The pro-charter funders are made up of billionaires, charter school operators, and big-money privatizers.
Among the donors to school board elections are billionaire Philip Anschutz, the richest man in Colorado; he was also a funder of the anti-public school documentary titled “Waiting for Superman,” which claimed falsely that charter schools are the answer to all the problems of public schools.
Other billionaire donors include Netflix founder Reed Hastings and John Arnold, a former trader at Enron.
Then there’s an alphabet series of organizations, some of which use fancy names–the equivalent of Parents for Public Schools– to hide the fact that they are pro-charter.
It’s hard for the average voter to make sense of the election with so many groups endorsing certain candidates.
Tto cut through the hype and propaganda of the charter lobby requires a wise ally.
Mike DeGuire has the experience and wisdom to sort out the charter groups from the true friends of students, teachers and public schools.
If you read only one article about what happened to the students, teachers and schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this is the one. Ashana Bigard is a parent of students in New Orleans. Elizabeth K. Jeffers taught in the NOLA district.
Turning New Orleans into an all-charter district may have raised test scores–although New Orleans is still a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states–but as you will learn by reading this article, the transformation was a disaster for students, their families, their communities, and their teachers.
This article was produced by Our Schools. Ashana Bigard is the director of Amplify Justice, an educational advocate, and author of Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20. A dedicated mother of three, she serves as an education fellow for the Progressive magazine’s Public Schools Advocate project and is a director-producer of numerous video and audio productions. Follow her on Bluesky @AshanaBigard. Elizabeth K. Jeffers, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans who began teaching in pre-Katrina New Orleans public schools. Her scholarship focuses on school choice and community-based inquiry. Her research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and other scholarly journals. Follow her on Bluesky @ekjeffersphd.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, numerous articles and opinion pieces have appeared in prominent media outlets touting the supposed improvement of the city’s public school system since the storm.
Katrina’s immediate aftermath saw the state of Louisiana disempower the democratically elected school board by taking over the management of 107 out of 128 schools. This led to the termination of 7,600—mainly Black and women—teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, clerical workers, principals, and other permanent employees, and the eventual conversion of all of the city’s public schools into privately managed charters.
A Washington Post column, “‘Never Seen Before:’ How Katrina Set off an Education Revolution,” by British journalist Ian Birrell, proclaimed the transformation a “miracle.” Another opinion piece in The 74, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools” by Ravi Gupta, the founder and former CEOof a charter school network, stated that the New Orleans school system shaped by Katrina was “a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised.”
As proof of their arguments, both authors pointed to a June 2025 report, “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons” by Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Pulling from the data presented in that study, Birrell said the case for declaring New Orleans-style education reform a “remarkable success” is “pretty definitive,” and Gupta called this supposed success an “unequivocal conclusion.” As a longtime youth advocate and community leader and an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, who was a public school teacher in the city, we invite you to consider whether this data alone proves that New Orleans public schools and the families they serve are better off after 20 years of “reform.”
Although Gupta warns against “[falling] into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms,” we’d like to tell you about Rio, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. Rio attended 12 different schools in New Orleans, many of which were shut down suddenly, before he finally graduated from a school that is now also closed. Rio’s story is not atypical of the human costs of the New Orleans school system, where closures are a defining feature and evidence that the disaster Katrina wrought on the schools is still happening.
Forced to traverse the fragmented charter system that has replaced the public system of neighborhood schools, New Orleans students are often traumatized bymultiple school closures. Decades of researchattest to the academic, emotional, and economic harms that result from severing social connections that families, faculty, and staff have had with schools and with one another.
For instance, obtaining a job reference letter from a former teacher should be simple for students to do, but that task becomes an obstacle course for many young adults from New Orleans, like Rio. Black Man Rising, a national group providing outreach and mentorship for Black youth, had to intervene to help him obtain the letter that made the difference between him being able to financially support himself and being just another addition to the statistics of Black youth who are unemployed and incarcerated.
Rio’s story illustrates a central paradox of the New Orleans system: Black families and communities continue to be severed and displaced as a result of failed leadership at the federal, local, and state levels. While the storm may be over, the disaster continues. On the other hand, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.
The near obliteration of democratic public schooling
In addition to severing families from their neighborhood schools and educators, Katrina reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation in ways that would shock most Americans.
New York University professor Domingo Morel contends in his bookTakeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy that state takeovers do not generally improve test scores or graduation rates; instead, they are about removing political power, as Black school boards have historically functioned as entryways for Black political leaders.
In a similar vein, Louisiana legislators, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, passed Act 35 in November 2005, which expanded the state-run Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction over New Orleans public schools during an emergency session when voters were dispersed across the country and many were still searching for their loved ones. The new laws removed the parent and teacher approvals required for charter conversions.
State legislation also enabled the termination of the majority Black teaching force, gutting the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers, Local 527), and further removing obstacles for top-down reform. Research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kevin L. Henry and his co-author has shown how the “charter school authorization and application process” used in post-Katrina New Orleans “reproduces white dominance.” While another study published in the journal Urban Education points to how charter schools consolidate power “in ways that limit local Black political power.”
Consider the example of Kira Orange Jones, whose case perfectly illustrates how educational democracy has been dismantled. In 2011, Jones raised $478,000for her Board of Elementary and Secondary Education campaign—much of it from out-of-state donors connected to Democrats for Education Reform and charter school advocacy groups. Her opponent raised just $19,000, creating a 25-to-1 spending disadvantage. But the campaign money was just the beginning. Jones simultaneously served as executive director of Teach For America’s (TFA) Greater New Orleans chapter while sitting on the board that approved TFA’s $1 million state contract with Louisiana. When ethics complaints were filed in 2012, the Louisiana Ethics Board overruled its own staff’s recommendation that Jones choose between her TFA position and her board seat.
While NOLA Public Schools mandates charter school governance boards to include an alumnus or a parent, legal guardian, or grandparent, who is either elected or appointed, Katrina school reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation. Parents often don’t find out when school board meetings are happening, let alone have access to board members’ email addresses or phone numbers to voice concerns. Even local reporters who tried to obtain basic contact information for charter school board members have been stonewalled. There is no state requirement that charter school boards meet at times that are convenient for working parents to attend.
The absence of neighborhood schools is an additional obstacle for parents who rely on public transportation. And although charter schools seemingly returned to an elected school board in 2018, the public has virtually no control over individual charter schools, which maintain complete autonomy over curricula, calendars, certification requirements, contracts, and daily operations.
Shadow suspensions and ‘behavior problems’
Louisiana has long been among the states with the highest rates of student suspensions and expulsions, and Black students are more than twice as likely to be suspended compared to white students and receive longer suspensions for identical infractions, according to an analysis of 2001to 2014 figures by Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. In New Orleans, suspension and expulsion rates rose sharply after the storm but then stabilized. Nevertheless, some charter schools continued to suspend and expel high percentages of students.
