Its finances had been shaky for a long time, and its enrollment had declined. Yet no one anticipated its sudden closure.
As it happens, the Network for Public Education reported only days ago on the frequency of charter school closures. Its report is called Doomed to Fail. It’s sad but true that charter schools have an unusually high record of transience. Parents can’t be sure that the charter school they chose will keep its doors open for more than a year, or three, or five.
The Washington Post reported:
On the day Eagle Academy abruptly closed, teachers at theD.C. charter school had been unpacking supplies, moving furniture and hanging bright posters covered with the names of students who were supposed to fill classrooms.
There had been rumblings of financial troubles, but the school’sleaders told families over the summer they had a plan: Another charter school had agreed to take over Eagle’s two campusesin Congress Heights and Capitol Riverfront.
But the D.C. Public Charter School Board, an independent city oversight body, blocked that plan. Eagle Academy unexpectedly was shuttered in August, less than a week before the new school year, leaving roughly 350 prekindergarten through third-grade students, plus their teachers, scrambling….
Eagle Academy had shown signs of financial shakiness as enrollment declined over several years, relying at times on credit cards to stay open and missing reporting deadlines, according to a staff report from D.C.’s charter school board.
While pandemic emergency funding gave the academy a temporary boost, Eagle made errors in budgeting, including overshooting student enrollment estimates and grant allocations, a Washington Post review shows. A promise to make significant cuts in spending and an effort to attract more students did not fully materialize.
Public records and more than a dozen interviews with Eagle families, school leaders and D.C. officials show that the city and Eagle’s own board lacked a clear picture of the school’s increasingly dire financial situation — leading to questions over whether more could have been done to stave off closure or allow for an easier transition for families. The city’s charter school board also said it would examine its oversight practices…
Eagle Academy opened its first campus in 2003. It was the dream of Cassandra S. Pinkney, who set out to build a school where Black children from underserved communities would learn to swim and kids like her son — who had special-education needs — could thrive. Pinkney founded the school with [Joe] Smith, a friend and charter-school advocate.
It was vaunted at the time as the District’s first “exclusively early childhood public charter school,” according to Eagle’s 2023 annual report. Two years after opening, the school had a special-education department with speech-language therapy, mental health services and other supports. It would later expand to enroll children through the third grade…
The enrollment problems caused financial ones. Schools are funded by the city largely based on the number of students who attend.
Eagle was spending close to $50,000 per student — higher than the citywide average of about $28,000 — according to data from the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent available. Most of Eagle’s student body came from lower-income homes, and the school had a higher-than-average share of children with disabilities, according to data published by the city, which are factors that bring in more funding.
The combination of declining enrollment and financial stress doomed the school.
The legendary Jackie Goldberg is retiring from the Los Angeles school board, which means there is an open seat. Carl J. Petersen, an LAUSD parent, sent questions to both candidates for the seat, but only one answered.
LAUSD Board District 5 covers Northeast Los Angeles from East Hollywood to Eagle Rock and extends through Koreatown and Pico-Union to include much of Southeast L.A. (“SELA”) from Vernon to South Gate and also part of South LA. With its representative, Jackie Goldberg, taking a well-deserved retirement, a rare open-seat election is occurring in November.
As voters begin receiving their ballots, the two remaining candidates, Karla Griego and Graciela Ortiz, have been given one last opportunity to answer questions about issues facing the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Throughout the campaign, Ortiz has failed to answer questions sent to her as part of the LAUSD Candidate Forum series and this last set of questions were no different. Griego continued to participate and her answers to the first half of the questions can be found below:
According to the District, charter schools currently owe $3,003,768 in delinquent overallocation fees, some of this debt is several years old. How would you force the District to ensure that these debts are paid?
Charter Corporations should not be allowed to continue expanding while carrying outstanding debt to our district and our students. I would propose specific limits to their expansion and contract renewals until such debts are paid off.
After telling the LAUSD School Board for years that state law required the District to classify classrooms used to provide Special Education services as “empty” and are, therefore, available to be given away when providing space under PROP-39, the Director of the Charter School Division admitted this year that it was, instead, the policy of the district. As a result, some of our most vulnerable children were receiving these services in closets and stairwells. How should Jose Cole-Guitierez, Director of the Charter School Division, be held accountable for misleading the Board?
