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Oakland, CA: Billionaires Will Convene to Discuss New Plans for Privatizing Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2019 //
20

 

What exquisite timing! The teachers in Oakland went out on strike to demand a decent living wage and to protest the destruction of their schools by privatizers, and guess who is planning to come to town?

On May 8-9, the NewSchools Venture Fund will hold its annual summit in Oakland, California, to review its plans for additional privatization of public schools.

The summit is sponsored by the usual suspects: The Walton Family Foundation (anti-union, anti-public schools, pro-privatization), The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (ditto), The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (selling computers and depersonalized learning), and The Carnegie Foundation of New York (once a friend to public schools, but no longer).

Make plans to be in Oakland to send your greetings to the Robber Barons of our day.

Who knows? Maybe Betsy DeVos will be their keynote speaker.

They are planning to disrupt your public schools, destroy your unions, and continue marauding where they are uninvited and unwelcome.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing, Walton Foundation

California: Legislature Passes Historic Charter Accountability Bill

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2019 //
9

 

During Governor Jerry Brown’s tenure in office, he vetoed all efforts to hold charter schools accountable, to consider their fiscal impact, or to limit their numbers. Those days are over under Governor Gavin Newsom. 

Edsource reports:

“The chairman of the Assembly Education Committee and several Democratic colleagues introduced a package of bills Monday that would impose severe restrictions on the growth of charter schools.

“Three of the bills would eliminate the ability of charter schools to appeal rejected applications to the county and state, place an unspecified cap on charter school growth and enable school districts to consider the financial impact of charter schools when deciding whether to approve them. A fourth bill would abolish the right of a charter school that can’t find a facility in its authorizing district to locate a school in an adjoining district.

“Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, who chairs the Education Committee, said the bills collectively would enable school districts “to make responsible and informed decisions” that are “critical for student success and taxpayer accountability.” Eric Premack, a veteran charter school adviser and advocate, called the legislation a “full-frontal” assault and “scorched earth” approach to charter schools.”

”Scorched earth”=accountability, ethics, transparency.

At the heart of the strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland was the fiscal drain caused by runaway charter schools, which have operated and proliferated in the state without accountability for years.

The power of the charters was guaranteed by their lobby, the California Charter School Association, which spends $20 million a year to defeat accountability measures.

It’s a new day in California!

Elections have consequences. The charter lobby backed Antonio Villaraigosa for governor and Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent.Both lost.

Both houses of the legislature swiftly approved a bill to impose accountability and transparency on charter schools and Governor Gavin Newsom has promised to sign it. 

In the future, charters will be subject to the same open meetings laws and conflicts of interest laws as public schools.

More stringent regulation may be on the way, for example, one bill would no longer allow charter operators who were rejected by their district to appeal to the county, and if rejected by the county, appeal to the state board.

At present, charters may open without consideration of their fiscal impact on the public schools.

Also, a charter may be authorized by a district to operate in another district hundreds of miles away.

John Fensterwald writes in Edsource:

“Capitalizing on the momentum, this week O’Donnell and three other legislators announced four more bills that would restrict charter schools. They would eliminate the right of appeals to the county and the state, cap the number of schools to what’s operating now, let school districts reject charter schools based on their financial impact and prevent charter schools approved in one district from setting up in another.

“This week, the West Contra Costa Unified School District board followed the lead of boards in Los Angeles and Oakland to endorse some form of a moratorium on charter schools. Newsom has not indicated his position on the latest bills or on a moratorium, now that the bill on transparency has passed.”

Are the “days of wine and roses” coming to an end for the richly funded charter lobby?

This NPE report explains why charters in California need regulation and accountability.

Click to access NPE-Report-Charters-and-Consequences.pdf

Imagine a charter school in a shopping mall where students see a teacher once every 21 days. Imagine charter schools with graduation rates of 10% or less.

Imagine rampant fraud that goes unchecked for years.

Could these excesses finally be subject to oversight?

