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NYC: Big Charter Chains Lose Enrollment

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2023 //
10

Governor Kathy Hochul wants to lift the cap on charter schools in New York City, but, Chalkbeat reports, the big charter chains are losing enrollment.

When Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a proposal to abolish the cap on the number of charter schools that can open in New York City, she said the policy is a matter of common sense, noting that children of color have experienced waitlists to enroll.

“I don’t think we should be telling them they don’t have a choice,” Hochul said in an interview on NY1 earlier this month.

The city’s charter sector has long been defined by its explosive growth and lengthy waitlists while enrollment has sagged among the city’s district schools. But preliminary state enrollment data suggests that demand for charter schools may be cooling — including among the city’s largest networks — complicating arguments for lifting the charter cap.

The city’s charter sector grew slightly this school year, by 0.42%, compared with a 2% decline among traditional public schools. But that masks important variations among charters: About 45% of them enrolled fewer students this year, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of state data. (The official statistics sometimes group multiple campuses under the same charter school.) About 60% of traditional public schools enrolled fewer students.

Meanwhile, the city’s most established networks enrolled fewer students this year than they did last year, including Success Academy (down 7.7%), Uncommon Schools (6.5%), KIPP (5%), and Achievement First (3.9%).

The governor’s proposal would abolish the local cap on the number of charter schools and release so-called “zombie” charters — essentially making New York City operators eligible for just over 100 new charter schools, which are privately managed and publicly funded.

But experts said there are trade offs of opening new schools in an environment where school leaders are struggling to fill all their seats. Since public dollars follow students, more schools vying for the same or shrinking pool of children would lead to smaller budgets or could even prompt closures, possibly affecting existing charters and district schools alike.

“The charter sector has grown substantially over time,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “But opening new schools at a time when you’re seeing these signs of contraction strikes me as something that requires a fair amount of thought.”

Pallas pointed to evidence that competition from nearby charter schools boosts student learning among district schools, an argument in favor of lifting the cap. But he also worries that the new charters, which educate over 14% of the city’s public school students, may not be viable long term or could threaten other schools by drawing funding away from them. “I don’t think it’s good for kids for there to be that kind of instability,” he said.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Harlem Success Academy, KIPP Charter Schools, New York, New York City

Pennsylvania: Stop Wasting Money on Cyber Charters

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2023 //
9

Recently, Republicans in Pennsylvania lambasted public schools for wasting money by setting up reserve funds for a rainy day. Meanwhile the State throws away hundreds of millions every year to pay for low-performing, unaccountable, profitable cyber charters.

Two Democratic legislators—Rep. Ismail “Izzy” Smith-Wade-El and Rep. Mike Sturla—wrote a rebuttal to the Republicans:

Republicans have criticized 12 school districts — including the School District of Lancaster, Penn Manor and Hempfield — for following normal procedures by making sure their general funds are healthy and able to support the many projects and upgrades all districts must contend with, especially in these difficult times.

The attack was inspired by an audit conducted by Pennsylvania Auditor General Timothy DeFoor….

In an interview with WITF, Auditor DeFoor questioned the need for school districts to maintain reserves at all, stating, “As far as putting money away for a rainy day, that’s great for a private individual such as ourselves, but not necessarily for a governmental entity.”

To embrace this view would be highly irresponsible. Fund balances are not recurring, so it would be inappropriate to use them for recurring expenses like salaries. This would lead many school districts to quickly go into the red. Additionally, any school district chief financial officer would attest to how one-time expenses come up all the time — and school districts must always be prepared for the worst. To suggest that districts should only be able to raise taxes if they have no fund balance goes against any solid financial principles.

The commonwealth itself, with the assistance of the GOP, recently added money into its rainy day fund, which at nearly $5 billion is the largest in state history. To turn around and criticize our local schools for saving for rainy days is simply hypocritical…

Currently, 447 out of 500 school districts have signed a resolution demanding commonsense charter school funding reform to ease some of the burden, yet none of the proposed bills to address the situation were ever brought up for a vote in the last legislative session when our colleagues across the aisle controlled the state House.

