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Peter Greene: West Virginia Reduces Accountability for Private Schools That Get Public $$$

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2026 //
2

The introduction of vouchers for private and religious schools is accompanied by certain lies.

  1. Vouchers won’t cost much
  2. Vouchers will save poor kids from failing public schools.
  3. Voucher schools will be more accountable than public schools.
  4. Vouchers won’t hurt public schools.

Every one of those claims is a lie. Vouchers always cost far more than was predicted. In every state, most vouchers are claimed by students who are already in enrolled nonpublic schools. Voucher schools typically are completely unaccountable for their use of public funds.

Peter Greene offers the example of West Virginia.

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they’ve been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million.

With that kind of money on the line, you’d think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know– so the taxpayers know what they’re getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.
SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order– with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here’s the list of rules slated for erasure:

  • The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.
  • The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.
  • The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.
  • The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.
  • Since there’s no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.
  • The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, “the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens.” Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal.
  • So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.
  • The bill does add one bit of new language:
  • As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes.

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as “No accountability at all.” A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I’m guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test.


Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we’d get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the “hard data” showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools– but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against.

This is not about choice. It’s about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it’s about making sure those schools aren’t accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It’s another iteration of the same argument we’ve heard across the culture–that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it.

We’ve been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off– the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn’t what’s being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, West Virginia

The Media Is Struggling to Cover Tehran

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2026 //
9

A very interesting blog called Status covers the media. It usually has the inside scoop on what’s going on behind the scenes, which journalists are seeing or leaving, what’s happening inside the major corporations.

In this post, Status explains how difficult it is to cover the war in Iran. The regime does not admit journalists. CNN is trying to provide coverage, as is The New York Times, but its reporters are not in Iran. The Washington Post is suffering from self/-influcted wounds because just a few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos eliminated his foreign correspondents in a cost-cutting move. Really smart for a guy with a net worth of $250 billion.

Natalie Korach wrote for Status:

As U.S. and Israeli forces launch deadly strikes on Iran, the inherent challenges of covering the country are exacerbated by recent newsroom cuts, social media distortion, and a White House prone to telling lies. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Americans watched the war unfold through footage captured by journalists embedded with troops across the region. Two decades later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, foreign correspondents from U.S.-based networks raced to Kyiv and other areas of conflict, broadcasting live as missiles struck Ukrainian territory. But when the United States and Israellaunched strikes on Iran over the weekend, there were few, if any, Western journalists in the country to document the damage firsthand. 

In a nation largely closed to Western media and with broadly limited internet access, the conflict is unfolding as something of an information black box, forcing news organizations to cover one of the most consequential military escalations in years largely from the outside. Adding to the challenge: Whether they can trust pronouncements coming from a Trump administration that has exhibited few compunctions about lying, from the president on down; and the degradation of social media, especially X, which is no longer a reliable source of information in breaking news situations. 

Major television news networks and newspapers tasked with covering the war are having to piece together events from government statements, grainy videos circulating online, and reports from Iranian state media. In an era where many news organizations have been forced to scale back foreign bureaus and reporting resources—most notably the recent and devastating cuts at The Washington Post—the conflict is quickly becoming a test for media, exacerbated by the fact that Iran remains one of the most difficult places on earth for journalists to operate safely. 

The geographic spread of the reporting team at CNN, the U.S. network with arguably the most foreign reporting resources, illustrates the challenge. The network has reporters fanned out across the region—Erin Burnett, Nick Paton Walsh, and Jeremy Diamond in Tel Aviv, Nic Robertson in Riyadh, Becky Anderson in Abu Dhabi, Paula Hancocks in Dubai, and Clarissa Ward reporting from Erbil in northern Iraq. Elsewhere across cable news, Fox News had Trey Yingst reporting live from Tel Aviv, Nate Foy on the ground in Cyprus, and Lucas Tomlinson in Istanbul. But none appeared to be inside Iran as of Sunday afternoon. 

The New York Times is similarly mobilizing its global newsroom to cover the unfolding conflict. A spokesperson for the paper told Status that “hundreds of journalists from across The Times’ global newsroom–in New York, Washington, London, Seoul and a large and growing reporting team on the ground in the region–have been coming together to produce comprehensive coverage of every aspect of this military action.” 

But few news organizations still possess the global infrastructure to support half a dozen or more reporters monitoring the situation on the ground in neighboring countries. Years of budget cuts have thinned the ranks of foreign correspondents in the region across the industry. At The Post, recent layoffs hit international coverage particularly hard, with the paper’s entire Middle East desk laid off. In January, Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati, who had been covering Iran, publicly appealed to owner Jeff Bezos on social media alongside colleagues, noting that she had spent months covering developments inside the country and wanted to continue the work. The appeals to Bezos to save the foreign reporting staff went unheeded. 

“If I were The Washington Post right now, I’d still want international journalists,” Ian Bremmer wrote on social media, where many experts called attention to the terrible timing of The Post’s retrenchment during this moment of crisis abroad. Spokespersons for The Post did not respond to requests for comment, but the paper’s rolling coverage of the conflict dominated its homepage all weekend.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, International, Media

John Thompson: Is It “Silly Season” or “Cruel Season” in Oklahoma as Legislature Reconvenes?

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2026 //
1

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the big concerns that will preoccupy the Republican Governor and Legislature in 2026.

He writes:

As Oklahoma’s legislative session begins, commentators are reminding us of the absurdities that will come. The Oklahoma Voice’s Janelle Stecklein’s Welcome to the 2026 Edition of Welcome to Oklahoma’s Political Silly Season. Here are Some Bills Worth Mocking, reported on: 

A proposed deregulation bill that would result in alligators taking over our wetlands; the bill to ban Sharia Law; the “doubly criminalizing the stealing of shopping carts,” and the bill which claims “condensation trails left in our atmosphere by airplanes are actually chemical agents designed to interfere with the sun, [and] weather or are a nefarious way to psychologically manipulate us.”

And, former Speaker of the House, Cal Hobson’s, “Hide the Children. Lock the Door. The ’26 Session Draws Near, summarized  the bill to require universities to build structures honoring the assassinated Charlie Kirk.

