretly recorded conversation in which he said that public schools could lose out on funding if a student opted for a voucher: “maybe that’s one less fourth grade teacher,” the official explained.

In short: vouchers don’t make sense, or cents, for Texas. Lawmakers should reject them. Again.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Hoax, Vouchers

Texas: Don’t Make the Same Mistake as Arizona: Vouchers Are a Fraud!

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2023 //
5

The Texas Observer published a warning to the Texas legislature: Take a close look at the Arizona voucher programs. Don’t go there. Vouchers subsidize private school students while defunding the public schools that still enroll the vast majority of the state’s students.

Like many other typical teenagers, James’ favorite periods in school are P.E. and lunch. During our phone call, he turned the tables on me, politely asking about my children and work. A 15-year-old student who was born with a tumor and has autism, James actively seeks engagement with others, especially his peers. But for two years, he learned at home in isolation. Arizona’s voucher educational savings account program, called the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA), granted him $40,000 of public funds to pay private school tuition. But even with that money, private school after private school denied him admission.

“They first demanded all his files, his IEPs [Individualized Education Plan for students with special needs], but before they would grant an interview, they would give some excuse why his needs could not be met there,” James’ mom Pamela Lang said. “Some gave interviews and tours, and James would get excited. But then they would decline admittance saying they could not accommodate him.”

After every single Phoenix, Arizona Catholic school and a slew of secular private schools rejected James, Lang was finally able to find a school to address his needs. But now, she fears there won’t be enough state funds in the future to afford its costly tuition.

What started in Arizona in 2011 as a $2.5 million state voucher program for students with special needs has now ballooned to a universal voucher program for all of the state’s students, public or private.

“The state said the voucher was for kids with disabilities but it was just a way in to open the door,” Lang said. “Every single year since the state got the ESA, they just kept expanding it to more and more people, and now, it’s for everybody. We’re just hoping kids with disabilities aren’t going to have nothing left for them.”

In the first quarter of this school year, Arizona already blew through $300 million, awarding 80 percent of the funds predominantly to wealthy students already enrolled in private schools. This will leave a projected $4 million debt in the state’s education budget at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, a debt that public school advocates fear will deplete public school funds further.

Critics say Arizona used vouchers for special needs students as a trojan horse for school privateers to divest, divert, and dismantle the state’s public education system, which now ranks in the bottom three among all U.S. states for per-pupil spending, teacher retention, and teacher pay.

Texas lawmakers are now poised to follow Arizona’s lead. But parents in Arizona are warning Texans to take heed. Their stories are a cautionary tale for our state, which plans during this legislative session to use special needs students to usher in multiple voucher programs.

Arizona’s voucher programs—and the Texas proposals—include both a universal education savings account and a tax-credit scholarship program, both of which would divert public education money from state coffers to enrich private schools, corporations, and wealthy families.

DIVEST

The country’s first public school education savings account started in Arizona in 2011. The ESA directly appropriates public education money and deposits it into an individual savings account or debit card for parents to use for private school tuition, tutoring, homeschooling, or therapy.

In its first year, $2.5 million of Arizona’s ESA money was directed toward students with special needs. But in subsequent years, expenditures and eligibility for the ESA program expanded to include children attending public schools that received a D or F rating, children in military families, in foster care, and on Native American reservations. Then in 2017, legislators attempted to pass universal vouchers for all students. The proposal was beaten back twice by public school advocates but passed in 2022.

Since its inception, Arizona’s ESA program has stripped more than $963 million from public school funds.

Texas House Bill 557, filed by Representative Cody Vasut, is a universal voucher program from the get-go. It would enable an unlimited number of students to receive reimbursements for up to $10,000 in private school tuition, the full per-pupil allotment in Texas. If all 309,000 private school students in Texas decided to apply for a voucher under this bill, public schools could lose $3 billion in state funding after one year alone. The impact could bankrupt a system in Texas which already ranks in the bottom 10 states in per-pupil funding.

Beth Lewis, director of Save our Schools Arizona, warns Texans that such a voucher program never gives back as much as it robs from public education.

“They sell it under the guise that the money’s following the child,” Lewis said. “But if you were already in a private school or a homeschool situation, that money’s not following you. It’s never been allocated to you. So in reality, it’s a subtraction from a student in the public school. Then, you’re never going to have an equitable system where every kid can access quality education.”

Besides the education savings account program, Arizona has a second type of voucher program that directly funnels public money to private schools—the tax credit scholarship program.

Open the link and read the rest of this important article. Vouchers are a reverse Robin Hood program: they take from everyone to pay the tuition of students already enrolled in private schools. As Professor Josh Cowennof Michigan State University has shown, kids who leave public schools to use vouchers fall behind their peers who remained in public school.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Special Education, Texas, Vouchers

A Slick Campaign for Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2013 //
16

The forces advocating privatization of public schools are well-funded and relentless. They cloak their goals in high-flown rhetoric about “saving kids from failing schools.” Or they cynically claim the mantle of the civil rights movement as they seek to disrupt communities and replace public control with private ownership. As the public gets wise, resistance grows.

This comment came from a reader:

I have been researching this whole privitatization of public services since Parent Revolution has targeted my school. Ben and his like are interested in taking publuc services like schools and even libraries to privateers. Always promoted as being able to provide better services. With dwindling tax dollars public entities can unburden themselves of unions, costly health care, and underfunded pensions. Under eleaborate PR campaigns boards and councils are sold on the ideas.

Next, is to convince the public needing the services. The gray area of being ethical is where the privateers work in. Their campaign is well groomed. A student looked at the Parent Revolution web site. He said ( a 5th grader) that it was well written to appeal to parents. Just what parents would want to hear. He researched those opposed to PR and found explicit examples of not doing what they promised. He said “bait and switch”.

Privitization is just another way for the 1% of America to mine new monies for profit to line their pockets. Their desire to help students is only if there is profit to be made. Besides if things don’t work out well and these kids hit the street being undesirables there are privitized psychiatric hospitals and private prisons these people can be warehoused with tax dollars and at a profit.

Categories Parent trigger, Privatization