In the 2020-21 school year, Pennsylvanians spent more than $1 billion on students enrolled in cybercharter schools.

Tuition for an independent cybercharter is considerably higher than for an online education program offered by a school district. And these cybercharter schools charge highly inflated tuition rates for students who have special needs — allowing them to profit from students with disabilities at the cost of local taxpayers. What are these cybercharter companies doing with that extra taxpayer money? Research suggests that the money is spent on advertising, executive salaries, other administrative costs — and, according to Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based education research group, carrying high fund balances. This all comes at the expense of our friends and neighbors struggling to afford their homes. This is wrong.

We encourage our fellow state House members to join us in fighting for more accountability from our state’s charter and cybercharter schools by ensuring that there is a single statewide tuition rate for regular and special education students that matches tuition to the actual costs of educating students at home on a computer. We need to ensure that cyberschools — which do not have the same operating costs of our local brick-and-mortar public schools — are especially held accountable when it comes to matching tuition fees with the actual cost of educating their students.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Pennsylvania, Virtual Charter Schools

Hakeem Jeffries Will Downplay His Support for Charters Now That He Is Party Leader

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2023 //
19

The 74 Million—a news site funded by charter supporters and billionaires—reports that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will downplay his support for charter schools now that he is Minority Leader of House Democrats. Charters have lost ground among Democrats, and Jeffries wants to unite the party. Importantly, he doesn’t want to alienate the teachers’ unions, which are an important part of the Democratic Party’s base.

Most Democratic members of Congress realized that charters were a step towards vouchers, and that both were deeply embedded in the Trump MAGA agenda.

For a time, during the Obama years, Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sold charters as a “progressive” idea that would nurture innovation. After thirty years, the charter claims dimmed. Too many scandals, too little innovation. Too many charter chains making profits or paying outlandish salaries. Too many charters that opened and closed within three years. Too many charters that believed harsh discipline was “innovative.”

The charter lobby considered Hakeem Jeffries one of its best friends, but that was before Trump chose Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. She was an outspoken friend of School choice, including charter schools. In recent years, red states have embraced charters and vouchers in their frenzy to privatize public schools and transfer public funding to private organizations.

Now, it’s clear to most Democrats that Republicans own the issue of charters and vouchers, not Democrats.

When Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona proposed modest rules to clean up the federal Charter Schools Program, which hands out $440 million a year to start new charter schools, the charter lobby made wild claims about how any accountability would irreparably harm new charters, but Democrats didn’t go along. The usual charter supporters in the Senate—Booker, Bennett, and Feinstein—complained about the new rules, but when the Senate voted on a motion to overturn them, not a single Democrat voted for the motion.

Today, the strongest allies of charter schools in Congress are conservative Republicans, like Virginia Foxx (NC), chair of the House Education Committee.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Obama, School Choice, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Chicago Mayoral Election: Parent Says NO, NO, NO to Paul Vallas

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
15

The Chicago mayoral election is February 28. Nine candidates are running. If no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff on April 4. You can read about the candidates here.

One of the candidates who is faring well in the polls is Paul Vallas. He is of interest to parents and educators because most of his professional career has been spent as a leader of school districts, although he is not an educator. He introduced a bold experiment in privatization in Philadelphia, which failed. After Vallas left Philly, the district was taken over by the state. He lost his position as superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut, because of his lack of credentials. If Vallas should win, the charter crowd would descend on Chicago to reap their rewards.

Julie Vassilatos is the parent of two students who graduated from the Chicago Public Schools in 2017 and 2021. She was outraged that the Chicago Tribune endorsed Vallas. (The tribune is behind a paywall.) She wrote a response to the editorial. The Tribune was impressed by Vallas’ long resume, but Julie writes that he left behind chaos and budget deficits wherever he was in charge of a school district.