Then came Governor Kevin Stitt’s address to the legislature.

Seven years ago, Stitt promised  to make us a “Top Ten” state,” by creating a business-friendly environment by cutting “red tape,” reducing regulations, as well as pushing school choice, and other free-market policies. 

But, according to CNBC, Oklahoma is now ranked 41th for business, 48th in education, and 49th in life, health and inclusion.

According to the U.S. News and World Report, we’re ranked 46th in economic opportunity, and 42th overall.

But Stitt told the legislature:

We’ve proven to the world that Oklahoma is second to none – it’s a state that promotes innovation, champions freedom, and creates opportunity for its people.

Oklahoma wasn’t built by government planners or bureaucrats. …

Oklahoma was built by entrepreneurs, risk-takers and innovators who believe in free markets and the American Dream – that if you work hard, take risks and create value, you should be rewarded.

Actually, Oklahoma was founded on populist principles, such as empowering voters to pass initiative petitions and amendments to the constitution. After the voters legalized medical marijuana, and voted for the expansion of Medicaid, Republicans have attempted to undermine those rights. And, now, Stitt is calling for the repeal of those two laws, and passing two other petitions that are the opposite of what voters supported.  

Stitt’s most destructive attack could be on Medicaid expansion, known as SoonerCare, which reduced the state’s uninsured rate from 17.6% in 2019 to 13.9 % in 2024. But, now it needs almost $500 million to maintain the federally mandated level of service and to administer new mandates and to more efficiently manage the system.

And Oklahoma’s recent privatization of Medicaid campaign “moved thousands of patients to other insurance providers.” And, it has “resulted in lower reimbursement rates and increased denials for services.”

Medicaid provides coverage for one in four Oklahomans. It provided coverage for more than ½ of the state’s child births. While half of its recipients are children, it helps out many low-income seniors and persons with disabilities.

But, Stitt told the legislature, “Nobody feels sorry for an able-bodied male that should be working between the ages of 25 to 65, and we should not be giving them free healthcare.”

Stitt bragged about his cuts in income taxes, which were “the Path to Zero income tax;” He called them a step towards “one of our greatest budget reform wins in history.”

Due to spending cuts, Oklahoma saved over $5.5 billion dollars. Those funds could be used to address $692 million shortfall for this year, as well as $1.5 billion in increased funding that state agencies have requested.

Instead, he wants to amend the constitution to place a 3% annual cap on recurring spending growth.

The third state question Stitt suggested to lawmakers would be to freeze property taxes for “all levels.” Property taxes are a major funding source for public schools, CareerTech, and county level programs. 

And he would like to expand the $249 million per year tax credits for private schools.

And Stitt repeated his calls to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling and limit tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma.

Of course, Stitt praised Trump and Ronald Reagan. He challenged the legislators to read Reagan’s speech, “A Time for Choosing.” He then said Reagan was “the last best hope of man on earth;” without him we would have taken “the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

He then bragged about freeing Oklahomans from Covid lockdowns, protecting them from vaccine mandates, and, in the name of protecting individual liberties and religious freedom, preventing boys from playing in girls’ sports.

After boasting about his success in limiting the freedom of transgender students, he called for the elimination of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) for not promoting the open transfer of student athletes.

And Stitt concluded:

Oklahoma is not just part of this American Dream. We are its purest expression. And this spirit is what has always defined Oklahoma.

Oklahoma is where bold dreams are possible.

I believe these last seven years have been the greatest in state history

Of course, Stitt’s “commitment to limited government and protecting the Oklahoma way of life,” also required cooperation with rightwing legislators; together, they share credit for making “our state … the best in the country.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Extremism, Oklahoma, Privatization, School Choice

New Hampshire: Republicans Rachet Up their War on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2026 //
1

Garry Rayno, veteran journalist, reports on the latest Republican plan to defund public schools in New Hampshire. They are moving quickly to enact a plan that will fatten rich districts and impoverish poor districts. They have already passed a voucher plan without income limits; the overwhelming majority of students taking vouchers were already attending private schools. in other words, state welfare for the rich.

Rayno writes in IndepthNH.com:

What’s the hurry?

Last week the Senate was in a hurry to pass two bills that will significantly harm the majority of school districts and students in public schools, while property wealthy districts and well-to-do families will benefit, all in the name of school choice.

The plan is to have the House agree Thursday to the amended version of House Bill 751, which would allow a New Hampshire public school student to enroll in any other public school in the state rather than the school where he or she lives.

The Republican controlled House is expected to concur or agree to the Senate amendment, sending the bill to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk for her action.

The bill would go into effect immediately instead of next school year as Senate Bill 101 would do, which is nothing more than an attempt to cut short the beating a similar plan has already taken at deliberative sessions in annual school district meetings around the state.

Something this complicated needs more than a few weeks to implement or it will create chaos and uncertainty.

As it stands, the open enrollment plan would make property poor school districts donor communities to property wealthy communities while increasing per student costs for the poorer districts and lowering the per student costs for the wealthier districts.

This really is Robin Hood in reverse.

And this bill is way more financially harmful to poorer communities than a $5,000 grant through the Education Freedom Account program as school districts would owe other districts tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The open enrollment plan would exacerbate the already alarming inequities between the schools in property wealthy communities and those in property poor cities and towns.

To add insult to injury, any shifting of schools for children from poor families will be out of reach because their parents cannot afford transportation or the difference in per student costs they would have to pay if their school district spends less per student than the school their child wants to attend.

The best and well-to-do will be able to go to schools in Bedford, Bow, Amherst, New Ipswich, Rye, Hanover, etc. but the majority of students will be in school districts with declining state aid as it follows the child after the first year and their parents will face ever increasing property tax bills.

This plan is not something that should be fast-tracked, unless you want to destroy public education, which is the goal of the Republican majority in the Legislature.

Under the plan, school districts would have to determine the capacity of the school and the grade levels and update the information each month.

Unlike current law, school districts do not have to vote to approve participating in open enrollment because the state says they shall participate.