But that’s just the official data. More recently, several parents have reported that their children are being sent home from school without receiving official suspension papers. Elizabeth’s field notes attest to students’ reports of one charter school network sending students to “the RC room” (restorative center) where they are forced to sit in cubicles, complete detention assignments, and write apology letters in a secluded room. This shadow suspension system allows schools to push out Black students without creating the paper trail that might trigger oversight or intervention. Children lose days or weeks of education in bureaucratic limbo, with no formal process and no recourse. And large numbers of students, often labeled as “behavior problems,” remain enrolled in alternative schools, rather than mainstream degree programs, according to state data.
Community-rooted educators replaced by managers
New Orleans teachers once lived in their communities. Most were career educators who taught generations of children, creating lasting bonds that extended far beyond the classroom.
Ashana experienced this personally at a small school called New Orleans Free School. As someone who is extremely dyslexic, she felt inadequate throughout most of her educational life until she encountered teachers like Woody, Janice, Jeanette, and Jim—two of whom, Jeanette and Jim, have since passed away. Woody still leaves encouraging comments under articles she has published, telling her he is proud of her. He, along with the others, encouraged her and insisted she could be brilliant despite her spelling difficulties. They told her she could be a writer. They emphasized that we all have different skill sets that we can develop, and that none of us is perfect, but that we can practice and grow.
This encouragement didn’t end when Ashana left Free School. The advice and support continue today. That’s what it means to have authentic relationships with your teachers. That’s what it means to be rooted in your community. Unfortunately, Ashana didn’t have the opportunity to send her children to that school to be educated by those incredible educators. The school that gave her a love of learning shut down.
The structure of charter schools severs critical bonds between schools and families. For instance, in her book Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20 Ashana recounts a teacher reaching out to her for resources to help with one of her students years before the storm. The child’s mother, who worked two jobs as a housekeeper and restaurant server, struggled to care for her seven children.
Her nine-year-old son often arrived at school dirty and disheveled because their washing machine had broken, and despite the mother’s instructions, the children didn’t wash their uniforms in the tub while she worked overnight shifts. Although the mother worked tirelessly, her extremely low reading level meant she was unaware of how to apply for assistance programs that could have helped her family. Most importantly, she probably didn’t believe she qualified for help. This teacher understood the family’s circumstances and worked to connect them with resources rather than simply reporting the situation to authorities.
This kind of close relationship between educators and families has become increasingly rare in the Katrina experiment. For instance, Ashana encountered a similar situation that ended differently. A family facing tough times was reported to the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) multiple times for neglect. When OCFS attempted to provide services, the mother, terrified that her children would be taken and placed in foster care as she had been, and having suffered abuse in that system, fled Orleans Parish with her children. She moved them to a motel in St. Bernard Parish, leaving everything behind. The children weren’t enrolled in school for almost a year until someone tracked them down and helped them return to the city and reintegrate into the school.
Somehow, punitive measures for Black parents and children have been equated with success—which raises the question: What exactly is the reform proponents’ definition of success, and what was the goal from the outset?
The current system has replaced community-based educators with a top-heavy administrative structure. New Orleans charter schools spend significantly more money on administration, even as teacher shortages remain high. For instance, InspireNola Charter Schools, which only manages seven schools, paid three executives a total of $667,000 for the fiscal year 2023.
Meanwhile, the constant “churning” of schools and the absence of a collective bargaining agreement have led to a larger system that dehumanizes teachers. In fact, the RSD required certified teachers who chose to return to their pre-Katrina schools to complete a “basic skills test” (akin to a literacy test).
But that was only the beginning of the disaster for New Orleans educators. One Black veteran explained to Elizabeth: “The RSD was bouncing teachers around like balls.” That is, the state takeover district issued letters labeling numerous experienced teachers as “surplus” when their schools transformed into charters. Many of these schools recruited inexperienced teachers who were expendable, accepted lower salaries, and could be programmed to adhere to the ideology of reform. The absence of collective bargaining power, arbitrary closures, and charter takeovers eventually led many career teachers to “choose” between commuting several hours a day to schools in outlying parishes and changing careers. Twenty years after the district’s purging of its unionized teachers (the United Teachers of New Orleans), only five of the city’s 90 charter schools are unionized.
In another example, Ashana recounts in her book about how a teacher whom she advocated for brought a doctor’s note to her school’s chief financial officer to document a urinary tract infection and request restroom breaks. The administrators emailed her to offer reimbursement for adult diapers. This example of denying teachers basic respect and humanity illustrates what is seen as a continual disaster. If educators are treated this way, imagine the conditions students face.
The cruel reality of ‘choice’
The current “choice” system has created impossible decisions for families. Consider the mother in New Orleans East who must choose each morning which of her two children to accompany to their bus stop, because the system doesn’t allow siblings to attend the same school. She would have to explain to her young daughter, who is clutching a bright orange whistle for safety, “Today I’m going to stand with your brother, but tomorrow it’ll be your turn.” The little girl, frightened at the prospect of standing alone, pleads with her mother, but is told, “I’m sorry, you know this is just the way it is for right now.”
This mother, with tears in her eyes as her children clung to her legs, captured the cruel reality. With this new choice system, she doesn’t get to choose to have both of her children sent to the same school. She gets to choose which one she can stand with every morning. That’s no choice at all.
Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, has been keeping track of the privatization movement. In this post, he criticizes the Republican Party for its war on public schools. There was a time when Republicans supported their community schools. They provided strong support for bond issues and were active on local school boards. Today, however, Republicans as a party have led privatization efforts, knowing that it is intended to defund their public schools. None of the promises of privatization have panned out. Surely they know that they are destroying not only their own community’s public schools but a foundation stone in our democracy.
Privatization promotes segregation. Public schools bring people from different backgrounds together. As our society grows more polarized, we need public schools to unite us and build community.
Ultican writes:
This year, state legislators have proposed in excess of 110 laws pertaining to public education. Of those laws 85 were centered on privatizing K-12 schools. Republican lawmakers sponsored 83 of the pro-privatization laws. Which begs the question, has the Grand Old Party become the Grifting Oligarchs Party? When did they become radicals out to upend the foundation of American greatness?
The conservative party has a long history of being anti-labor and have always been a hard sell when it came to social spending. However, they historically have supported public education and especially their local schools. It seems the conservative and careful GOP is gone and been replaced by a wild bunch. It is stupefying to see them propose radical ideas like using public money to fund education savings accounts (ESA) with little oversight. Parents are allowed to use ESA funds for private schools (including religious schools), for homeschool expenses or educational experiences like horseback riding lessons.
In this table, ESA indicates tax credit funded voucher programs. There have been 40 bills introduced to create ESA programs plus another 20 bills designed to expand existing ESA programs. Most of 2025’s proposed laws are in progress but the governors of Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and Wyoming have signed and ratified new ESA style laws. In addition, governors in Indiana, South Carolina and New Hampshire signed laws expanding ESA vouchers in their states.
None of the 16 proposals to protect public education or 3 laws to repeal an existing ESA program were signed by a governor or passed by a legislature.