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Jan Resseger: How Charter Schools Have Plunged Oakland into a Fiscal Crisis

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2019 //
21

Jan Resseger writes here about the cause of Oakland’s fiscal crisis: the expansion and encroachment of charter schools.

This context is important as background to understand the teachers’ strike.

She writes:

Like Los Angeles, Oakland’s financial crisis is related to California’s embrace of charter schools and the school district’s adoption of a portfolio school reform governance plan by which the district manages traditional public and charter schools as though they are investments in a stock portfolio. The idea is to establish competition—launching new schools all the time and closing low scoring schools and schools that become under-enrolled.  It is imagined that competition will drive school improvement, but that has not been the result anyplace where this scheme has been tried.

To better understand the issues underlying why Oakland’s teachers are on strike, it is worth examining Lafer’s in-depth profile of the Oakland Unified School District.

Lafer’s report explores the Oakland Unified School District as an exemplar of a California-wide and nationwide problem: Uncontrolled charter school expansion undermines the financial viability of the surrounding public schools. “In every case, the revenue that school districts have lost is far greater than the expenses saved by students transferring to charter schools.  The difference—the net loss of revenues that cannot be made up by cutting expenses associated with those students—totals tens of millions of dollars each year, in every district.” “California boasts the largest charter school sector in the United States, with nearly 1,300 charter schools serving 620,000 students, or 10 percent of the state’s total student body.”

“(W)ith a combined district and charter student population of over 52,000 in 2016-17—(Oakland) boasts the highest concentration of charter schools in the state, with 30 percent of pupils attending charter schools.” “By 2016-17, charter schools were costing OUSD a total of $57.3 million per year—a sum several times larger than the entire deficit that shook the system in the fall of 2017.  Put another way, the expansion of charter schools meant that there was $1,500 less funding available per year for each child in a traditional Oakland public school.”

Lafer identifies two problems at the heart of California’s enabling legislation for charter schools. First, a local school board has no control over whether charters can expand in the district: “Even when districts determine that there are already enough schools for all students in the community—or even if a charter operator petitions to open up next door to an existing neighborhood school—it is illegal for the district to deny that school’s application on the grounds that it constitutes a waste of public dollars. By law, as long as charter operators submit the required number of signatures, assurances against discrimination, and descriptions of their plans and program, school districts may only deny charter petitions for one of two substantive reasons: if ‘the charter school presents an unsound educational program,’ or ‘the petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in the petition’”

The second problem, Lafer explains, is particularly serious as it impacts Oakland Unified School District: “While charter schools are required by law to accept any student who applies, in reality they exercise recruitment, admission, and expulsion policies that often screen out the students who would be the neediest and most expensive to serve—who then turn to district schools.  As a result, traditional public schools end up with the highest-need students but without the resources to serve them.  In Oakland, this can be seen in the distribution of both special education students and unaccompanied minor children who arrive in the district after entering the U.S. without their families.”

The problem is made worse because California does not allocate state funding based on the number of disabled students who require special services: “Special education funding is apportioned in equal shares for every student attending school, irrespective of the number of enrolled students with disabilities. Even in districts without charter schools, special education is an underfunded mandate, in that the dedicated funding for this purpose is insufficient to meet the needs that school systems are legally required to serve.”

Lafer reports that in 2015-16, Oakland’s charter schools served merely 19 percent of Oakland Unified School District’s students with special education needs: “The imbalance is yet more extreme in the most serious categories of special need.  Of the total number of emotionally disturbed students attending either charter or traditional public schools in Oakland, charter schools served only 15 percent.  They served only eight percent of all autistic students, and just two percent of students with multiple disabilities… Thus, charter schools are funded for a presumed level of need which is higher than the number of students with disabilities they actually enroll, while the district serves the highest-need students without the funding they require.”

The bottom line is that it is wasteful and inefficient to run two separate school systems, both funded by the public.

It is especially sad that Governor Jerry Brown, a progressive in so many ways, was blind to the depredations of the charter industry. He opened two charter schools where he was mayor of Oakland and never admitted that he was wrong.