The parents of a student living outside the district could apply to attend a different school anywhere in the state if there is a vacancy and the student has not been a disciplinary problem or been expelled from his or her resident school or has a history of chronic absenteeism.

Receiving schools are prohibited from making admission decisions based on “grade or age levels, pupil needs, areas of academic focus, aptitude, academic or athletic achievement.”

Now for the fun part, the home district of the student would pay the receiving district its average per pupil costs, which are determined annually by the Department of Education.

If the sending district’s per-pupil costs are less than the receiving school’s, the parents would have to make up the difference.

It appears if the sending school’s per-pupil costs are more than the receiving school’s, that amount of money would be sent to the receiving school.

Remember the outrage over donor communities, over property taxes raised in one community being sent to another community’s schools, this will make property poor communities donor towns to property wealthy communities who most likely have nicer facilities, better paid teachers and more activities and programs for their students.

It is still exporting property taxes raised in one community to another community’s school district.

The likely scenario is that students whose parents have the economic ability will be enrolled in the better school districts in the state.

That will do two things: It will provide more revenue to a school district that already has a significant tax base, while lowering the money for the student’s home district.

It also will increase the cost per student for that district because there will be a lower number of students, while decreasing the per-pupil costs for the receiving district because there are more pupils.

Analysis by Reaching Higher NH indicates over time, the per-pupil cost of the sending district will be more than the receiving district.

The organization uses the towns of Newport and Sunapee and the scenario of five students leaving Newport each year for Sunapee schools over a five-year period.

The per-pupil cost in Newport is $29,290 and the cost in Sunapee is $31,464.

Newport would have to send Sunapee $146,450 and each family would pay $2,174 to make up the difference, and Sunapee nets $157,320.

The bill allows districts to negotiate to lower the tuition by 80 percent and if that occurs each parent would have to pay $8,032.

During the five-year period, Newport’s per-pupil costs would rise to about $34,000 per pupil and Sunapee would go down to about $29,800.

“Within four years, and after the migration of 20 students, Newport’s cost per-pupil has surpassed Sunapee’s cost per-pupil. The good news for transferring parents is they no longer have to pay out of pocket to cover the difference. The bad news for Newport and its taxpayers is that the bill from Sunapee keeps getting larger, since the cost of open enrollment is tied to the sending district’s cost per pupil,” according to the analysis on the group’s website.

The state school aid, as little as it is, about 22 percent, would follow the child to Sunapee after the first year because the child is now included in the Average Daily Attendance of the Sunapee school district not Newport’s.

What this plan does not do is add one cent to state public education aid, although New Hampshire provides the least amount of state aid of any state in the country including Mississippi or Alabama. 

While New Hampshire pays 22 percent, the national average is 47 percent, which is more than double.

If New Hampshire paid the national average, about $1 billion dollars would come off of local property tax bills.

But even with two recent court cases finding the state has failed to live up to its constitutional obligation to provide its students with an adequate education and to pay for it, lawmakers have yet to do anything to address that, any more than they have in the three decades since the original Claremont lawsuit ruling.

Instead Republican lawmakers have voted to ban books; divisive concepts; diversity, equality and inclusiveness’ made record keeping more onerous and repetitive; will spend $112 million this biennium mostly benefiting kids already in religious and private schools, or homeschooled; sought a statewide school budget cap; failed to provide enough money for special education and building costs, sending the bill to local property taxpayers; cut businesses taxes largely benefiting multinationals and large corporation; eliminated the state’s only progressive tax on interest and dividends; and everything else they could do to destroy public education, as they appear to agree with the chair of the House Education Policy and Administration Committee Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, that public schools are leftist indoctrination centers.

This open enrollment plan is the latest in a long line of distractions from the one thing the legislature legally has to do: Pay for a constitutionally adequate education for the state’s students.

Supporters of the open enrollment plan call it a market approach to education. That would be fine if there were a level playing field, but there is not. 

The education funding system they don’t want to change has sentenced the students and taxpayers of the property poor communities to higher taxes and a less than adequate education creating an economic death spiral.

Yet those who can afford a private or religious school education are given state subsidies at taxpayer expense that include season passes to Gunstock and tuition to religious summer camps.

The Legislature’s first job should be to provide an adequate education to the state’s students and pay for it. That should be the first priority, not an afterthought.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, New Hampshire, Republicans

Houston: Students and Teachers Flee HISD After State Takeover and Top-Down Reforms

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2026 //
2

In 2023, the state of Texas took control of the Houston Independent School District because of an absurd state law that allows a state takeover of an entire district if only one school is “failing” for five years. In Houston, that one school was Phyllis Wheatley High Schol, which had disproportionately high numbers of students with disabilities, English language learners, and impoverished students. Wheatley was improving, but not enough to avert the takeover.

HISD went to court to block the takeover by the state, but eventually lost in 2023.

The State ousted the board and installed a new superintendent, former military officer Mike Miles, who had had a rocky tenure as superintendent in Dallas (teachers left in droves in response to Miles’ autocratic style.) Miles also started charter schools.

Miles imposed a standardized “New Education System” and ousted experienced (but noncompliant) principals.

A new study conducted by the Educatuon Research Center at the University of Houston found that a significant number of students and teachers had left the district since the state takeover. The beneficiaries of this exodus were charter schools–especially YES Prep and KIPP–and nearby school districts.

HISD enrolls about 168,400 students this year. It has lost 13,000 students since the takeover in 2023. Enrollment is growing in other districts, not declining.

Loss of enrollment means loss of state and federal funding.

The biggest enrollment losses occurred in schools closely implementing Mike Miles’ mandates. Researchers “found that campuses strictly implementing reforms lost more students. Certain magnet and specialty program schools with more autonomy gained students.”

Researchers said that this exodus from public schools to charter schools did not happen statewide.