“… the program violates the Wyoming Constitution in two key ways. One for directing public dollars to private enterprises, which the lawsuit says is clearly prohibited. The second for violating the constitution’s mandate that Wyoming provide ‘a complete and uniform system of education.”’
On July 15, District Court Judge Peter Froelicher granted a preliminary injunctionagainst the state’s universal voucher program. He wrote, “The Court finds and concludes Plaintiffs are, therefore, likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the Act fails when strict scrutiny is applied.” The injunction will remain in effect until the “Plaintiffs’ claims have been fully litigated and decided by this Court.”
Laramie County Court House
Last year, The Utah Education Association sued the state, arguing that the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program violated the constitution. April 21st, District Court Judge Laura Scott ruled that Utah’s $100-million dollar voucher program is unconstitutional. At the end of June, the Utah Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of Scott’s ruling. However, the decision seems well founded.
The Montana Legislature, in 2023, established a statewide Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program. It allows families of students with disabilities to use public funds deposited into personal bank accounts for private educational expenses. In April this year, Montana Quality Education Coalition and Disability Rights Montana brought suit to overturn this program. In July, the Montana Federation of Public Employees and the organization Public Funds Public Schools joined the plaintiffs in the suit. The legal action awaits its day in court.
At the end of June, the Missouri State Teachers Association sued to end the enhanced MOScholars program which began in 2021 funded by a tax credit scheme. This year in order to expand the program; the states legislature added $51-million in tax payer dollars to the scheme. The teachers’ suit claims this is unconstitutional and calls for the $51-million to be eliminated.
Milton Friedman’s EdChoice Legal Advocates joined the state in defending the MOScholars program. Their July 30thmessage said, “On behalf of Missouri families, EdChoice Legal Advocates filed a motion to intervene as defendants in the lawsuit brought by the Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) challenging the state’s expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program, known as MOScholars.” It is unlikely EdChoice Legal Advocates are representing the wishes of most Missouri families.
In South Carolina, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that its Education Trust Fund Scholarship Program was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was instituted by the state teachers union, parents and the NAACP. The program resumed this year after lawmakers revised it to funnel money from the lottery system instead of the general fund.
The South Carolina effort has been twice ruled unconstitutional for violating prohibitions against using public funds for the direct benefit of private education. Legislators are proposing funneling the money through a fund that then goes to a trustee and then to parents, who then use it for private schools.
Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association stated:
“We just don’t agree, and we think it’s unconstitutional.”
“We’ve already been to court twice. The Supreme Court has ruled twice that it is unconstitutional. So, we don’t understand how they’re trying to do a loophole or a workaround. You know, they’re trying to work around the Constitution, and it’s just a problem.”
The South Carolina fight seems destined to return to the courts but they have vouchers for now.
Last year in Anchorage, Alaska, Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman concluded that there was no workable way to construe the state statues in a way that does not violate constitutional spending rules. Therefore, the relevant laws “must be stuck down in their entirety.” This was the result of a January 23, 2023 law suit alleging that correspondence program allotments were “being used to reimburse parents for thousands of dollars in private educational institution services using public funds thereby indirectly funding private education in violation … of the Alaska Constitution.” Alaska has many homeschool students in the correspondence program.
Plaintiff’s attorney Scott Kendall believes the changes will not disrupt correspondence programs. He claims:
“What is prevented here is this purchasing from outside vendors that have essentially contorted the correspondence school program into a shadow school voucher program. So that shadow school voucher program that was in violation of the Constitution, as of today, with the stroke of a pen, is dead.”
The Big Problem
GOP legislators are facing a difficult problem with state constitutions prohibiting sending public dollars to private schools. The straight forward solution would be to ask the public to ratify a constitutional amendment. However, voucher programs have never won a popular vote so getting a constitutional change to make vouchers easier to institute is not likely.
Their solutions are Rube Goldberg type laws that create 100% tax credits for contributing to a scholarship fund. A corporation or individual can contribute to these funds and reduce their tax burden by an equal amount. Legislators must pretend that since the state never got the tax dollars it is constitutional. Lawyers who practice bending the law might agree but common sense tells us this is nonsense.
The big problem for the anti-public school Republicans is voucher schools are not popular. They have never once won a public referendum.
Jennifer Berkshire writes a blog called The Education Wars, where she explains the latest attacks on public schools by entitled billionaires and their lackeys. In this one, she reviews the revival of the New Orleans “miracle,” you know, the claim that turning almost every public school in the city into a privately run charter schools produced dramatic gains. Not true.
She wrote:
Ten years ago, I wrote a piece about some of the many unintended consequences of New Orleans’ charter school experiment. Wildly at odds with the narrative of success and transformation being peddled by the education reform industry, the story was among my first real attempts to do ‘serious’ journalism, and I’m still really proud of it. (For those of you who don’t know, I got my start chronicling the excesses of education reform on a humorous blog.) I learned a lot working on that story, including that writers have no control over whatever terrible headline gets slapped on their masterpiece… But it was in New Orleans that I really began to understand something essential about education reform. If the vision of what’s on offer is narrower than what the community wants, these top-down efforts to “disrupt” public education are doomed from the start.
The twenty year mark since Hurricane Katrina has ushered in a predictable wave of celebratory accounts of the New Orleans miracle. I recommend giving them a miss and spending some time instead with an eye-opening new book by parent advocate Ashana Bigard. (Full disclosure: Ashana is one of my favorite people in the world, not to mention among the most amazing organizers I’ve ever met.) Called Beyond Resilience, Ashana’s book opens with a scene of a meeting held in the period after the hurricane erased whole neighborhoods, and claimed the lives of some 1,800 people. The purpose of these gatherings, Ashana writes, was to give local parents the opportunity to envision the sort of education future they wanted for their children.
What they dreamed of was so much more than their children had before, and more than they themselves had had before. Having seen what was offered to children in other places, they wanted that and more for New Orleans’ children.
Among their demands: fully equipped science labs, theater programs, curriculum rich in local history, career and technical education that prepared students for jobs in the trades. The list was long. It was also grounded in the harsh reality of New Orleans’ brutal poverty. Parents asked for kids to be able to bring food home when money was tight, for washers and dryers in every school because so many laundromats had never reopened. And they wanted swim lessons in order to give their kids a fighting chance against the next hurricane.
The enormous gulf between those wishlists, compiled on flip charts and dry erase boards, and what the parents ultimately got is the subject of Beyond Resilience. “What they gave us instead was almost a cartoonish representation of the opposite of everything we had asked for,” writes Ashana. “The charter school operators and organizations that supported charter school reform efforts would listen to parents, guardians and community members, and then create schools that looked more like juvenile jail facilities than schools.”Subscribe
No excuses
I first encountered Ashana through her work as an advocate for students and parents who were caught up in the draconian discipline practices that took root during the early years of the New Orleans charter school experiment. While the rhetoric was all about preparing kids, or ‘scholars’ in charter parlance, for college, Ashana was spending more and more of her time intervening on behalf of kids who were being treated like criminals. There was the boy whose mother couldn’t afford to buy him the shoes that the uniform required, so got suspended and then expelled. There was the five year old who was repeatedly suspended for eating crackers on the bus. And there were the countless students accused of the vague yet sweeping offense known as “disruption of a school process,” who ended up, not just kicked out of school, but arrested. These children, writes Ashana, weren’t treated as human beings,
but as criminals who had already committed crimes and would most definitley commit more crimes if they weren’t guarded and watched every second of the day.