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Oakland, Privatization, Teachers

Peter Greene: Republicans Plan to Eliminate Public Schools in Florida

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2019 //
35

Peter Greene paints an ugly picture of the dominant forces of privatization in Florida and their plans to destroy public education and share the spoils.

He begins by asking these questions:

Here are two not-entirely-academic questions:

Is it possible to end public education in an entire state?

Can Florida become any more hostile to public education than it already is?

Newly-minted Governor Ron DeSantis and a wild cast of privatization cronies seem to answer a resounding “yes” to both questions.

The trick they play is to say that anything funded by the public, no matter who owns it, runs it, or uses it, is “public,” by definition.

Florida has become a playground for for-profit entrepreneurs and religious zealots, and the new governor Ron DeSantis is on their team.

He describes the leaders of a group that calls itself the “School Choice Movement,” and they are people who never give a moment’s thought to the public interest or the common good.

There is a lot of dirty politics in the Sunshine State, and a good deal of money to line someone’s pockets. Up until now, the courts have blocked the goals of the privatizers, which directly violate the state constitution. But Governor DeSantis just replaced some of those pesky judges to get the courts out of his way.

Greene writes:

Calling charter schools public creates a nice batch of smoke and mirrors, allowing DeSantis and his cronies to privatize giant chunks of Florida’s school system while still proclaiming, “No need to worry. You still have public schools!” You could completely shift the education system to privately owned and operated schools while still reassuring parents, taxpayers, and, perhaps, courts, that you haven’t done a thing because it’s still all public schools.

It’s not just marketing. It’s stealing the Mona Lisa and hanging up a Polaroid picture of the painting in its place. It’s kidnapping your spouse and replacing them with an inflatable doll. It is a gaslighting of epic proportions.

In the meantime, Florida taxpayers, you probably should not try to just stroll into the public governor’s mansion you paid for or borrow one of those public vehicles that you bought for officials to drive around in (especially don’t try to commandeer a public army tank). Instead, I would keep a close eye on your public schools while you’ve still got them. And if it’s already too late in your county, don’t be sad– your loss of public education has at least made some of your leaders really wealthy.

And the rest of us need to pay attention, too. Remember– Betsy DeVos is among the many people who think Florida is an educational exemplar.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Sign a Petition to Change the Charter Law in California

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2019 //
1

Allies who met at the Oakland conference of the Network for Public Educare are petitioning to regulate charter schools so they don’t harm public schools.

 

Dear Friend of Public Education:

On behalf of Educators for Democratic Schools, and Wellstone Democratic Club Education Committee (both active in Oakland) we are writing again to those who participated in the California Caucus of the NPE conference and others interested in Charter School reform to enlist your support for reform of the Charter School Act. We are about to launch a statewide petition for the following specific changes to the Act:

 

  1. Add adverse fiscal impact as a basis on which districts may reject charter applications.

 

  1. Give locally elected school boards the sole authority to approve and renew charter school petitions.

 

  1. Require charter schools to enroll students with disabilities, including those with the most severe disabilities, English Language Learners, and newcomers, in equal proportion to the enrollment of these groups of students in the district in which the charter operates.

 

  1. Apply to charter school board members the same prohibition of conflicts of interest as apply to public school boards.

 

  1. Require charter schools to be more accountable and transparent and not force school districts to have to cede control of their facilities to charter schools.

 

You can sign the petition today by going to CharterLawReform.com.

 

We also created a suggested cover email for you here but if you want to create your own personal cover even better: Open in Docs

 

We are hoping that tomorrow each of you will join each of us and many other organizers throughout the state to send the petition out to all your friends, families, networks and organizations and ask them to sign as well.  Once someone signs and inserts their address it will automatically be directed to their state Senator and Assembly member as well as every member of the Education Committees of both bodies and the Governor.

 

Thank you in advance for your help and support!

 

David Weintraub, on behalf of

Educators for Democratic Schools

Wellstone Democratic Club Education Committee

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

D.C.: A Rating System Designed to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2019 //
17

 

This is not a well-known secret: every distribution will always have a bottom 5%.