The exodus of experienced teachers has led to a sharp increase in first-year teachers and uncertified teachers. The number of first-year teachers increased by 562 teachers, or 64.7%, since the takeover, according to the UH research center…

Area school districts and charters are hiring more HISD teachers after the first year of the takeover than they did previously, according to the report. Fort Bend ISD hired the most former HISD teachers, bringing on 207. Katy ISD ranked second in 2024–25, followed by Cypress-Fairbanks ISD.

The share of uncertified teachers in HISD’s teacher workforce increased to nearly 20% in 2024-25, even though research shows certified and experienced teachers improves student success.

Templeton said there is a trend of relying more on uncertified teachers statewide, but not to the extent seen in HISD.

“The increase in uncertified teachers and the increase of novice teachers … that increase was greater in HISD than the other districts surrounding it,” Templeton said.

Teacher turnover soared in Dallas when Mike Miles became Superintendent. In his first year, he ruled as an autocrat, and nearly 1,000 teachers quit. Over his three years, the rate of teacher resignations increased from the low teens to about 22% annually.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Houston, State Takeover, Students, Teachers

How Florida Cheats Public School Students By Lavishly Funding Kids in Non-Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2026 //
4

The Network for Public Education reposted this analysis of school funding in Florida by Sue Kingery Woltanski. She was not surprised to discover that the state provides much more aid to students in non-public schools than to those in public schools. Imagine what a difference that money would make if it were directed to public schools, where it belongs. Florida now subsidizes the tuition of every student in private schools, religious schools, and home schools. Most of that state money goes to students who never attended public schools. Florida is underwriting the

In this post, Sue Kingery Woltanski breaks down the finances in just one Florida district to show how taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually resulting in more taxpayer dollars going to private schools than to public ones. Reposted with permission. 

What Monroe County’s numbers reveal about Florida’s broken school funding priorities
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1UT3ALNtP1/

I saw this image today, and it prompted me to take a closer look at the numbers for my Florida school district: Monroe County.

SURPRISE! Here is the state funding breakdown for Monroe:

  • Monroe’s 8,457 Public School students (district and charter) receive $181.86 each from the state (for a total of  $1,537,924).
  • While Monroe’s 743 Family Empowerment Scholarship voucher recipients receive $6,786.03 each from the state (for a total of $5,040,326).

What if that $5,040,326 was used to fund Monroe’s public school students instead? Per pupil funding would be nearly $600 more per pupil, which could translate into teacher raises of $8,000/year or a reduction in class sizes, expanded electives,  richer learning experiences, or some combination of all of the above – all of which could directly improve classrooms and student learning

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Inequity, Privatization, Vouchers

Carol Burris: Time to Fix Charter School Laws

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2026 //
6

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, is an expert on charter schools and charter legislation. For the past decade, she has studied the charter school movement, state charter laws, and federal funding for charters and the consequences of those laws and funding more closely than anyone I know.

She wrote the following article, which was published in the current issue of The Progressive:

More than thirty years have passed since nineteen states first embraced charter schools as laboratories of innovation, and the evidence is clear: The model has broken down. Public trust has sharply eroded. School closures are routine, leaving students stranded and families frustrated. And nearly every day brings yet another charter school scandal.

The second installment of “Charter School Reckoning: Disillusionment,” a three-part report by the National Center for Charter School Accountability, reveals that the very structure of this sector—rather than merely isolated bad actors—is what enables mismanagement, profiteering, and instability at high cost to students and taxpayers. The need to rewrite charter laws is no longer a matter of debate; it is a matter of protecting students, taxpayers, and the public trust.

Roughly half of all charter schools by the 2018-19 school year were operated by management corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit. In Michigan, for-profit operators run 70 percent of the state’s charter schools. In Ohio and Florida, for-profits run half. Nevada’s, North Carolina’s, and South Carolina’s for-profit-run school sectors are quickly increasing. Charter schooling is now an industry, not a public school reform.

This growth in corporate chartering has been accompanied by the expansion of complex real estate and contracting structures. These arrangements are not incidental; they are built into the fabric of many charter school laws. In nearly every state, management companies can own school buildings, set their own lease terms, and collect “management fees” that reach 10 percent to 25 percent of a school’s total revenue. Through these related-party transactions, companies maximize profits, siphoning off funding that should be benefitting students.

In every state, authorizing entities that issue charters for schools are responsible for ensuring that the school is fiscally sound, well-managed, and that students are achieving. According to the new report, authorizers “decide who can start a new charter school, set academic and operational expectations, and oversee school performance. They also decide whether a charter should remain open or closed at the end of its contract.” Unfortunately, fee incentives, multiple authorizers, and political appointees to state authorizing boards often make the authorization process vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement. 

In 25 percent of states with charter school laws, four or more types of organizations—including universities, nonprofits, struggling colleges, junior colleges, school districts, and state agencies—are permitted to authorize charters to collect at least 3 percent of a school’s funding. In some states, small and cash-strapped nonprofits and colleges have created charter portfolios that generate millions of dollars. The “Charter School Reckoning” report also documents examples of failing schools that “authorizer shopped” to avoid being shut down, as well as one case of an authorizer who took charter customers on junkets to London and Stockholm.

Charter school board governance also generally remains slap-dash and unaccountable. Only five states require charter school governance to be based on elections. Nearly all other appointments are created by charter school boards’ bylaws, with only a handful of states having any requirements around term limits or membership.

Too often, board members have been sought out by the school’s operator and serve without term limits or approval beyond the board. The Epic Charter Schools case in Oklahoma shows how boards stacked with associates of the school’s founders failed to oversee tens of millions of dollars in questionable spending, with one board member admitting that he was a childhood friend of co-founder David Chaney.

Drawing from news stories published between September 2023 and September 2025, the “Charter School Reckoning” report documented a staggering $858 million in taxpayer funds lost to fraud, theft, profiteering, or incompetence. In story after story, board members were asleep at the wheel, claiming ignorance of the theft, fraud, and incompetence occurring on their watch. Only three states—California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts—“expressly prohibit contracts between a charter school board member and a company with whom the school is doing business.”

The consequences of these system design flaws fall heavily on students and families, with more than one in four charter schools closing by their fifth year and nearly 40 percent shuttering by year ten. And the funds taken from the public school system and taxpayer pockets are irretrievably lost.