She writes:

It’s unclear to me exactly what motivated the members of the Chicago Tribune editorial board to endorse Paul Vallas for mayor in our upcoming election.

Vallas has run for mayor before. In 2018 I wrote about why he was not a good candidate, and these reasons all hold true today. I could simply re-run that piece today on its own and that would be nearly sufficient as a response to the Tribune’s endorsement. (Notably, they didn’t endorse him last time around.) But there are specifics in Sunday’s editorial that require a response, so I will do that here, with the former piece, from my now-disappeared blog “Chicago Public Fools,” appended below.


The Tribune editorial board gave their reasons. But they’re poor reasons at best, and at worst, wrong or disingenuous. Let’s go through their claims.

I. First, the Tribune editorial highlights Vallas’s “expertise in city financing, policing, and public education.” Expertise can mean, I suppose, “someone did a thing, maybe a lot.” But doing it well and successfully should be inherent in the word. “Expertise” in this case is absurdly unsupported by facts. Cities he’s worked in—rapidly, and left rapidly—were left with complicated budget problems, vast deficits, and controversy. He was superintendent of schools in Philadelphia for 5 years (ousted after causing ballooning budget deficits, OR he resigned in order to gallop to New Orleans, you pick), New Orleans for 4 (he left in order to run unsuccessfully for Cook County Board President), and Bridgeport, CT for 2 (ousted because he did not meet the job qualification of being an educator, OR he resigned to run unsuccessfully with IL gubernatorial candidate Pat Quinn, you pick). A quick recap of each stint:

In Philadelphia

Vallas’s record here is complicated. From The Notebook in 2007:

One thing is certain – Paul Vallas certainly shook up the Philadelphia School District.

Full of energy and confident that he could solve any problem, Vallas’s five-year tenure was a whirlwind of bold initiatives and dramatic changes in policy.

At the same time, he is leaving a district in tumult, with the same deep financial problems that he inherited – running a large deficit, and still without stable, reliable funding that meets the extraordinary needs of the city’s students.

His legacy here has much to do with the Broad Institute’s brand of “reformers.” Recapping the history of “reform” in Philadelphia, Thomas Ultican writes of Vallas in 2018’s “Philadelphia Story: Another School Choice Failure”:

He also opened the door for billionaire Eli Broad to infest Philadelphia with administrators trained at his unaccredited Broad Academy.

Broad believes that leaders of school district need financial and business management skills but require little or no experience in education. He also says that the best way to reform education is through competition and market forces.

Vallas is an example of the kind of school leader Broad sought to foster. He was someone who had little to no experience in education but understood finance.

We have some experience of the Broad Academy here in Chicago. You remember. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was a Broadie. [She was convicted of taking kickbacks and sent to prison.]

In New Orleans:

Even those who accept the rising test scores narrative know there are vast problems in New Orleans post Vallas, as recounted in a 2015 New York Times article. “The rhetoric of reform often fails to match reality.” Privatization here, as elsewhere, hurts the most disadvantaged students.

“We don’t want to replicate a lot of the things that took place to get here,” said Andre Perry, who was one of the few black charter-school leaders in the city. “There were some pretty nefarious things done in the pursuit of academic gain,” Mr. Perry acknowledged, including “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, counseling out, and not handling special needs kids well.”

Privatization, writes teacher, scholar, and author Mercedes Schneider, was not a better way to run schools. Schneider has researched and written substantially on this topic, speaking of expertise; if you have any interest in the long-term effects of school privatization, do yourself a favor and learn from her.

Has Vallas’s brand of reform been sustainable in New Orleans? In a 2008 piece in nola.com, a principal presciently considered this question:

Cheryllyn Branche, the principal of Bannecker Elementary School, wonders about sustainability. ‘I have a vested interest in this community. No matter what, it will always be home,’ she said. ‘If we don’t have people who have a commitment to this place in the long term, it won’t come back.’

‘Sometimes I want to ask him, “What happens when you are gone?”’