In D.C., under the control of the Mayor, the school system had adopted a rating system that is guaranteed to produce winners and losers. The losers are set up for privatization.

Parent activist and blogger Valerie Jablow thinks this stinks. She’s right.

 

She writes:

It’s not merely that the relativity of the STAR rating means that we will always have 1-star schools–which is unbearably cruel, given what’s at stake. It’s also that it purports to be neutral. After all, who can argue with test scores? They’re numbers–and everyone knows numbers don’t lie! Numbers are neutral!

But the reality is that the STAR rating and others like it are most definitely notneutral. Rather, these ratings were created out of deeply political motivations to determine school winners and losers. And without infusions of real resources tied to those 1- and 2-star ratings (and not merely listening sessions mediated by private advocacy group PAVE), DC schools with low ratings stand to lose a lot.

Moreover, if the STAR rating were about ensuring quality in our schools, we would know exactly how far those Anacostia high school teachers moved their students every single year. And we would also know what resources they got–and the resources they needed–in doing so.

But these ratings not only don’t tell us any of that, but teachers at Anacostia will be penalized to the extent that their students do not score well on PARCC. Not to mention that those teachers get only a few years to move that bar. (See p. 35 of our ESSA plan to see what happens when a school doesn’t move that bar fast enough: privatizing.)

We thus find ourselves in a very interesting place–wherein we have a school ratings system that cannot really tell us about school quality, all the while it purports to do just that.

Soooo: why do we have this rating system?

It would appear to be about choice–but even then, in a very limited context.

While all our charter schools are about choice, and now educate about half our students, most families attending DCPS also engage in choice of some sort, whether through the out of boundary process or through selective high schools. In fact, according to school analyst Mary Levy, about 25% of our high school students currently attend selective high schools–which makes DCPS’s choice to invest in a new one (Bard) and expand another (Banneker) on trend.

Except that the trend is a little concerning…

So, let me ask again: why do we have this rating system?

We have just spent a considerable amount of civic money and effort not only making it easier for families to reject schools with low test scores (the star rating appears on our lottery website), but also investing in tests that make it easier for schools with some of the city’s highest test scores to select out an already limited pool of high-scoring students.

All the while we learn nothing from the resulting ratings about the resources provided (or needed) at our schools or, for high schools, growth that teachers have been able to effect for their students–who more likely than not start out at or below grade level everywhere except for a relatively small number at only a small subset of our high schools.

Perhaps the worst part is how these ratings enable a grotesque educational bait and switch.

That is, the underlying assumption appears to be that the ratings enable parents to choose and thus helps students and makes schools better, presumably through competition. But the only competition herein is pitting public against the public, such that the public loses every time it wins, since our public schools are a system of, for, and by the public. Not to mention that “winning” in this context is very strange indeed: is it a slot at a selective high school for your child? Or your school not being closed down or privatized? All the while this so-called competition neither informs us about what is really going on inside our schools nor helps schools support the students they have.

So, gotta ask again:

Why do we have this rating system if it’s not really about quality or helping schools or truly informing parents or ensuring we have adequate resources for the majority of our schools that do not now (and may never) have many students getting a 4+ on PARCC?

Maybe this rating system, which appears so ill-suited for what it purports to do, is really about something else entirely–say, resources?

That is, because 1-star schools will always be with us (how convenient!), our city will thus ensure a steady flow of resources from closed or privatized 1-star schools (buildings, students, personnel, furniture, supplies) for, well, whoever would like to have them.

Now who’s winning?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Testing

“Arizona Republic” Wins Prestigious Polk Award for Investigating Charter School Scandals

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2019 //
5

Arizona blogger David Safier reports that an investigative team of reporters at the Arizona Republic has won a prestigious Polk Award, one of the highest honors in American journalism, for its fearless reporting about charter school scandals in the state.