It is unconscionable that Charter corporations have deceived our districts’ decision-makers and that LAUSD has not yet held Charter companies accountable. In conjunction with the community schools model, schools should have the decision-making power to use their facilities to best benefit their students, and not be at risk of space being taken to expand or co-locate charters.
The LAUSD is required to have a Homeless Liaison for each school per the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act. What are the candidate’s positions on LAUSD partnering with the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment Homelessness Liaisons in Neighborhood Councils to notify our constituents about homeless services for students and their parents at their schools?
LAUSD should at the very least have a homeless liaison in each school, and be in communication with existing partners so that our students and their families are aware of homeless services available to them. But we need to do more. With rising housing costs in Los Angeles, LAUSD has the responsibility– and the ability–to address homelessness in creative ways that offer vital services to our students. This includes using vacant lots to build housing for our students and their families and partnering with community based organizations, city and county offices to address the homelessness crisis.
What statement(s) from the opposing campaign team would like to address?
My opponent claims that it is not her place to evaluate the Superintendent, her boss. I disagree. I believe that as an educator, and as a School Board member, it will be my responsibility to hold the Superintendent accountable to the students we serve and to the many qualified employees of the District. We need to focus on funding services for our students, not new digital platforms that no one asked for. We need to focus on serving our special education population, not overtesting our kids. We need to focus on providing enrichment, arts education, and mental health services to our students, not selling our kids out to more privately-run charters. We need to evaluate his decisions every step of the way, and demand better.
Given the rhetoric around cutting wasteful spending, please provide one specific part of the budget where you believe waste exists and how would you make cuts that would not affect the classroom?
It seems that there are too many high paid administrators at the District and Local District levels as well as contracts with outside consultants, marketing and testing companies. One of those contracts, the recent AI Bot named Ed, whose company filed for bankruptcy, is an example of expenditures that were made at the top level without stakeholder input.
One of the basic jobs of a School Board Member is to hire and fire the Superintendent. How should a Superintendent be evaluated?
Evaluation should be based on progress towards goals which are predetermined by the school board. These goals should be informed by stakeholder input and priorities. Beyond progress toward academic achievement, graduation and attendance, goals should include school climate and culture, safety, wellness and progress toward improving the overall educational experience of all of our students. Data toward these goals should be collected throughout the Superintendent’s tenure, to provide guidance and opportunities to make changes and improvements on actions designated to achieve these goals.
Nurses need equipment and the proper size office to care for students. Have all school Administrators established a HIPAA compliant Health Office where the nurse has confidential work space to talk with students, parents, staff members, and doctors regarding students health needs, reporting abuse or neglect? Do they have a private area to do procedures, other than in a bathroom which is not appropriate to do give a Insulin Injection, or to do a Gastronomy Tube feeding or to put the tube back into a student in a space large enough and as sterile or clean as possible?
I support equipping our nurses with the resources and facilities necessary at all schools to provide safe and secure health services to our students.
Do Special Education Centers and special day classes have a place in the District’s continuum of services. If not, why? If yes, what will you do to ensure that families have an ability to choose them during the IEP process?
Special Ed Centers and Special Day Classes should have a place in the District’s continuum of services. Although it is part of the IEP meeting discussion, it is not necessarily one that is delved into deeply. Sometimes parents do not understand the difference between programs and placements. An action step toward making this conversation meaningful and collaborative with the whole IEP team, is to provide information to help parents be aware of their rights. They must also be encouraged and empowered to participate in the meetings. An accountability piece is adding space in the IEP document that records the conversation; holding local regional meetings at least 4 times a year that informs and supports parents’/caregivers’ understanding of the IEP process, their rights and engagement in the process. Furthermore, this meeting would also inform families and students what various Special Education Programs are offered in the LAUSD.
There is a wide consensus that the IEP process has become increasingly adversarial. How will you ensure that parents are equal partners in guiding special education services?
Some of the first steps of action to remedy this, is to ensure that case carriers/teachers’ caseloads/class size is honored and respected. This way, teachers and case carriers can meet with family members to review the IEP process and meeting. Building relationships and respecting families/caregivers and approaching the IEP meeting from a place of compassion and understanding while centering the child’s needs, is critical to build trust. Meetings should include norms of collaboration that are agreed upon by the IEP team, which explicitly states that everyone on the team is an equal partner (although these norms exist, they are not always reviewed at IEP meetings.)