These documented patterns point to a clear conclusion: Charter laws in many states create predictable opportunities for profiteering, opacity, and instability. Reform must therefore address the systemic issues that enable these outcomes. The report concludes with ten concrete legislative changes that, if correctly implemented, will reduce fraud and abuse and bring charter schools back to their original mission to serve as laboratories of educational innovation, deserving of the word “public.” Among the specific changes supported by the evidence in this report are stronger financial transparency rules, clear prohibitions on related-party transactions, limits on authorizer fees, democratic governance requirements for charter school boards, and renewal terms capped at five years.

The report concludes, “We can still incubate good ideas, but we should do so where they belong: inside the public system, with the sunlight, stewardship, and community voice that public money requires. Recommitment to that principle—public dollars for public schools under public rules—is the surest way to move from reckoning to repair.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud

Jeff Bryant: The Death of Public Schools in Florida?

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2026 //
1

Jeff Bryant, a veteran education journalist, dissects he plan to destroy public schools. Governor Ron DeSantis and the Legislature has unleashed the for-profit vultures to pick the bonds and funds of the state’s public schools. Not because the charges are better schools, but because the rightwingers have close ties to members of the legislature. Want to open a charter school? Want the state to pay all your expenses? Come on down to the Sunshine State!

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

The letters started coming in October 2025. In the first wave, according to the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), “at least 22 school districts in Florida” got letters alerting them that charter school operators, including a for-profit charter school management company based in Miami, intended to use a state law recently enacted to open new charter schools on the campuses of existing public schools beginning August 2027.

In Broward County, a South Florida district that includes Fort Lauderdale, the Mater Academy charter school chain, operated by for-profit charter management company Academica, claimed space in 27 public schools. Mater Academy claimed space in nearly 30 schools in Hillsborough County, home to Tampa Bay, “along with more than a dozen [schools] in Pinellas [County] and six in Pasco [County],” Tampa Bay Times reported. In Sarasota County, Mater claimed space in three public school campuses.

At least two more charter chains—New York-based Success Academy and New Jersey-based KIPP NJ—have joined in the campaign.

“So far, 480 schools in 22 counties have received 690 ‘letters of intent’ from charter school organizations expressing their intent to occupy space in public school buildings,” FPI’s Norin Dollard told Our Schools in late November. When schools receive letters from multiple charter organizations, it’s first come, first served, she explained, and the timeline for schools to respond is incredibly short—just 20 days.

Once the charter occupies part of the public school, Dollard explained, it operates rent free, and the public school district becomes responsible for much of the charter’s costs, including those for services charters don’t customarily provide, such as bus transportation and food service, as well as costs for school support services like janitorial, security, library, nursing, and counseling. Even any construction costs the charters might incur have to be covered by the public school.

This new law will force some public schools to convert to charter schools, said Damaris Allen, “and that’s intentional.” Allen is the executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, a public schools advocacy organization that is rallying opposition to the law.

The letters have caught the attention of national news outlets, including the Washington Post, which reported, “The Florida law is an expansion of a state program called ‘Schools of Hope,’ which was set up to allow certain charters to operate in areas with low-performing local public schools. The new law allows ‘Schools of Hope’ operators to take over space at any public school that’s under capacity, regardless of whether it is high- or low-performing.”

“The expansion of the Schools of Hope idea has been on a slippery slope,” Dollard explained, “much like school vouchers have been in the state.” Originally, in 2017, schools identified for Schools of Hope transition from public governance to charter management were very narrowly defined as persistently underperforming schools. That changed in 2019 when the legislature altered the definition of low-performing to target more schools and added schools in so-called opportunity zones—government-designated areas selected for economic development—as open territory for charters. Now, the new law allows charter schools to take over “underused, vacant, or surplus” space in traditional public schools and operate free of charge.

As the reach of the Schools of Hope idea morphed, so did its rationale. According to a 2025 op-ed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the program was originally conceived as an “initiative that incentivizes high-quality charter operators to open schools for students trapped in failing ones.” The aim now, according to Bush, is to solve the “problem” of underutilized space in existing public schools.

With school enrollments in steep decline in nearly every district in the state, fear of a potential mass charter school industry takeover of public school spaces—along with the costs local districts will incur—looms over district leaders across the state and strikes them as a clear existential threat.

Other consequences of colocating more charters in public schools have not been well-thought-out, according to Allen. For instance, on the issue of school safety, public schools have undertaken a number of measures to protect against school shootings, such as converting buildings to single-point entry. Charter schools don’t have to do that. So what happens when a charter operation moves into a building and doesn’t comply with the single-point entry? Also, the state legislature created new rulesfor public school libraries in 2022. Charters don’t have to follow those rules. How is that going to work in a colocation?

Allen fears the daunting challenges of charter colocations will cause some school boards and communities to sell school buildings or convert them to district-operated charters rather than give in to charter schools run by outside, for-profit companies.

And while proponents of Florida’s Schools of Hope program see it as a way to expand education options for students and families, critics point to evidence that Florida charter schools, which one expert called “a shitstorm,” need stricter oversight rather than a free rein. And, regardless of the outcomes, they warn that the idea is sure to get promoted as an “education innovation” that other Republican-dominated states will likely adopt.

A warning sign, not a model

When Nancy Lawther, a retired college professor of French, got involved in public schools advocacy, she became very skeptical about the oft-told narrative about the need for more education options because “too many poor children are trapped in failing public schools.” After all, in Dade County, Miami, where she lives, the public system has an A rating by the state despite having a challenging student population that is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with many living in households earning less than the state’s median income.

Her skepticism only increased when she first heard about expanding the Schools of Hope program to more schools, especially when she saw the results from the first schools taken over.

The original “Schools of Hope” weren’t individual schools; it was a whole district. In 2017, the Jefferson County school board voted in favor of participating in a pilot project for the new Schools of Hope initiative. The board’s approval to join the pilot meant that the district was required to turn over the management of their schools to a “high-performing” charter management company, which, in this case, happened to be Somerset Academy, another charter chain managed by the for-profit Academica management company.