Since I’ve known Ashana, her criticism of the city’s schools has been remarkably consistent. At its core is this belief: a model of schooling centered on harsh discipline is developmentally inappropriate, especially for young kids. Early in the book, she recounts being told by Ben Kleban, a hard-charging charter school CEO who embodied the no-excuses ethos, that his K-2 elementary school was so quiet that “you could hear a pin drop.” Ashana was aghast. These were kids who should be playing, talking and singing. “[H]e went on to tell me that these kids were different.”
These children are different. That was the refrain. These Black children in New Orleans, who had lost everything, who were sleeping in abandonded buildings, grieving the loss of family members, friends, and entire neighborhoods were ‘different’ and therefore didn’t deserve the same developmental considerations as other children their age.
In recent years, Ashana has been part of an effort called Erase the Board that seeks to bring traditional public schools back to New Orleans. The group’s demands echo the ones put forth by those parents and community members so many years ago—schools that are human focused rather than test and discipline centered, music and art classes, trained teachers, and trauma informed practices. But Erase the Board is also challenging a central tenet of the New Orleans model: schools that fail to raise test scores are closed. Of the city’s 75 charter schools, 50 have been closed or reconstituted at some point. While that churn is in large part responsible for producing academic gains, it has also proven deeply unpopular with parents, who hate school closures even when said shuttering is being done for ‘the right reasons.’
The constant opening and closing of schools is also highly disruptive to students, Ashana argues. She tells the story of one student who attended twelve different schools: half he was pushed out of over disciplinary infractions, the other half closed. “You have schools closing, teachers moving in and out. Kids need stability and that’s the opposite of what we’ve got. All you’re showing these kids is displacement.” Among Erase the Board’s demands is that failing charter schools be reopened as traditional public schools. “We estimate that, at the rate that charter schools close, we’ll have half our city back in seven years,” says Ashana.
Selling the vision
“‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution,” was the title of the puffed piece that appeared in the Washington Post recently. Penned by a British scribe who used to pen speeches for former UK prime minister David Cameron, aka Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, it’s the sort of breathless sales pitch that abounded in the first decade after the hurricane. These days, the ‘miracle’ talk is harder to find, in part because so many holes have been poked in the claims of success, as teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein notes here. And while New Orleans may have ended up with a system ‘never seen before,’ the reality is that the same forces are coming for its charter schools that now threaten all public schools.
For one, there aren’t enough kids, especially when you consider that the model entails constantly opening new schools. Back in 2022, New Schools for New Orleans, an architect of the all-charter model, warned “that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services.” And that was before Louisiana enacted its ginormous new school voucher program. In a system that is entirely focused on test scores, the appeal of attending a private school where kids don’t take tests seems pretty obvious.
Indeed, at a time when the GOP has largely moved on from charter schools, save for the classical variety, and gone full voucher, the New Orleans experiment—expensive, interventionist, couched in the language of civil rights—feels like a throwback. So too does one of the animating beliefs driving the experiment: that kids in one of the country’s poorest cities could overcome poverty if they all went to college. Hence the frustration in the final puffish piece I’ll mention: edupreneur Ravi Gupta’s lament for the 74: “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools.” Conservatives aren’t keen on the model’s aggressive intervention, complains Gupta, while Progressives are squeamish about the fact that New Orleans’ success required wiping out the city’s unionized teaching force, which made up much of its Black middle class.
Gupta implores us to focus on the ‘hard numbers’ and avoid what he calls “the tyranny of the anecdote.” But Ashana Bigard and her powerful new book show exactly why that perspective is so short sighted. Why, if the model is so successful, asks Ashana, does the city require so many alternative schools and programs to catch the kids who ‘fall through the cracks’? Why are there so many ‘opportunity youth,’ kids who aren’t in school or working? Indeed, if you expand the frame beyond the metrics of academic achievement, it’s hard to make the case that life for young people in New Orleans has improved, the conclusion I reached back in 2015. “The math ain’t mathin’,” is how Ashana put it when we spoke recently.
That there’s been so little laudatory coverage of New Orleans’ education revolution “reveals something broken about our politics and media,” insists Gupta. But I think the real reason is much more simple. The reformers who drove the experiment never recovered from the scene that plays out at the start of Ashana’s book, when parents and community members, some of whom had been pushing for reform in the city’s schools long before Katrina, envisioned what education in New Orleans could be. Today, the gap between that vision of possibility for the city’s kids and what was delivered remains a chasm.
Two decades after hurricane Katrina, Ashana is still fighting for the schools New Orleans’ children deserve. The rebuilding is still happening, she writes in the book’s conclusion.
But it’s not about getting back to what it was—it’s about creating something that never existed: a New Orleans where all of our children can thrive, where our culture is respected and our people are valued, where love and justice aren’t just words but ways of life, where the billions generated by our creativity flow back to strengthen our communities.
An eternal optimist, Ashana ends on a hopeful note, insisting that “That New Orleans is possible. That future is within our reach.”
Keep your eye on Byron and Erika Donalds in Florida. Byron is running for the governor’s job as the MAGA candidate, while his wife is making a bundle as the queen of charter schools. As prescient pols figured out long ago, the school choice biz can be very lucrative.
Erika Donalds has long been a leading face of school choice in Florida, even as her husband Byron has risen through the GOP to become a major political player. Now a new story dug up by Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows how Donalds is a model of how folks in the charter school world can make a bundle.
The couple got together while Byron was still with his first wife (a public school teacher who still seems a bit grumpy about the whole business). He hooked up with the Tea Party, and Erika became an investment banker. Her school choice origin story is that in 2013, her second child had some sort of run-in with a teacher at school, and Donalds, unsatisfied with administrative response, put the child in a private school and transformed into an advocate for school choice.
Donalds has had a hand in the founding of a multitude of groups. She helped start Parents ROCK (Rights of Choice For Kids). When Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, Donalds helped launch School Choice Movement, a group that pushed for policies that would cut the throat of public education, including one that said charters must be approved by the state, not a local district; the group has since gone silent.
Back in 2015, while she was still serving as a school board member, she helped launch the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, meant to be a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. They started with four members– Donalds, Jeff Bergosh, frequent collaborator Shawn Frost, and Bridget Ziegler, future co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who called Donalds the face of charter schools in Florida. Tina Descovitch, another M4L co-founder, would later join FCSBM and was the president when they folded in May 2020, just a few months before the founding of M4L.