In Bridgeport CT:

Vallas was hired shortly after the state takeover of Bridgeport, CT public schools, subject to his fulfilling CT law that he be trained as an educator. A special condition was created just for him, non-trained-educator that he was: that he complete an educational leadership program. Instead of doing this he took a single independent study course that was later deemed not to fulfill the special condition. The whole thing ended in a tangled lawsuit, explained in this 2013 piece in the Stamford (CT) Advocate:

[I]t is a case study about the arrogance and abuse of power that have become the hallmark of the so-called reform movement.

The Vallas saga is the story of how an infamous reformer broke the law — a law written expressly for him — and how senior officials put personal and political connections above the law and welfare of Bridgeport’s children.

The court ruled against Vallas, but later reversed the decision in an appeal; Vallas had already left to join Pat Quinn’s IL campaign for governor. His short tenure in Bridgeport was largely colored by this controversy.

It’s clear that the expertise the Tribune touts, based largely on his school district leadership, is fraught with complications and possibly wildly overrated. The parts that worry me in this history include the rapid fire breaking and destruction coupled with simultaneous rapid spending and rapid budget slashing. The failure to listen to constituents. The repeated disadvantaging of already-disadvantaged children.

I know reformers like Vallas do not see that the upshot of their work turns out to be racist. But oddly, districts subjected to the Vallas type of reform somehow get a whole lot whiter—from administrators, through teachers, and on down to students. Saying “choice is the civil rights issue of our time” over and over like a magic spell does not make it true. School choice has never, and will never, increase equity in a school district. School choice originates in the racist response to Brown v. Board of Education and the creation of schools not subject to federal oversight. Today choice is instrumental in breaking down democracy in our communities. [These claims were the subject of my blog that ran for 7 years; though I want to go on and on about this, we’ve got to keep moving or I’ll never get through this post!]

Just on a practical level, Vallas’s plans for keeping schools open on nights and weekends baffle me. How does he propose to pay for all that staffing? Our schools don’t even have libraries. They have hardly any extracurriculars. Some of them are lacking in utter basics. What is he talking about? I can’t even imagine the epic Godzilla versus Mothra battles that would ensue between him and the CTU over this.

No, Chicago Tribune. No. No to someone who is a serial privatizer. No to someone who set corporate ed reform in motion in Chicago decades ago. No to someone who blows things up and leaves. No to someone who’s left increased racial inequity in his wake. We don’t need a mayor who has this kind of proven track record on education.

II. Next, the Tribune loves that Vallas “has the ear of rank and file police officers on the street.”What they mean by this is that he is very cozy—one could say uncomfortably cozy—with FOP president and disgraced cop John Catanzara. Last month the FOP endorsed Vallas; this week Vallas spoke at an FOP event for retired police officers alongside Catanzara; and he recently accepted a $5K donation from a retired policeman involved in the Laquan McDonald murder. When WBEZ reported on that connection, his campaign acknowledged that, and rather than returning the money, they gave $10K to Parents for Peace and Justice.

His public safety plan is full of dog whistles, like so: “Our city has been surrendered to a rogue element who act with seeming impunity in treating unsuspecting, innocent people as prey.” Kicking CPD Superintendent David Brown to the curb is Job One. Bypassing Kim Foxx when necessary is key. And adding thousands of police officers is a priority, so that CPD is staffed “like it was under Rahm Emanuel.” Said new cops would be recruited from military bases (?!), the fire department, retirees, and private security forces; residency requirements would be waived (but wait, didn’t he say having cops from the local community was best?). Every CTA station would be staffed with cops. In a just and good world, these are not inherently problematic proposals. In the world we live in, with out of control, hostile, already overly militarized cops, these ideas would implement a semi-privatized dystopian police state with watchful cops on every corner trying to snatch the city back from the rogue element. Of course rank and file cops like these ideas.

The Tribune is hopeful that Vallas would use the trust of the police “to improve police conduct.” Again with the saying it/wishing it connection. I think the next mayor needs more concrete proposals about improving police conduct than we see in Vallas’s plan.