But the results of the pilot would be a warning sign about the abilities of charter management firms to improve the education outcomes of public schools. As a 2025 op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel recounted, “[T]axpayers saw higher costs, stagnant results, and constant staff churn. By 2022, the takeover collapsed. Local leaders called it ‘an absolute disaster.’ The state had to step in with a $5 million bailout just to get the district running again.”

A 2024 account of the pilot in the Tallahassee Democrat reported, “[F]rom 2017 to 2022,… [Jefferson County] remained troubled by students’ lagging academic performance and mounting disciplinary issues, like fighting that in one case led to the arrest of 15 students. … [And] the school district was still getting a D grade” from the state.

Nevertheless, after Florida lawmakers expanded the Schools of Hope program in 2019, which has cost more than $300 million as of 2025, “There are only about a dozen Schools of Hope in Florida. In 2024, eight of them got C or D grades,” pointed out the Bradenton Times.”

‘All about market share’

Given its track record of failure, Lawther suspects that expanding Schools of Hope has nothing to do with improving education outcomes or making better use of publicly funded school buildings.

Indeed, Sarasota County, one of the districts targeted for charter colocations, has been an A-rated system since the state created the grading system in 2004, according to the district website.

Also, in districts where there are enrollment slides, there are few signs that demand for charters will soak up excess building capacity. According to a 2025 analysis of Sarasota County by Suncoast Searchlight, “The number of charter schools has grown in recent years, but the share of students at charters has not shifted much.” And building utilization rates of the different sectors are nearly identical—82 percent for public schools and 84 percent for charters, WUSF stated. “Some of the lowest-performing charters are barely a third full.”

Mater Academy, the charter operator using the Schools of Hope law to claim space in Sarasota public schools, does not currently operate a school in the district.

“This is all about market share,” Lawther said. “It’s about getting an advantage over charter operators that are not Schools of Hope providers, and independent charters that can’t compete in a market geared to the large chains,” like those operated by Academica.

Further, while enrollments in Florida charter schools continued to grow, it has shown signs of slowing down—from 3.7 percent in 2024 to 2.6 percent in 2025—and the number of charter schools decreased, from 739 in 2023-2024 to 732 in 2024-2025.

Also, the charter industry in the state faces many more privately-operated competitors. “Expansions of voucher programs are creating a more competitive market for charter schools,” Lawther noted, “and private schools, microschools, and homeschooling are growing forms of school choice.”

Indeed, charter schools no longer appear to be the fastest-growing form of school choice in the state.

After the Republican-led Florida legislature passed a bill in 2023 that did away with income requirements for families to receive state-sponsored school vouchers, the share of state funding diverted from the public system—which, technically, includes charters—to private schools and homeschooling doubled from 12 percent in 2021 to 24 percent in 2025, WUSF reported. In the school year 2023-2024, the number of vouchers, often called “scholarships,” given out to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling increased by approximately 142,000 students, according to Next Steps, a school choice advocacy group.

Florida has also experienced a 46 percent increase in homeschooling over the past five years, WEAR statedin 2025. And the state has freed up 50,000 new community facilities to serve as microschools, according to the Center for American Progress.

It would seem that in this increasingly competitive education landscape, the Florida charter school industry could use a new competitive angle like the one offered by Schools of Hope. “Officially, charter school advocates say Schools of Hope is an amazing opportunity to expand parent choice,” Dollard said, “but unofficially, this is an incredibly lucrative business opportunity.”

An industry in decline?

The charter school industry’s desire for new business strategies that enable charter operators to seize public school classrooms—or even whole buildings—is not confined to Florida.

In Indiana, for years, public school districts have been required to notify the state, within 10 days, when one of their buildings becomes vacant and to make the building available to lease to a charter school for $1 per year or sell the building to a charter operator outright for $1.

In Ohio’s 2025 approved budget, a new provision allows the state to force school districts to close some public school buildings and sell those properties to charter or private schools “at below market value,” Ideastream Public Media reported.

Arkansas is also likely to adopt a Schools of Hope-like measure, Allen speculated, because its state secretary of education Jacob Oliva served in Florida. Oliva was Florida’s state education chancellor during the failed Schools of Hope pilot in Jefferson County.

One market condition that’s likely behind these increasingly aggressive charter school industry is land grab, as revealed in a 2025 analysis by the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA). According to the report, charter school closings have been accelerating nationwide, while the pace of new charter openings has slowed significantly during the same time.

“[T]he 2023-24 school year saw just 12 more open charter schools than during the previous year,” the report found. This is “a dramatic departure” from the heydays of industry growth when “[t]he number of charter schools increased by 421” between 2010 and 2011.

Charter school enrollment growth has also stalled, according to the report, increasing by 0.1 percentage point—from 7.5 percent to 7.6 percent of total charter enrollment—between 2020 and 2023.

In the most recent school years, based on official data from 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, NCCSA found, “Most states experienced declines or stagnation [in charter school market share], and preliminary indicators suggest that, once the 2024 data is finalized, the trend will likely worsen.”

North Carolina offers a clarifying example of the significant headwinds that the charter school industry now faces.

In the Tar Heel state, charter schools have enjoyed widespread support among state lawmakers and private investors. The state legislature has made dramatic changes to state laws regarding charters, including loosening regulations and fast-tracking approval of new schools. And a 2024 analysis by the Charlotte Observer found “at least $279 million in private equity investments in North Carolina charter schools since 2013.”

Despite this support, the number of charter schools in North Carolina declined in 2024-2025, from 211 to 208 in 2023-2024, according to an industry spokesperson. And many of the newest charter schools to open in the state have not fared well. “State data show that only about 26 percent of new charter schools in the past five years met or exceeded their enrollment projections,” NC Newsline reported, “and more than half of those that missed the mark are now closed or never opened.”

The report’s findings revealed that although charters tend to locate in low-income neighborhoods, they serve far fewer children from low-income families, fewer children who are English learners, and fewer children with disabilities, resulting in leaving traditional public schools with elevated needs and higher costs.