Safier writes:

The Arizona Republic’s thorough, ground-breaking stories about charter school corruption and profiteering have received scarce press coverage in southern Arizona from anyone but your faithful education blogger. That’s a serious omission. Though the stories tend to be based in Phoenix-area charter schools, they speak to statewide problems stemming from the lack of adequate charter regulation and oversight. One of the bad actors discussed in the series, for example, is state representative Eddie Farnsworth, who is making millions by selling his for-profit charters, which run on taxpayer dollars, to a non-profit company. That piece of news is definitely relevant everywhere in Arizona.

Also nearly absent in local reporting (I can’t say it hasn’t been reported, but I haven’t seen it) is the team of reporters who put together the articles that won the prestigious Polk Award in Journalism.

So let me be [among] the first in the southern Arizona news media to congratulate reporters Craig Harris, Anne Ryman, Alden Woods and Justin Price for sharing the honor, as well as the investigative editor Michael Squires.

The reporters received the Polk Education Reporting award, one of 14 Polk awards given in 2018, for:

“disclosing insider deals, no-bid contracts and political chicanery that provided windfall profits for investors in a number of prominent Arizona charter schools, often at the expense of underfunded public schools that educate all but 30,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million students.”

This is one of those series that demonstrates the power of the press.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization

Tulsa: Broadie Swarm Alert!

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2019 //
19

 

This comment was posted by a reader who teaches in Tulsa. It was written in response to a post on the blog that Broadies have now taken charge of all the top positions in the District of Columbia schools. The Broadies use unusual titles because they lack the credentials to hold jobs that require certification. A Broadie, for the uninitiated, is someone “trained” in the top-down management philosophy of Eli Broad at the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. They are known for setting high goals and meeting none of them. They are devotees of high-stakes testing and charter schools. They love to disrupt schools and communities. As you will see, when one Broadie gets in, others swarm.

 

Washington DC – Welcome to my Hell in Tulsa

Superintendent – Deborah Gist – $241,000 + +
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/deborah-gist/

Chief Learning Officer – Devin Fletcher – $155,700
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/devin-fletcher/

Chief Financial Officer – Nolberto Delgadillo – $151,300
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/nolberto-delgadillo/

Chief Operating Officer – Jorge Robles – $150,000
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/jorge-robles/

Design and Innovation Officer – Andrea Castaneda – $136,600
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/andrea-castaneda/

Director of School Talent Services – Coy Nesbitt – $95,230
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/coy-nesbitt/

Director of Organizational Impact – Martin Green -$95,300
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/martin-green/

Talent Management Partner – Carlos Lopez – $95,230
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/carlos-lopez/

Design and Innovation Specialist – Joseph Fraier – $93,520
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/joseph-fraier/

Manager of District Strategy and Implementation – Vanessa Portillo – $93,200
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/vanessa-portillo/

Director – Talent Acquisition, Development and Retention – Quentin Liggins – $105,312
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/quentin-liggins/

Director of Strategic School Support – Shannon Doody- $90,000
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/shannon-doody/

Director of Portfolio Management – Becky Gligo- $90,000
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/becky-gligo/

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Peter Greene: Is Shelby County (Memphis) Approaching a Death Spiral Due to Charters?

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2019 //
14

 

Peter Greene writes here that the invisible hand of the market doesn’t work well for schools.

There is no magic in the market.

Shelby County in Tennessee is overwhelmed with charters and of course they want more.

He writes:

“Shelby County is running up against two of the fallacies embedded in most charter school policy.

“One is the modern charter policy lie– the notion that you can run multiple parallel school systems with the same money that used to run one system. The other is that charter systems don’t need a lot of regulation because the invisible hand of the market will take care of it all.

“Shelby County Schools in Tennessee has noticed that it has problems with both of those principles.

“The issue was raised back in August when the board considered nine more charter applications– which would have brought the grand total to 63 charter schools in the county. Superintendent Dorsey Hopson put his finger on the problem:

“No surprise, we have too many schools in Memphis,” Hopson said. “If you got 12 schools in a three-mile radius… and all of them are under-enrolled, we’re not serving kids well.”