Several months ago, Texas journalists reported that millions of dollars were transferred from charter school accounts in Texas to charter school accounts in Colorado. Their stories said that Houston superintendent Mike Miles was bolstering the finances of one of his Colorado charter schools.
Miles was appointed as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District as part of a hostile state takeover of HISD. State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath was installed by Governor Greg Abbott, and Morath imposed Miles on HISD.
When Miles came under fire for financial irregularities, the state investigated. Who is the state? Mike Morath, the same guy who appointed Miles.
The Texas Education Agency has cleared acting Houston school district Superintendent Mike Miles of wrongdoing after he was accused of improperly diverting millions of dollars in state funds to his Colorado charter school system.
After reporting from Spectrum News and The Texas Observer prompted calls for an investigation earlier this year, the education agency concluded on Tuesday that neither Miles — who the agency picked to lead the state’s largest school district last year — nor his charter school network, Third Future Schools, “violated any applicable Texas laws,” according to the 29-page investigation report.
The investigation found, in part, that checks directed from a partnering Texas school district to Third Future Schools’ Colorado address went there because the Colorado location handles accounting services for the network’s Texas branch, which is run independently. But, the checks were eventually deposited in the Texas branch’s bank account.
“Based on the evidence obtained and analyzed during the investigation, there is no merit to the allegations contained in the media reports that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas,” the report notes.
The agency is closing the investigation, and “no further action will be taken” at this time, the report says.
In an email sent to the Houston school district community on Tuesday, Miles called the earlier reporting “a baseless distraction and an attempt to undermine and discredit the good work happening” in the schools.
“Now we can do what we always do and move forward on behalf of our students,” Miles said.
Earlier this year, Spectrum News reported that the Texas branch of Third Future Schools — which receives funding from multiple Texas school districts to run campuses in the state — was potentially using public funds from its school in Odessa to offset financial losses at a sister school in Colorado.
The Texas Observer later reported that it had identified “additional irregularities” related to the disclosure of expenses by the charter network.
Miles denied wrongdoing and accused the previous reporting of mischaracterizing “common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them” and welcomed an investigation into the network’s activities.
The state’s investigators agreed with Miles, saying they found no evidence that Texas school districts deposited funds into the bank account of Third Future Schools in Colorado. Third Future Schools-Texas reimburses the Colorado location for administrative services it provides to all of the charter network, the report says.
Colorado voters, beware! On the November 5 ballot: an amendment to the State Constitution to protect school choice.
If you want to support public schools and a raid on the state’s treasury by privatizers, defeat it!
This proposed amendment is weird. Ever since the founding of this nation, states have had explicit pledges in their constitution to protect public schools, open to all. Colorado’s state Constitution includes such language as well as language explicitly rejecting public funding for religious schools.
Article 9, Section 2 of the Constitution says:
Section 2. Establishment and maintenance of public schools. The general assembly shall, as soon as practicable, provide for the establishment and maintenance of a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state, wherein all residents of the state, between the ages of six and twenty-one years, may be educated gratuitously.
Article 8, Section 7 of the Constitution says:
Section 7. Aid to private schools, churches, sectarian purpose, forbidden. Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian society, or for any sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property, ever be made by the state, or any such public corporation to any church, or for any sectarian purpose.
Now, the privatizers want to cancel that language and replace it with language chartering what was previously forbidden.
On November 5, 2024, Colorado voters will weigh in on a hot topic in education today: school choice. Amendment 80 would make the concept of “school choice” a guaranteed right in the Colorado constitution. The text of the amendment reads as follows:
(1) PURPOSE AND FINDINGS. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO HEREBY FIND AND DECLARE THAT ALL CHILDREN HAVE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO ACCESS A QUALITY EDUCATION; THAT PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIRECT THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN; AND THAT SCHOOL CHOICE INCLUDES NEIGHBORHOOD, CHARTER, PRIVATE, AND HOME SCHOOLS, OPEN ENROLLMENT OPTIONS, AND FUTURE INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION. (2) EACH K-12 CHILD HAS THE RIGHT TO SCHOOL CHOICE.