Critics of the Schools of Hope law noted that these industry shifts, as well as a historical tendency for education policies enacted in Florida to get picked up in other Republican-dominated states, will spur other states to adopt similar policies, regardless of any evidence that they might harm public schools.

“More generally,” Baker added, “Florida charter schools are a shitstorm, both underserving higher need populations and underperforming with those they do serve.”

‘A shitstorm’

Among the critics of Florida’s Schools of Hope legislation is Bruce Baker, a professor and chair of the department of teaching and learning at the University of Miami and an expert on charter schools and public school finances.

“I’m, of course, deeply concerned with granting preferential access to any charter operator, at the expense of a fiscally strapped school district,” Baker wrote in an email. “I’m more concerned when it may present a slippery slope regarding control over land and buildings that should—by the [state] constitution, which supersedes this regulatory change—be solely under the authority of the local boards of education elected by the taxpayers who financed those facilities and continue to maintain them. It becomes even more problematic if this eventually creates an avenue to transfer ownership. That would be a particularly egregious violation of local board authority and private taking of public assets. We aren’t there yet, but it’s a concern.”

Baker’s assessment of charter schools in the Sunshine State is evident in his 2025 report, which looks at the impacts of the industry on school funding adequacy, equity, and student academic outcomes across the state, and, more specifically, in the Miami-Dade district.

Also, charters, despite having an advantage of educating less challenging and less costly student populations, underperform public schools on state assessments while “serving otherwise similar student populations.” This finding holds statewide and in Miami-Dade.

The report concludes that Florida charters are “compromising equity, eroding efficiency, and producing poor educational outcomes for those it serves.”

Given these findings, the report recommends that state lawmakers “[i]mpose a moratorium on charter school expansion, including the Schools of Hope Program.” It also calls for “new regulations for evaluating existing charter operators,” stronger vetting of new charter operators, and stricter enforcement of regulations about charter school student outcomes.

Schools of nope

Several district school superintendents across Florida have urged their communities to oppose the state’s Schools of Hope charter school expansion in public school buildings. When the state’s current education commissioner defended the Schools of Hope law in his address at a 2025 conference for school board members and district leaders and suggested it could be used to shut down whole districts, the audience roundly booed him.

Grassroots groups such as Families for Strong Public Schools have held events to educate the public about the negative impacts of charter colocations. A coalition that includes the United Teachers of Dade, NAACP Miami-Dade Branch, the Miami-Dade County Council of PTA/PTSA, and others has formed to protest charter colocations. And a senator in the state legislature has introduced a bill to repeal the Schools of Hope expansion.

Much of the opposition has rallied under the banner of “Schools of Nope” and is organizing call-ins and an email campaign targeting state legislators.

Opposition organizers like Damaris Allen see this as a do-or-die moment in the state. “Either we win this fight, or it’s the death of public schools in Florida,” she said.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice

Musk and Trump Have Blood on Their Hands After Canceling US AID

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2025 //
11

At the start of the second Trump administration, Trump unilaterally created a fake “Department of Government Efficiency,” led by Elon Musk. Only Congress can create or eliminate Departments. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives is responsible for funding and defunding the federal government.

Trump ignored the Constitution and Congress and let Musk and his team ransack the Federal Government, fire thousands of civil servants, and close agencies at will. DOGE decisions were made not by experts but by Musk and his team, most of whom were young men in their 20s, even a teenagers. From their point of view, their greatest accomplishment was to copy massive amounts of personally identifiable data from the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration.

While DOGE slashed and burned agencies and Departments with abandon, the cruelest cut of all was the near-total elimination of foreign aid. Millions of people in impoverished countries relied on U.S. AID for food, medicine, and medical care. The aid is gone. Hundreds of thousands of people died. If you say it in the active tense, Trump and Musk murdered “hundreds of thousands of people” whose lives depended on US AID. The food aid was more than a humanitarian impulse: American farmers lost at least $2 billion that was used to pay them to supply food for US AID.

Matt Johnson wrote for MS NOW:

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Elon Musk boasted in February, shortly after President Donald Trump gave him permission to hack his way through the federal government. As a “special government employee” with no oversight running the “temporary organization,” the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk destroyed the 64-year-old humanitarian agency in a matter of days, abruptly halting deliveries of lifesaving medicine, emergency food aid and many other forms of support to the poorest people on the planet. This was done in the name of DOGE’s mission to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Musk claimed that DOGE would slash government spending by “at least $2 trillion,” but it ended up saving a microscopic fraction of that figure. Now that DOGE has been disbanded, Musk claims “We were a little bit successful” — but admits that he wouldn’t do it again. 

Musk tried his hand at government, shrugged and moved on. The same can’t be said for the people who are dead and dying thanks to the DOGE-led onslaught on the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk declared in March. According to models created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, hundreds of thousands of people have in fact died as a result of eliminated and disrupted aid. 

It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID. The U.S. was responsible for 40% of the total foreign aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024, and much of the infrastructure that delivered this aid has now been destroyed. Beyond the frozen payments for active aid projects, partner organizations have closed, supply chains for medicine and food deliveries have been severed and staff who administered and monitored programs have been fired. Early warning systems for starvation and infectious diseases have shut down. 

The individual stories are harrowing. A South Sudanese child with HIV died from pneumonia because he didn’t receive the medication necessary to sustain his immune system. People participating in studies were abandonedwith experimental drugs in their systems and medical devices in their bodies. Cases of acute malnutrition at refugee camps have surged. 

In the MAGAverse, none of this is true because USAID was never an aid organization to begin with. Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who has accused the agency of being a terror organization and subverting governments around the world, was a big influence on Musk’s assault on USAID, which Benz called the “Terror Titanic.” Like Musk before him, Benz has now been appointed as a special government employee to investigate his allegations that USAID was a massive covert influence operation and front for the CIA. 