Donalds served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee (along with Jeb Bush edu-pal Patricia Levesque), the group that tried to sell Amendment 8, yet another attempt to kneecap public schools. Fortunately, the Amendment was such a deceptive con job, a judge threw it off the ballot.
In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported payingErika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.
But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”
State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.
Bredderman also notes that in 2023, three of Optima’s flagship schools fired the Donalds firm, apparently due to “deficiencies” in accounting.
Open the link to finish reading. One would have to be an accountant to decipher the many overlapping organizations in the Ed-reform-school choice business. School choice in Florida is a multi-billion dollar industry.
I was very sad to learn, via a note posted on Facebook by Gene V. Glass that David C. Berliner has died.
David was one of the most honored research psychologists in the nation. You can open his resume online and see the many times he has received awards or served in prestigious positions. I won’t recite his bio.
Instead I want to praise him as a wise and insightful friend. I learned from him and was very happy that we forged a strong bond in the past few years.
David was an acerbic critic of the past two+ decades of what was called “education reform.” David laughed at the nonsensical but heavily funded plans to “reform” education by imposing behaviorist strategies on teachers, as if they were robots or simpletons.
David had no patience with the shallow critics of America’s public schools. He respected the nation’s teachers and understood as few of the critics did, just how valuable and under-appreciated they were.
But he did have patience with me. He appreciated my change of views and offered encouragement. Knowing that he had my back made me fearless.
I will miss my friend. So will everyone else who cares about the future of American education, not as a business venture, but as our most important civic responsibility. .
You may have read about Josh Cowen . He’s a professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University. For twenty years, he worked on voucher research, hoping to find definitive evidence that vouchers helped the neediest kids–or didn’t.
About two years ago, he concluded that the answer was clear: vouchers do not help the neediest kids. Most are claimed by kids who never attended public schools. In other words, they are subsidies for families who already pay for private schools. When low-income kids use vouchers, the academic results are abysmal. He concluded that the best way to improve the schooling of American students is to invest in public schools.
Josh did his best to stop the billionaire-funded voucher drive. He published a book about the evidence, called The Privateers. He wrote articles in newspapers across the nation. He testified before legislative committees.
He concluded that the most important thing he could do is to run for Congress. He’s doing that and needs our help. I’ve contributed twice. Please give whatever you can.
Public schools need a champion in Congress.
Josh writes:
Hey everyone. You may have heard that I’m running for Congress in my home district in Michigan. It’s one of the most important seats to flip next year for Democrats to retake the US House. I’m hoping you’d consider chipping in today to help us meet a big deadline by 9/30.
I’m probably the most prominent congressional candidate in the country running in part on the idea that we need to stand up for and renew our public schools.
I took on Betsy DeVos and the Koch operation all over the country, trying to stop school voucher schemes. I’m a union member and work closely with labor—check out my book excerpt about vouchers in AFT’s New Educator right now!—and I was just given NEA’s highest honor, the Friend of Education award. Diane herself won a few years back—I’m truly honored.
But the DeVoses and a MAGA Texas billionaire are going to spend big here to hold Congress and defund schools. Former MI GOP Governor Rick Snyder is planning to raise $30 million to make 2026 the “education election” for Republicans in Michigan. This is the same guy at the helm when kids were poisoned in Flint. And the same guy responsible for the disastrous EAA charter school fiasco.
My GOP opponent is the Koch’s bagman in Michigan. This is a guy who eked out a win in our district just last year when Elissa Slotkin had to give up her seat to run for Senate. So it’s a very winnable race. But we need help.
Last month just for starters: 14 statewide and local school and community leaders in Michigan endorsed us. Last week, UNITE HERE!, the big hospitality workers union, endorsed our campaign. And just this week, Dr. Jill Underly, the statewide elected chief of Wisconsin public schools, announced her support. You may remember that Dr. Underly beat back Elon Musk’s plan to buy the off-year elections just this spring in her state. She showed how a strong, positive message of standing up for public schools and standing up to billionaires can win a swing state election.
We can do that too. So I’m asking for your help to close this month strong.
Leonie Haimson is a public school activist in New York City who fights for smaller class size, student privacy and against privatization of public funds.
She wrote on her blog:
Please email Comptroller Lander and ask him to audit DOE charter rent spending and lack of matching funds for public schools – more on this below.
ask the comptroller to audit DOE’s charter rental payments now!
Last Thursday, September 18, 2025, several large charter school networks held a protest rally in Cadman Plaza and a march across the Brooklyn Bridge to push for the continued expansion of the charter school sector. This was apparently provoked by the fact that the leading candidate for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he opposes allowing more charter schools to open, especially since they have reached their legal cap in NYC under state law.
Liz Kim, reporter at Gothamist, got hold of a tape of a speech that Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the largest charter school chain, Success Academy, gave to her Charter Management Staff and 158 new teachers, exhorting them to attend this march and rally, and to make at least five “phone-to-action” calls to their elected officials.
In the speech, Moskowitz harshly reprimanded those who had not yet done so: “You did not do the phone-to-action because you thought, ‘This is not very serious,’” she said. “So I want to just reset for all of you. It is an existential threat.” And:
“We have faced threats throughout the last 20 years, we have a core competency in political threats, unfortunately. But this is one of these moments where there is heightened risk, policy risk, political risk, and so we are going to do what we’ve always done, which is to stand up for children and families in a massive way in Cadman Plaza to speak our minds and to make sure that government works for children and families. … government doesn’t naturally work for the people. It has to be forced and made to work for the people. So we’re doing two things. One is this parent mobilization, and the second is our phone to action campaign.
And our goal is to send elected officials, two million messages. Now, teachers, you’ll do a network one now and then when you get to your schools, you’ll do a local one. But I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the network, because only 25% of the network was doing the phone to action. …And you know, would be natural for you not to understand we have these nice offices, Aren’t they nice? Very nice.
You guys [work] for a not for profit, you are highly compensated. You could say, What? What? Me worry? What’s there to worry about? But there’s a lot to worry about, and this is not a theoretical worry. We lived through eight years of Bill de Blasio. The first thing he did when he became mayor is he threw out three of our schools.”
This is untrue. De Blasio did not kick out three of her schools; he rejected three Success charter co-locations that had been proposed by Bloomberg before he left office but not yet implemented. De Blasio also accepted co-locations for five other Success charter schools.
In any event, after a barrage of negative television ads, DOE officials were browbeaten into finding and renting private space for these three Success charter schools at city expense for $5.4K – $11K per student. By last year, the number of Success charter schools rented directly by DOE had risen to nine, with buildings added under both Mayor de Blasio and Mayor Adams, at a cost of $14.3 million annually. By renting these buildings directly and failing to ask Success to rent the buildings themselves, they are sacrificing 60 percent reimbursement from the state for those expenses.
At the meeting, Moskowitz was clear that she was requiring all network staff and teachers to both make phone calls and participate in the rally:
“When we ask you to do phone to action, you kind of do it. You can’t make people chase you down. … we’ve kind of gotten loosey goosey here and just know your managers are going to hold you accountable to an extraordinary standard of performance. … When your network are giving a directive, I think we’re getting a little democratic here. We are quite hierarchical.