III. In discussing some of Vallas’s challengers, the Tribune is “troubled by [their] associations”(in this case, Chuy Garcia’s connection to Madigan). But how can the editorial board overlook Vallas’s own troubling associations? Let me detail a few.

He spoke at an Awake IL event this past summer. Days later, after he was roundly criticized for joining forces with the group, he walked back his connection with them, assuring folks that he, himself, is not in any way homophobic or racist. It would have taken a 5 second internet search to see that Awake IL has a history of being unhinged about covid restrictions, threatens trans people regularly, refers to the governor as a “groomer,” was instrumental in the vandalism of UpRising Bakery, and is connected to the Proud Boys. But Vallas didn’t make a 5 second internet search when he was invited to serve on a panel that Awake IL leader Shannon Adcock called “the Continental Congress of school choice.”

He received a $7.5K donation from disgraced former CPS Board of Ed member Deborah Quazzo, whose notoriety derives chiefly but not solely from the large profits she secured as a result of contracts obtained while serving on the Board of Ed. Her husband threw in another $10K for good measure. Interestingly, in his last at-bat for mayor, Vallas received a much smaller donation from Quazzo, then returned it after he was asked about it by WBEZ. Time heals all wounds, apparently. Vallas now says, 4 years ago there were allegations being made about her that didn’t seem great, and his campaign was wary. Now he thinks “nothing came of those investigations” into what Quazzo did on the Board, and besides, “She has a reputation for being very active in school reform.” (Again, a 5 second internet search would yield the CPS Inspector General’s report on all matters Quazzo. Allegations sustained.)

I’ve already mentioned the deeply problematic John Catenzara. At least the $5K donation of the Laquan McDonald-involved cop, Richard Hagen, did cause a twinge of conscience.

Disgraced Barbara Byrd-Bennett partner in crime Gary Solomon was also an associate of Vallas’s—for years. Solomon went with Vallas to Philadelphia, then New Orleans. “In a series of letters to Louisiana officials who oversaw the New Orleans district, Vallas vouched for Synesi Associates,” Gary Solomon’s education consulting firm. “Synesi landed two no-bid contracts worth nearly $893,000 in New Orleans during Vallas’ time running the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.” Solomon’s prison term for his involvement in the Barbara Byrd-Bennett kickback scandal ended early because of covid. He’ll be released from home confinement in October.

Vallas owes one of his jobs to yet another shady connection, former governor Bruce Rauner, who set him up as Chief Administrative Officer of Chicago State University, in hopes of turning it around. This scenario didn’t end well—CSU cut ties with Vallas when he announced his run for mayor in the middle of his tenure. “I find it unfortunate that he would attempt to use Chicago State University as a platform to run for the mayor of the city of Chicago,” [Board Vice President Nicholas] Gowen said. “It is not the role of Mr. Vallas to try to use Chicago State University to try to bolster his bona fides to the black community.”


IV. The Tribune touts the need for “turnaround specialists” like Vallas and hopes others join him. But what is this? Do we want this? What does a turnaround actually do beyond slash-and-burn destruction of communities and gentrification outcomes that turn out looking quite racist? Educator and author Larry Cuban asks if turnaround “experts” are what struggling school districts (and presumably by extension, cities) really require.

Vallas is (or was) the premier “turnaround specialist.” Whether, indeed, Vallas turned around Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans is contested. Supporters point to more charter schools, fresh faces in the classroom, new buildings, and slowly rising test scores; critics point to abysmal graduation rates for black and Latino students, enormous budget deficits, and implementation failures.

“Turnarounds” as a school strategy have been notorious, and notoriously ineffective. On the school level, a turnaround means every staff member of a school is fired, down to the last lunch lady, and replaced with new staff members. These supposedly higher quality (and perplexingly, usually way whiter) staff members are supposed to fix everything. Break it all fast. Rebuild it fast. Voila! It is fixed. On the district level, it means replacing traditional public schools with charters, lots of firing, much slashing of budgets. Poof! District is fixed, and it is a miracle! Until said turnaround experts leave town with the district and city holding the bag—and the bag is usually empty.