According to University of Southern California Professor Guilbert Hentschke, “school choice has become a catch-all label describing many different programs that offer students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools.” Since school choice covers many options, it can be confusing, and it is often the “subject of fierce debate in various state legislatures across the United States.” The critical distinction to make regarding school choice is often whether it affects public or private schools.
School choice has been the mantra for voucher-systems currently enacted in at least twenty states. School choice with voucher-type legislation entails using taxpayer dollars for education savings accounts, opportunity scholarships, tax credits, or actual vouchers so families can choose any type of schooling for their child — private, public or home schooling. This idea represents an emphasis on “funding students instead of funding school systems.”
The focus on school choice has resulted in increased enrollment in charter schools, private schools, and home schooling. At the same time, the school choice movement has also created instability, competition, ideological curricula, resource inequities, increased segregation, loss of community, and reduced funding for public neighborhood schools. In Colorado, of all eligible school-age children, about 76% attend public schools, 15% attend charter schools, 8 percent are in private schools, and 1% are homeschooled.
Advance Colorado is the conservative think tank organization that developed the language for Amendment 80, and they coordinated the expensive signature gathering to secure approval for the measure, originally titled Initiative 138. The backers acknowledge that parents already have the right in state statute to “send their kids to a neighborhood school, charter school, private school, home school, or across district lines.”
Advance Colorado’s solution to the “problem” of legislators promoting charter accountability is to put “the right to school choice in the Colorado Constitution” which they assert will give school choice “legal advantages a normal statute does not have.” Over fifty highly paid lobbyists were assigned to kill the charter accountability bill which was publicly opposed by Governor Polis, and was defeated in the House committee.
Even though Advance Colorado states its goal is to protect the charter schools from future legislative interference, Amendment 80 encompasses “private and home schooling” options. Including “private schools as a guaranteed right” is a plan promulgated by Americans for Prosperity and other conservative think tanks in several red states where voucher bills have been passed or expanded. Fields said he thinks “parents should be in charge of education,” adding “I think it’s easier when they have resources to send their kid to the school that they want to.”
Colorado State board of education members Lisa Escárcega and Kathy Plomer wrote in a September 11 op-ed that Amendment 80 is “not just about school choice.” They cautioned that “Amendment 80, brought by wealthy, in and out-of-state organizations, is part of a nationally coordinated master plan to go around voters in states where voucher proponents have been unsuccessful in passing state voucher laws.” They pointed out that in Colorado, “voters turned down three education voucher ballot initiatives in the 1990s.Voucher and private school proponents then tried the legislative route. The Colorado legislature has turned down any type of voucher or education savings account 18 times just since 2016.” While the amendment doesn’t mention vouchers, the state board members expressed their concern that “If parents have a right to send their children to private schools, then shouldn’t the state pay for it?”
Using public taxpayer dollars for children to attend private schools or for home schooling is not legal in Colorado, nor is it currently popular. (They can get some indirect support.) Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center stated that “it would be hard to persuade voters or politicians that Colorado should join the ranks of states that provide taxpayer subsidies for private schools or homeschooling.”
Even though Fields insists this amendment “is not paving the way for a voucher program in Colorado,” the far-right conservative groups providing the money to promote Amendment 80 have tried to enact vouchers in Colorado for years.
Vouchers are not necessarily an effective system to improve student learning and according to recent research, they can hinder state budgets significantly. Josh Cowen, senior fellow at the Education Law Center, pointed to decades of evidence showing private school vouchers have led to some of the steepest declines in student achievement on record. He added that measures similar to Amendment 80 passed in Arizona, Florida and Ohio have led to serious budget cuts.
Who is funding this effort to enshrine “school choice” in the state constitution?
In an op-ed about Advance Colorado last year, Colorado Newsline editor Quentin Young wrote that “Coloradans don’t know who’s supplying its money or their true motivations, because nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors.” Advance Colorado is the same “dark money group” that gathered signatures for Initiative 108, which would have forced over $3 billion in cuts to services to citizens.
Advance Colorado started as “Unite for Colorado” in 2019, which bankrolled almost every major Republican effort in Colorado in 2020. Unite for Colorado spent over $17 million in 2020 on Republican candidates, and they have “become the most important fundraising entity for conservatives and for Republicans,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chairman of the Colorado GOP. Unite for Colorado changed its name to Advance Colorado Action in 2021 due to questionable conflicts over its spending practices, which are still in litigation.