There is a chain of command, and when your boss asks you to do something, assuming it’s not unethical or a question of conscience, you do the task. Are we clear? I do not want to have to chase people down for phone to action. Is there some argument or particular reason? Anyone live in New Jersey? Okay, that’s not an excuse. I hate to tell you, list your 120 Wall Street address and get it done. ….”
She then told her staff and teachers to take out their phones and make all five phone calls to elected officials right then and there.
According to a report in Labor Notes, Success Academy employees were also required to send emails to elected officials, and were ordered to “submit screenshots of these emails to their managers to confirm they had sent them.”
Success Academy was not the only charter chain to make participation in the rally mandatory for staff, parents and students. It was also required by the Zeta charter chain, founded by Emily Kim, former attorney for Success Academy. A document sent to staff at Zeta Charter Schools made this clear:
“100% attendance expected from all Zeta families, students, and staff. Each student must attend with a parent/guardian to ensure the safety of every child. Students cannot attend the rally without an adult family member or authorized chaperone.”
Students, their parents and staff had to arrive at Zeta at 6:30 AM to get on the bus to Cadman Plaza, according to the schedule. If parents wanted to bring their younger children, they had “to bring their own seats for the bus ride to the rally,” presumably meaning they had to pay for their own transportation to get to Cadman Plaza.
Teachers at Zeta were told it was their responsibility to get parents to attend:
“All teachers must ensure 100% completion through family follow-up calls Mon., Sept. 8th- Wed., Sept. 10th. Your Principal and Operations Director will share a school-wide tracker to follow up and log all family calls accordingly.”
There is a real question about whether mandatory attendance at a political event or forcing teachers to make political phone calls is legal. The day after the rally, on Friday, John Liu, Chair of the Senate NYC Education Committee and Shelley B. Mayer, Chair of the Senate Committee on Education sent a letter to NY State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa and John King, Chancellor of State University of New York, whose agencies authorize and oversee charter schools.
Senators Liu and Mayer expressed “great concern that many charter schools in New York City cancelled classes and pressured students, families, and staff to participate in a political “March for Excellence” on September 18, 2025. We urge the state to conduct a thorough investigation into potential violations of state law.”
They also pointed out how“canceling classes during a school day and forcing families and students to engage in a political rally is an egregious misuse of instructional time and state funds. We urge SUNY and the State Education Department to exercise their oversight authority and fully investigate this matter to determine any possible violations of state law, and if such violations are found, to claw back a portion of state per capita funding from each school administration that engaged in this event, and to take steps to ensure future misuse of student’s precious school time does not continue.”
Though they didn’t specify any laws that might have been broken, in 2023 Governor Hochul signed into law Senate Bill 4982, which prohibits employers from coercing employees into attending or participating in meetings where the primary purpose is to communicate the employer’s opinions on religious or political matters. The law also holds that the courts may impose monetary penalties on employers who do this, and that employees can seek “equitable relief and damages” in court if they do.
In any case, this is not the first time that Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy have been found guilty of breaking laws. Repeatedly, her charter schools have been shown to deny students their legal rights, violating their privacy, and pushing out those who do not make the grade either in terms of behavior or test scores. A sample of these documented violations are listed at the end of this blog post.
Evidence of inflated charter rental payments and missing matching funds
Another issue of great concern is how charter schools now drain more than $3 billion dollars annually from the DOE budget, plus charge more than a hundred million dollars per year to DOE in rental subsidies. NYC is the only district in the nation that is obligated to either co-locate charters in public schools or help pay for their rent in private buildings. This applies to all new and expanding charter schools since 2014, after they go through a perfunctory appeal process, according to a law pushed through by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and the charter lobby. The amount spent on their rental expenses by DOE has risen sharply over time –though 60% of these expenditures are supposed to be reimbursed by the state.
In 2019 and 2021, Class Size Matters issued two reports that provided evidence that DOE had overspent on rental assistance to charter schools by $21 million. We also revealed suspicious charges for rental subsidies paid by DOE to several charter schools, including those run by Success, that owned or subleased their own buildings.
In one case, the rent for two Success Academy charter schools housed at Hudson Yards increased from approximately $793,000 to over $3.4 million in one year – more than quadrupling , causing DOE to pay $3 million in rental subsidies for those two schools alone in 2020.
We also found that public schools co-located with charter schools were owed millions of dollars in matching funds for facility enhancements, compared to the amounts required by state law. From 2014 to 2019, 127 co-located public schools were owed a total of $15.5 million.
Please email Comptroller Lander and ask him to audit these programs
Shortly after the release of our second report, in March 2022, Senator John Liu, Senator Robert Jackson, and Rita Joseph, chair of the Council Education Committee, sent a letter to Comptroller Brad Lander, urging him to audit this spending, based upon our troubling findings. I recently learned that no such audit has been conducted. An analysisalso shows that Lander has audited fewer DOE programs than any other NYC Comptroller since 2003 at this point in office.
We are now engaged in examining DOE own reports of their spending on charter school rent, which continues to rise sharply higher each year, as well as their continuing failure to provide sufficient matching funds to public schools for facility upgrades and repairs.
Please email the Comptroller now and urge him to launch an audit on these programs before he leaves office in January, by filling out the form here.
Where it says, “Your Suggestion,”please write:
“I urge you to audit DOE spending on charter rent, especially charter schools that own or sublease their own buildings, as well as charters whose buildings DOE rents directly and thus is unable to receive 60% reimbursement from the state. Also please audit the lack of public school matching funds, as there is evidence that they continue to be owed millions for facility upgrades.”
Feel free to rephrase this in any way you like.
On my blog, at the end of this post, is a list revealing the documented pattern of Success Academy violations, including failing to provide students with their mandated services, repeatedly suspending them for minor infractions, violating their privacy, and pushing them out when they do not conform to rigid behavioral expectations or do not score high enough on standardized exams.
2. If you haven’t already, please also fill out this brief survey on class sizes at your school this year. So far, from the unscientific sample of teachers and parents who have responded, class sizes have increased in as many schools as have decreased, despite the fact that more than 700 schools received funds to lower class size. If DOE is simply pushing up class sizes in the schools that did not receive this funding, that would be a matter of great concern.
Florida, under Ron DeSantis, is determined to defund its public schools.
The first charter law in Florida was passed in 1996, when Democrat Lawton Chiles was governor. The 1996 law said there could be no more than two charter schools in each district, and only local school boards could authorize them. When Chiles left office, the state had 17 charter schools.
From 1999-2007, Republican Governor Jeb Bush removed the caps on charters and encouraged their growth. By the end of his tenure, there were more than 300 charter schools.
Republican Charlie Crist vetoed aggressive charter legislation, but charters increased to more than 300 during his tenure in office (2007-2011).
Republican Rick Scott (2011-2019) strongly promoted school choice, reduced regulation, and the number of charters increased to about 650.