“Shelby County is home to Memphis, one of the great early charter playgrounds in a state that has always ridden on the reformster train. About 14% of students in the county attend charter schools, and that’s enough to leave some schools feeling a financial pinch (the overhead of maintaining a building does not go down whether you lose one student or one hundred). That’s also before we count schools being run by the state in the Achievement School District (a method of state takeover of school districts with low test scores).

“Nor are the schools well-distributed. Check this map and you’ll see that some neighborhoods have clusters of charter schools, while other areas of the county have none at all. It’s almost as if market forces do not drive charter businesses to try to serve all students, but only concentrate on the markets they find attractive! Go figure. (Note: charters in Tennessee can be run by profit or non-profit organizations or, of course, non-profits that funnel all their money to for-profit businesses.)

“The problem did not happen overnight– a local television station did a story entitled “Charter Schools– Too Many? Too Fast?” back in 2017. The answer was, “Probably yes to both.” But it also included the projection that SCS would some day be all charter. It does appear that Shelby County is in danger of entering the public school death spiral, where charters drain so much money from the public system that the public system stumbles, making the charters more appealing, so more students leave the public system, meaning the public system gets less and less money, making charters more appealing, so students leave, rinse and repeat until your public system collapses.”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Memphis, Privatization

Wisconsin: Governor Evers Seeks to Freeze Voucher Enrollments and Charter Expansion

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2019 //
10

 

Recently elected Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has proposed freezing voucher enrollments and charter expansion. 

Neither charters nor vouchers have been more successful than public schools. Milwaukee, which has both, is one of the nation’s lowest performing school districts on the NAEP.

Republicans in the legislature have vowed to protect privatization of public funding. They are determined to eliminate local control of public schools, whichused to be a bedrock tenet of Republican thinking.

The Journal-Sentinel reports:

MADISON – Gov. Tony Evers in his first state budget is seeking to undo expansions of private voucher schools and independent charter schools passed by Republicans over the last decade.

Aides say the proposals are an attempt to reduce property taxes and stabilize what the Democratic governor sees as two parallel systems of education in Wisconsin.

But Republicans who control the Legislature are likely to block many, if not all, of the measures Evers wants.

Evers, the former chief of the state’s education agency, is seeking to freeze the number of students who may enroll in private voucher schools across the state, including in Milwaukee where the nation’s first voucher program began nearly 30 years ago.

The governor’s budget also proposes to suspend the creation of new independent charter schools until 2023 and eliminates a program aimed at Milwaukee that requires county officials to turn persistently poor-performing schools into charter schools without district officials’ approval.

“I’ve said all along that addressing the pressing issues facing our state starts with education,” Evers said in a statement Sunday. “We have to fully fund our public schools, and we have to make sure voucher schools are accountable and transparent, not just for kids and parents, but for Wisconsin taxpayers, too.”

Advocates for private school vouchers see the proposals much differently:

“Evers’ budget would end school choice as Wisconsin knows it,” said C.J. Szafir, executive vice president of the conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

Aides to Evers provided the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with an overview of proposed changes to the state’s four private voucher programs and its charter schools, some of which were proposed by Evers in September through the Department of Public Instruction’s budget request.

Evers as state schools superintendent oversaw the state’s 422 school districts and its private schools from 2009 until being sworn in as governor earlier this year.

In that time, Evers repeatedly argued the state could not properly fund its public schools while also expanding taxpayer-funded private voucher and charter school options without a funding increase for public schools.

Republicans under former Gov. Scott Walker backed aggressive growth in taxpayer-funded subsidies for students living in middle and low-income households who want to attend private schools, arguing students who lack the financial means to move to a higher-performing school should be able to enroll in them anyway.

Walker and Republicans also implemented new ways to create independent charter schools in liberal-leaning school districts that have long blocked them — like Madison and Milwaukee.

Democrats, teachers unions and public school advocates have opposed the expansions of alternatives to traditional public schools, which coincided with budget proposals that for the most part either cut funding or held funding flat for public schools.

Evers’ budget proposal seeks to pump the brakes on those expansions, following heavy criticism of the statewide voucher programs subsidizing large groups of students already attending private schools without taxpayer-funded help.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice
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