As a “dark money group,” Advance Colorado receives grants from many sources, most of which are unknown, yet there is evidence that connects Advance Colorado to several conservative organizations. There are also reports that tie the group to Phillip Anschutz, Colorado’s richest billionaire. According to Cause IQ, between 2020-2023, over $28 million was funneled to Unite Colorado/Advance Colorado from the Colorado Stronger Alliance.
Colorado Dawn was formed in 2021 to “support organizations who further the efforts to educate the public about western values and economics,” and it has received over $3 million from Unite Colorado (Advance Colorado). Tax records from the Colorado Dawn’s 2022 990’s list state Board of Education member Steve Durham as chairman, Senator Paul Lundeen as Vice-chairman, and Michael Fields as Treasurer. Lundeen announced in 2022 his hopes that Colorado would enact a voucher program after the Supreme Court “cleared the way for public dollars in a Maine tuition assistance program to flow to private religious schools.” The Colorado Secretary of State’s office indicates that Colorado Dawn spent over $1.3 million to collect signatures for Amendment 80.
On Sept 13, 2024, the CEA announced its opposition to Amendment 80 at a press conference in Denver. A coalition of various representatives from across the state, the National Education Association, and the ACLU described their main reasons for opposing Amendment 80.
The speakers at the press conference emphasized that the amendment is unnecessary because school choice is already protected in law and has been for 30 years. In addition, they stated that the amendment opens the door to taking money from public schools to fund private schools. Speakers stressed that funding private schools would drain money away from rural public schools, private schools pose significant civil rights concerns, and they don’t belong in the Constitution.
In interviews with Chalkbeat, several education experts weighed in on the wording in Amendment 80, indicating it could create years of “litigation” order to interpret the amendment’s misleading language, which Kristi Burton Brown also acknowledged in her interview with KOA radio.
Currently, the following groups are opposing the measure: ACLU of Colorado, AFT Colorado, Colorado Fiscal Institute, CEA, The Colorado Association of School Executives (CASE), AFSCME, Advocates for Public Education Policy, Business and Professional Women of Colorado, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, League of Women Voters Colorado, Soul 2 Soul Sisters, Bell Policy Center, Colorado PTA, One Colorado, United for a New Economy, Colorado Democratic Party, American Association of University Women, Colorado WINS, Colorado AFL-CIO, Stand for Children, and New Era Colorado Action Fund.
Colorado voters will need to decide which rationale they support regarding this school choice amendment. Will they agree with Advance Colorado that a constitutional amendment is necessary to ensure that the legislature will not update current charter school laws? Or will they believe that Colorado does not need to go the route of other states and create a pathway to use public funding for private and home schools?
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Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career.
The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?
Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools.
While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.
Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive.
Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.
Here are some of the key findings of the report:
-By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed
-By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.
-More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures
-Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%.
-The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.
-The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.
-Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.
-School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth..
The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.
K-12 education has captured its share of headlines over the last few years. Schools—and, specifically, local school boards—became a lightning rod for anger about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the first weeks of the pandemic, Republicans accused Democratic leaders of being too slow to reopen schools. That accusation gained potency as evidence mounted that schools hadn’t been the vectors of COVID-19 transmission that experts initially feared. Sensing vulnerability, Democrats became reluctant to engage on K-12 issues, and Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin showed that Democrats wouldn’t put up much of a fight if education became a battlefield for culture war conflicts. The result was a dizzying, maddening stretch where schools were embroiled in controversies over critical race theory and transgender students’ rights when education leaders needed to focus on pandemic recovery.
Now, as memories of the pandemic recede, the politics of education are changing. Democrats are talking more about schools, emboldened by the selection of a former schoolteacher, Tim Walz, as Vice President Harris’s running mate. Republicans, for their part, have harnessed discontent with public schools into an aggressive push for private school voucher programs that threaten America’s public education systems.
The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, along with the education-related portions of Project 2025, provide a glimpse of where K-12 education might be headed.
The Democratic platform
The Democrats’ 2024 platform is light on specifics, with more attention to the current administration’s accomplishments and the would-be Harris administration’s support for some broadly defined goals (e.g., reducing chronic absenteeism). To some extent, the lack of specifics stands in contrast to both the Democrats’ 2020 platform—which, for example, pledged a tripling of Title I funds for high-needs schools—and more detailed 2024 proposals for early childhood education (e.g., free, universal pre-K) and higher education (e.g., free community college).