Far-right DeSantis is a cheerleader for charters and vouchers. Elected in 2019, DeSantis has aggressively expanded charters as well as vouchers, while reducing accountability.
Half of Florida’s charter schools operate for-profit. Over the years, nearly 500 charter schools have closed, due to maladministration, low enrollment, finances, or scandal.
Today, Florida has about 730 charter schools, which enroll 13.8% of the state’s students, about 400,000. The cost of charters is about $2.5-4 billion annually that should have gone to public schools.
The state’s Republican-controlled governor and legislature are dedicated to expanding private alternatives to public schools. In 2023, it removed income limits from vouchers, so that all private school students are now eligible to get a state subsidy. The number of students receiving vouchers doubled, from 250,000 to 524,000.
Before and since the voucher expansion of 2023, 70% of the voucher recipients were already enrolled in voucher schools. so Florida offers a subsidy to all students enrolled in private and religious schools regardless of family income.
Florida spends about $4 billion on vouchers each year, subsidizing mostly families who can pay for schooling without state aid.
Thus, between charters and vouchers, Florida is spending at least $6 billion annually on school choice.
Now, Florida has given charter operators another boon, allowing them to co-locate inside public schools. This alleviates their need for facilities funding.
Many Republican legislators have financial ties to the charter industry.
It’s the latest push by Florida officials to expand school choice in a state that has long been a national model for conservative education policy.
The move comes as some public schools are closing their doors as they grapple with declining enrollments, aging facilities and post-pandemic student struggles.The new regulations approved by the state board build on a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis this year to allow operators to open more “schools of hope,” charter schools that are meant to serve students from persistently low-performing schools.
Lawmakers created the schools of hope program in 2017 to encourage more publicly funded, privately run schools to open in areas where traditional public schools had been failing for years, giving students and families in those neighborhoods a way to bail out of a struggling school.
This year’s law loosens restrictions on where schools of hope can operate, allowing them to set up operations within the walls of a public school — even a high-performing one — if the campus has underused or vacant facilities.
The board’s new regulations require public school districts to provide the same facilities-related services to the charter schools as they do their own campuses, including custodial work, maintenance, school safety, food service, nursing and student transportation — “without limitation.
”School districts must allow schools of hope to use “all or part of an educational facility at no cost”, including classrooms and administrative offices, the rules read.
“All common indoor and outdoor space at a facility such as cafeterias, gymnasiums, recreation areas, parking lots, storage spaces and auditoriums, without limitation, must be shared proportionately based on total full-time equivalent student enrollment,” the rules continue.
Public school advocates urged the board to vote down the proposal at Wednesday’s meeting. One such advocate, India Miller, argued that schools of hope are designed to be “parasitic” to public schools.
“To me, it would be like asking Home Depot to give Lowe’s space in their store and pay all of their infrastructure costs. It just does not make sense to me,” Miller said.
Board members, who are appointed by DeSantis, defended the new rules and dismissed concerns that the charter expansion could pull critical funding away from traditional public schools.
“Schools of hope wouldn’t be necessary if our public school system had done its job along the way,” said board Vice Chair Esther Byrd.
Associated Press writer Kimberlee Kruesi contributed reporting from Providence, Rhode Island. Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Mike DeGuire is a veteran educator in Denver. He says it’s time to take stock and assess the damage that “reform” has inflicted on students and public schools in Denver.
Is public education a public or a private good? This issue is at the heart of the school choice debate sweeping the country.
Advocates for school choice are advancing policies that move us toward the privatization of our schools, treating our children’s futures as commodities rather than community investments. This well-funded bi-partisan coalition promotes privatization through charter school expansion, vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Republicans use the words “parental rights, freedom and competition,” while neoliberal Democrats brand it as “innovation and expanding opportunity.”
Public education is one of the last shared institutions that binds us together across race, class, and geography; when we weaken it, we weaken democracy itself.
The result is the same for communities when privatization becomes a reality in red states with vouchers or in blue cities where most charter schools are located. Vouchers segregate schools by class and race, diminish the importance of community, and severely limit funding for public schools.
Charter schools operate like private schools, create competition for students, often have unelected boards. Additionally, the charter schools, not the community, get to determine who enrolls, who stays, and what kind of learning takes place. As marketplace ideology takes over, public dollars and democratic control move from local neighborhood schools to private boards and political operatives.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) shows how this movement works in a blue city, and why it matters now in Trump’s vision of America’s education system.
Different slogans, same destination
On the right, and in most Republican-led states, legislatures enacted policies to privatize education with vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) designed to route public funds to private and/or religious schools. Often, these tactics originate with model bills written and promoted by the American Legislative Council (ALEC) and their allies. The goal is to let public dollars “follow the child,” which means diverting them away from democratically governed school districts.
On the neoliberal Democratic side, the mechanism is the charter-centric “portfolio model.” Local school boards often elected with large amounts of pro-reform money approve policies to close or “restart” neighborhood schools. Then they open new charters, bring in “operators” deemed to be “effective,” and the district “manages” the schools and their networks like an investment portfolio.
This storyline was supercharged under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which rewarded states for removing barriers to charter growth and for aggressively initiating school “turnarounds.”
The overlap with Republicans and Democrats is structural. Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits. In their book, “Wolf At the Schoolhouse Door,” Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire describe “how Republicans and Democrats joined to support failed policies whose ultimate goal was to eliminate public education and replace it with a free-market approach to schooling.”
Charles Siler, who worked as a lobbyist for the libertarian Goldwater Institute, told the Washington Post that “Charter schools are part of the incremental march towards full privatization. In many ways, charter schools are the gateway to total public-school dismantling.” Since vouchers are unpopular with the public and some lawmakers, Siler continued, “privatizers have to engage in incrementalism, and they use different names to create a sort of moving target.”
Both camps sell the public on privatization by claiming that “failing test scores” prove neighborhood schools, especially those serving Black and Brown students, are broken beyond repair. They argue the racial achievement gap is proof that these schools must be shut down and replaced with charters through “school choice.”
This narrative is deeply misleading. First, decades of research show that standardized test scores mostly measure socioeconomic status and neighborhood inequality, not the quality of individual schools. Poverty, housing insecurity, and systemic racism drive disparities, not the mere fact of attending a district school.
Second, the research demonstrates that replacing schools with charters has not closed achievement gaps. Denver Public Schools illustrates the point: after years of churn, closures, and huge charter expansion, racial disparities in achievement persist. Black and Latino students continue to score lower on state tests than white peers — not because they are “trapped in failing schools,” but because privatization has siphoned resources from their neighborhoods, destabilized communities, and ignored root causes.
Bipartisan funding for similar goals
The funding networks and foundations knitting these free-market agendas together are deep-pocketed and bipartisan. For instance, the conservative Walton Family Foundation underwrites charter startups and charter facilities nationwide, spending well over $1 billion on this effort. The majority of their political spending goes to Republican causes, with over 2/3 of their PAC money going to Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers.