Benz’s campaign is just the latest example of MAGA propaganda using USAID as a convenient political scapegoat. DOGE viewed the takeover of USAID as an opportunity to find instances of “viral waste,” which could be broadcast to the American people as a justification for its other cost-cutting efforts. One example cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later declared that the money had been “sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” 

There was just one problem: The money was actually for family planning in a province of Mozambique called Gaza….

This is not the full article. Open the link to read the rest.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Data, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Funding, Injustice, International, Musk, Elon, Trump

The War on Public Education Hurts the Most Vulnerable Students

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2025 //
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Garry Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, understands the war on public education. He knows that privatization is meant to diminish public education. He knows that it is sold by its propagandists as a way to help the neediest students. He knows this is a lie intended to fool people. He knows that the children who are hurt most by the war on public education are the most vulnerable students.

You might rightly conclude that the war on public education is a clever hoax.

Rayno writes:

“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” 

The quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but is also similar to words from British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.

What better measure of treating the most vulnerable than the public education system open to all, not just those with the resources to send their children to private or religious schools.

Public education is often called the great equalizer providing the same learning  opportunities to a community’s poorest children to the richest in stark contrast with today’s political climate driven by culture wars and fear of diversity, equality and inclusion.

Public education has provided an educated citizenry for businesses, government and political decision making for several hundred years.

Public education is the embodiment of “the public good,” as it provides a foundation for a well-lived life that is both rewarding and useful to others.

But for the last few decades there has been a war on public education driven by propaganda, ideology and greed.

While the war has intensified in the last decade, it began with the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 declaring racial segregation in public schools a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

The decision overturned the court’s earlier Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which established the separate-but-equal provision for public education.

The Brown decision required the desegregation of public schools sending a tidal wave through the south reaching north to Boston.

The southern oligarchs who never really believed the South lost the Civil War soon colluded with others like them to develop a system to bypass their obligation to pay to educate black kids. Instead they established “segregation academies” where their children could learn in a homogeneous setting.

The system was created with the help of libertarian economist James Buchanan who touted the belief that the most efficient government is one run by the wealthy and educated (the oligarchs) because the regular folks are driven by self interest which makes government inefficient, and most importantly, costly through higher taxes.

This philosophy continues today as libertarians and other far right ideologues want to privatize public education because it takes too much of their money in taxes, and a humanities-based public education induces children to develop beliefs different from their parents, which once was the norm for American families.

It is not by happenstance we see parental bills of rights, opt outs, open enrollment and greater and greater restrictions on what may be taught, along with increased administrative work loads piled onto public education by politicians in Concord as they double down on refusing to do the one simple thing the state Supreme Court told them to do 30 years ago, provide each child with an adequate education and pay for it.

Instead they have pushed a voucher system costing state taxpayers well over $100 million this biennium, with 90 percent of it paying for private and religious school tuition and homeschooling for kids who were not in public schools when their parents applied for grants if they ever were in public schools.

Most of the voucher system expansion occurred under the Chris Sununu administration with his back-room-deal appointed Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.

Edelblut nearly beat Sununu in the 2016 Republican primary for governor for those with short memories.

Sununu sent his children to private schools while he was governor and Edelblut homeschooled his children.

Public education during the eight years of the Sununu administration was not a priority although 90 percent of the state’s children attend public schools.

And it is not coincidence that after the Republican House resurrected House Bill 675 which would impose a statewide school budget cap, that Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s small DOGE team — led by two “successful businessmen” — issued its long awaited report and one category targeted schools following the legislature’s Free State agenda of greater transparency and efficiencies, seeking Medicaid and insurance reimbursements and reforming school audit requirements. 

HB 675 failed to find enough support last session because it violates the once sacred “local control ideal” often touted for local government.

House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, issued a press release linking the report and the bill.

“HB 675 applies the findings of the report where they matter most. When dollars are committed and taxpayers are on the hook, HB 675 puts power back into the hands of the voter by requiring a higher threshold of consent,” he said.

Yes a higher threshold which means the will of the majority is nullified by a minority.

State lawmakers fail to acknowledge they provide the least state aid to public education of any state in the country. Instead local property taxpayers pay 70 percent of public education costs and should be able to set their school budget and various other realms usurped by state lawmakers without a “higher threshold of consent.”

The battlefield in the war on public education shifts over time. It began with religious and political ideology; moved into gender and sexual identification; parental rights, including who decides whether school materials and books are appropriate; school choice such as open enrollment, which will exacerbate the already great divide between property poor and wealthy school districts; and is now positioned to impact the most vulnerable of public school children, those with disabilities.

Last week special education administrators gathered for their annual meeting and to celebrate 50 years of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to improve access to education and to integrate classrooms to include those with disabilities.

Today’s special education services and supports are lights overcoming the darkness of institutionalization or stay-at-home kids separated from their peers in public schools.

Many children with disabilities were told to stay home and not to attend school as there were no specialized services or therapies for them.

But services are expensive as federal lawmakers knew they would be, promising to pay 40 percent of the cost, but reneging on that promise and paying only about 13 percent.

In New Hampshire, most of the remainder is paid by local property taxpayers.

The state pays little until a student’s costs reach three-and-a-half times the state’s per-pupil average or about $70,000.

But state lawmakers have also failed to live up to their  obligation to pay their state of the catastrophic costs, so local school districts are reimbursed at less than 100 percent.

Last session lawmakers approved an 80 percent threshold as the low end of the reimbursement scale.

Special education costs are difficult to predict and a budget can be blown quickly if a couple students needing costly special education services move into a district.

The federal government is potentially moving the Office of Special Education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services which local special education administrators said would change the goal from education to a health model which would imply there is a remedy or an illness.

And they said it is the first step back down the road they began traveling 50 years ago when students with disabilities were institutionalized or warehoused in one facility.

Several bills to come before the legislature this session will explore going back to centralized facilities to provide services and supports and explore if the private sector can better provide the services, which is consistent with the libertarian ideal of private education.

Great strides have been made in the last 50 years allowing people with disabilities to lead productive and rewarding lives independently, but that could change as lawmakers focus on costs and greater efficiencies, and the political climate seeks a homogenous environment without minorities, disabilities or vulnerable people.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Lies, New Hampshire, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers
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