The 2024 platform does contain relevant, specific ideas outside of its “Education” section. For example, Democrats propose rebates for school districts that purchase electric school buses—an idea grounded in research on the harms of students’ exposure to toxins. They also offer specific proposals to reduce gun violence (amid a scourge of school shootings) and to strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ children and students of color (frequent targets of culture war attacks).
Notably, some of the platform’s clearest statements on education describe what Democrats oppose. That includes private-school voucher plans and policies hostile to transgender youth that have become increasingly popular among Republican leaders.
The Republican platform
Republicans’ 2024 platform is also light on policy specifics. The platform has a few ideas that have long been cornerstones of GOP education politics. That includes ending teacher tenure—an idea that would require local or state action and confront fierce opposition from teachers’ unions.
The platform has language about resisting political indoctrination in schools—while seeming to propose some indoctrination of its own. This includes proposals to “support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization” and “promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.” Along similar lines, former President Trump recently described a bewildering plan to create a credentialing body to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.”
Substantively, the most important part of the Republican education platform might be its support for universal school choice. In about a dozen states, Republicans have recently created or expanded education savings account (ESA) programs that make public funds available to pay for private school or other educational expenses. Critics of these programs—myself included—argue that they violate our basic traditions, benefit the wealthy at the expense of others, and are not well supported by research.
Project 2025
If the Republican platform is light on policy proposals, Project 2025 certainly is not.
Along with my colleagues Rachel Perera and Katharine Meyer, I recently wrote a more detailed piece that analyzes Project 2025’s education proposals. Project 2025 proposes severe cuts to the resources and protections available to the country’s poorest, most marginalized children. For example, it proposes to eliminate the Head Start program (for young children in poverty), discontinue federal Title I funding (for schools that serve low-income children), and kneecap IDEA (federal legislation that supports students with disabilities). It’s especially harsh on transgender children, with proposals aimed at reorienting civil rights enforcement around “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and stripping Title IX protections from transgender students.
In other words, Project 2025 sets its sights on the programs that serve America’s neediest students. It would essentially terminate the federal government’s long-running role in addressing inequities that arise in locally governed school systems.
Notably, many key Project 2025 proposals would require an unlikely degree of congressional cooperation. This includes some of the highest-profile proposals, such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (a vaguely defined idea that’s unlikely to materialize in its most extreme form). Still, a second Trump administration couldenact some Project 2025 proposals unilaterally. That includes rolling back civil rights protections and replacing civil servants in the U.S. Department of Education with political appointees after reinstating Schedule F.
Taking stock
It’s fair to say that Democrats’ plans for federal education policy are modest. Democrats aren’t proposing a markedly stronger role for the federal government. On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture as they offer a more “conservative” agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.
Just what those GOP plans might be—and just how radical they are—depends on whether the true Trumps X administration plan is the Republican platform, Project 2025, or some combination of the two. That remains to be seen
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced math, is a close observer of the public school privatization movement. In this post, he reviews the situation in Delaware, where the big money for privatization is coming from the DuPont family. The school board of the Christina district recently fired its superintendent, who was named superintendent of the year only two years ago. The reason, Tultican writes, was his opposition to charter schools.
He begins:
July 10th the Christina school board voted, at 2:45 AM, to remove popular Superintendent Dan Shelton. The seven member board split 4 to 3. It seems that Shelton’s opposition to allowing charter schools to take over the district motivated the vote. The Christina school district serves the small Delaware cities of Wilmington, Newark and their outskirts. It is a modest sized district with about 14,000 students. The unseen force behind the ouster was the DuPont family.
The attack by billionaires on schools in Delaware is similar to harm visiting public education throughout the nation. The local rich guy sets up tax exempt “charities” and uses them to undermine local schools. The “charities” hire young ambitious and talented people to lead the effort. Looking behind the scenes in Delaware illuminates the undermining of public schools nationwide.
Board President Donald Patton was joined by Vice President Alethea Smith-Tucker, Y.F. Lou, and Dr. Naveed Baqir in voting to oust the Superintendent two months before the new school year begins. It is alleged that they are the compromised four. In a local pod cast, Highland Bunker, board member Doug Manley reported that Matt Clifford, who dropped out of the recent school board election, was offered support if he agreed to vote with Board President Patton. Manley also speculated that Y. F. Lou received the same offer.