In his book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” journalist Christopher Leonard describes how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Koch-funded right-wing group, creates model legislation which can be introduced in state legislatures. Many of these bills aim towards privatizing schools by implementing voucher programs.
City Fund raised millions, largely from Netflix founder Reed Hastings and hedge fund manager John Arnold, to spread charter schools in over 40 cities through portfolio management systems and by bankrolling local political action groups. While Hastings supports Democratic causes, he is opposed to teacher unions and believes that local school boards should be abolished. Arnold, also a Democrat, gifted the KIPPcharter network millions, and like many billionaires today, is seen as cozying up to the Trumpadministration for influence.
The Bradley Foundation and ALEC financed the policy and political infrastructure for vouchers and ESAs for decades. The Bradley Foundation, the Colorado-based Coors family, and the Koch foundation were three of the six billionaire families that funded Project 2025, which has been the playbook for Trump since he took office in January.
Many of these same philanthropic and political dollars fund both a Republican voucher push and a Democratic-branded charter expansion — two lanes of the same privatizing highway.
Denver: a “portfolio” laboratory
Denver is often cited by education reformers as a national model as it implemented unified enrollment, systematic school closures, and rapid charter school growth. But the backstory behind who paid for these policies is less sanguine. A Network for Public Education report details how Denver Public Schools became a neoliberal “experiment,” using a web of nonprofits and political groups to expand charters and restructure the school district.
Both Republicans and Democrats contributed large amounts of money in Denver school board elections to promote corporate reforms, such as teacher pay for performance, school choice systems, and enrollment zones. In the 2017 DPS school board election, billionaires gave huge sums to the Denver candidates favoring charter school expansion. According to a report from the Network for Public Education Action, these included “Colorado billionaires Phillip Anschutzand Kenneth Tuchman, and out-of-state billionaires John Arnold of Texas and the Alice, Jim and Stuart Waltons of Arkansas.”
Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits.
Meanwhile, years of churn and school closures left communities reeling. Even reform-friendly analyses concede that the “portfolio model” era meant opening lots of charters and closing or “replacing” dozens of neighborhood schools. Researchers studying this model have cited significant concerns with the efficacy of the model, including equity issues, narrow reliance on test scores, instability and churn, tensions among schools, and loss of democratic control and community voice.
In a 2016 article, progressive education advocate David Osborne documented that “Since 2005 [Denver] has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.”
The billionaires’ money helped maintain a pro-charter majority school board until 2019 when teacher union-backed candidates were elected because of organized community backlash to the reforms and unrest after a teacher-led strike that year. That shift caused alarm bells among the billionaire backers of the pro-charter movement. They moved quickly to expand their funding to two political action groups in Denver.
RootED and Denver Families for Public Schoolsreceived over $38 million from Reed Hastings’ City Fund organization, which they used to promote their pro-charter agenda through grants to charter schools, local think tanks, and other community groups. Their efforts paid off in the 2023 school board election, when three of their endorsed candidates won their elections after Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million to promote their campaign.
Outside spending has transformed Denver board elections into major dark money funding events, with the 2023 election hitting $2.2 million, just shy of the 2019 record of $2.3 million.
In an op-ed for Charter Folks, Clarence Burton and Pat Donovan, leaders for Denver Families for Public Schools, described their plans to repeat the 2023 wins in the upcoming November 2025 school board election. They may spend some of their vast resourcesfrom City Fund to sway voters.
In the next four years, DPS faces continued enrollment declines, and district leaders seem inclined to approve more closures to rebalance finances. That is the portfolio playbook’s endgame: when money is scarce, close neighborhood schools and expand privately run options. If successful in electing their endorsed candidates, Denver Families Action is poised to help that happen.
Do charters drain district resources? What the evidence says
District leaders and parents feel the fiscal squeeze when enrollment flows to charters. Fixed costs don’t disappear just because 5% or 10% of students leave. Research consistently warns that losses to enrollment can trigger costs that are not fully “variable” — you can’t cut 1/20th of a teacher or 1/10th of a bus route. Studies from New York and other locales estimate significant per-pupil losses in host districts as charter school share rises.
A policy brief from the National Education Policy Center summarizes the structural mechanisms that occur with fixed costs, diseconomies of scale, and shifting student composition. The brief describes how “a network of philanthropists and wealthy donors have reshaped the political economy of school finance, advocating for school voucher policies, charters, and privatization in the face of declining public-school enrollments.”
Pro-charter think tanks argue the picture is “mixed,” especially longer-term if districts close schools and cut staffing, the very things communities have fought against. But even those reviews concede there are short-term inefficiencies and significant harms. In practice, these policies mean closures, layoffs, and program cuts in neighborhood schools.
This bipartisan push undermines neighborhood schools, deepens inequality, and places corporate interests above the common good.
Trump-world raises the stakes
Under President Trump’s second term, privatization is not just encouraged; it’s federal policy. A January 29, 2025, White House directive ordered the Education Department to steer states toward using federal formula funds to support K-12 “choice” initiatives, which was a direct push for vouchers and related schemes.
Trump’s “Agenda47” likewise spotlights universal school choice as a signature plank, tied to dismantlingprior civil-rights guidance and reshaping federal oversight. Plans to weaken or abolish the Education Department are framed as clearing the path for parental choice.
Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon increased the federal department budget for charter schools by $60 million to a historic record of $500 million. At the closing session of the National Democratic Governors Association meeting, McMahonstressed to the governors they should open charterand micro-schools to promote more competition. This is the Republican Lane, wide open.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 promoted federal tax credits for vouchers, which are now approved federal legislation. The CEO of Democrats for Education Reform is pushing Democratic governors to use these new federal vouchers to expand learning opportunities for economically disadvantaged students or lose “free federal money.”
The policy highway already built by the neoliberal Democrats (charter growth, closures, portfolio management) has made it easier for a voucher-first administration to push public taxpayer dollars out of democratically governed systems. That’s the interlock: Democrats normalized the market; Trump-world aims to privatize the whole store.
The bottom line
Denver is not an outlier — it’s a warning. A bipartisan coalition normalized the idea that public education should be run like an investment portfolio, where schools are opened, closed, and “reconstituted” based on technocratic dashboards and political spending. The Trump administration’s voucher agenda, promoted for decades by the Koch brothers and other conservatives accelerates the same logic, now directs federal policy to help states route public dollars out of public governance altogether.
If we believe education is a public good — funded equitably, governed democratically, and accountable locally — the public must see charter expansion and vouchers as two halves of the same privatization project. When education is treated as a public good, it is essential for democracy, civic participation, economic stability, and social cohesion.
Every child deserves an equal chance in life. Therefore, education must remain a public good — not a marketplace where opportunity is limited to the school’s choice of selecting students. The question isn’t whether our schools should be run like private businesses. It’s whether we are willing to fight for education as a right, not a privilege.
And, if the public cares about our children’s future,they need to vote, organize, and promote legislation accordingly.
Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.
Diane Ravitch's blog 