Trustee Manley stated that in his view the only reason Shelton was removed from office was because of his opposition to letting charter schools parcel out the district. It is notable that in 2022, Shelton was named Delaware State Superintendent of the Year.
Longwood Foundation
The Longwood Foundation is not called the DuPont Foundation because it was originally established in 1937 by Pierre DuPont to support Longwood Gardens. A tax reform act in 1969 caused a change and Longwood Gardens Inc. was formed to finance the gardens. The Longwood Foundation remained in existence to “principally support charitable organizations” and push forward the DuPont agenda.
Over the last decade, the foundation has spent $1,812,200 to support Reading Assist Inc. whose web page says:
“Reading Assist provides high-dosage tutoring for students in grades K-3 in the lowest 25% for reading proficiency, with a focus on serving in schools where there is the highest need.
“We recruit, train, and embed AmeriCorps members – known as Reading Assist Fellows – willing to commit a school year of service to provide our accredited, one-on-one intervention program to struggling readers.”
Reading Assist is a science of reading (SoR) advocate whose founder has ties to the dyslexia community. AmeriCorps has helped provide Teach for America (TFA) training and recruits. In other words, these organizations come with privatization blemishes. Many researchers believe SoR is bad science promoted by wealthy people and publishing companies while TFA is their army.
Longwood is still a DuPont family run organization. According to the 2022 tax form 990PF (TIN: 51-0066734), John DuPont is the current president and Margaret DuPont is Vice President. The tax records also show that in the last decade they have provided the fake education graduate school, Relay Graduate School, $1,300,000.
The Foundation concentrates its spending into the Wilmington area and does very little spending nationally. So their spending of more than $15,000,000 on charter schools in the last decade has made a huge impact locally. Margaret and one other DuPont family member also sit on the board of the smaller Chelsea Foundation (TIN: 51-6015638) which also provides grants to charter schools. It is this drive to privatize the Christina School District that seems to have led to firing a respected and popular administrator.
In 2017, Indiana scholars Jim Scheurich, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams posted an article on Diane Ravitch’s blog that outlined the model used by billionaires to gain control of local schools. Point five of their rich guy privatization model is, “Development of a network of local organizations or affiliates that all collaborate closely on the same local agenda.”
Please open the link to finish the article.
One other interesting point in Ultican’s post. Remember Julia Keleher? She was appointed to be the Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico when the island was in dire financial straits. She pushed charters and vouchers and was widely opposed by teachers, parents, and students. She ended her time on the island with a jail sentence:
On December 28, 2016, Keleher was appointed Puerto Rico Secretary of Education by Governor-elect Ricardo Rosselló who became so hated he was driven from office in 2019. The appointment was just a few months before hurricane Maria hit. Keleher also became disliked as was demonstrated by San Juan protesters loudly chanting, “Julia go home!”
Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17, 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She plead guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud. Almost as soon as she finished her prison term, she was hired by First State Educate. Now she is the executive director.
Having spent years covering charter scandals and seeking accountability for charters, the Network for Public Education realized that it could not compete with the high-powered corporate public relations firms representing the charter school industry. So, we decided, the only way to get accountability is to do it ourselves.
So NPE established the National Center on Charter School Accountability, which will produce reviews of charter school performance.
You remember, I hope, the saga of the New Orleans Public Schools District: Abandoned by white families, underfunded by a overwhelmingly white Legislature and Dtate School Board, the public schools were segregated and held in low regard. Then came Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which severely damaged most of the schools; the students scattered. The state stepped in and created the Recovery School District, whose job was to get the schools rebuilt and reopened under new management. To get rid of the union, the entire teaching staff (mostly Black) was fired, and teachers were allowed to reapply for their jobs.
When school opened again, most of them were privately managed charter schools, many of the newly hired teachers came from Teach for America, and the district for a time enjoyed a large infusion of funds from the federal government and large foundations, all committed to the success of the charter model.
Be skeptical of claims about dramatic improvements in student outcomes when comparing pre-Katrina to the present. The enrollment in 2004 was nearly 70,000, and is now about 40,000.
Diane Ravitch's blog 