What in the world does a “turnaround expert” do in charge of a whole city? What parts are going to be dismantled? What parts remade? What parts gentrified? What budgets slashed and burned?

I can’t picture it. More significantly, Vallas hasn’t really articulated it.

The Tribune lauds Vallas for his expertise in education—which is questionable—and his rapport with CPD—which is dubious. It overlooks some super sketchy connections and wants to bring down the cursed turnaround upon Chicago. You know, and I know, that Paul Vallas is not the mayor we Chicagoans need—not in 2019 and not now.

If you want to read the author’s appraisal of Vallas in 2018, when he captured a little more than 5% of the vote, open the link. It follows this post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry

Indiana: Legislators Want Property Taxes for Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2023 //
5

Steve Hinnefeld writes on his blog School Matters that Republican legislators in Indiana want property taxes to pay for charter schools. This will mean budget cuts for public schools or higher property taxes.

Taxpayers in Indiana should be irate that their property taxes will bolster the bank accounts of for-profit charter chains like National Heritage Academies and Accel.

I remember when the idea of charter schools was first discussed in the 1980s. The promise of charter advocates (and I was one at the time) was that they would be more accountable than public schools; that they would cost less than public schools; and they would have higher test scores than public schools. In the more than three decades since the first charter schools opened, the public has learned that none of those promises came true.

Charter schools on average do not produce higher test scores than public schools, unless they choose their students with care. Many charter schools—in states like Ohio—perform far worse than public schools. They are less accountable than public schools because they have private boards that answer to no one. Their finances are usually opaque since they are not subject to the same budgetary oversight as public schools. And now we know that they do not cost less than public schools; they want the same funding as public schools, and many are subsidized by outside philanthropists. And, unlike public schools, charter schools close with high frequency and little warning. They destabilize communities. And that is why I no longer support charter schools.

Steve Hinnefeld writes:

Indiana legislators are considering a significant change in Indiana school finance that would, for the first, time, require public school districts to share local property tax revenue with charter schools.

Senate Bill 398 is set for a hearing Tuesday in the Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee. A similar bill in the House hasn’t yet been scheduled for a hearing, but probably will be. House Bill 1607 goes further than SB 398 by also requiring school districts to share referendum funding with charter schools.

SB 398, authored by Sen. Linda Rogers, R-Granger, would require school districts to share revenue from their property tax-supported operations funds with charter schools. The money would be allocated according to the number of students who live in the school district and attend charter schools.

The measures follow a public advocacy campaign that may have pushed the issue of charter school funding onto lawmakers’ agendas. The campaign, which included TV and social media ads, focused on differences in funding between Indianapolis Public Schools and charter schools.

The bill would also make districts share property taxes with nearby public school districts to which their students transfer.

Under Indiana’s current school finance system, the state provides comparable per-pupil funding to district and charter schools. But districts can also levy local property taxes to pay off debt and for their operations funds, which pay for facility construction and maintenance and for transportation. The state gives charter schools an extra $1,250 per pupil to compensate for their lack of property taxes.

A Legislative Services Agency analysis says SB 398 would shift nearly $70 million a year from school districts to charter schools after a three-year phase-in. The biggest impact would be in Indianapolis and Gary, where more students attend charters or transfer than attend district schools.

Advocates for charter schools argue their students deserve the same funding as students who attend district schools. However, charter schools aren’t subject to the same requirements as district schools and aren’t overseen by elected school boards. It’s rare in Indiana for voters to have no local election mechanism to influence how their property taxes are spent.

The campaign for more charter school funding highlighted the difference in per-pupil funding between IPS schools and Indy charter schools that aren’t affiliated with the district. The ads were “endorsed” by the Indiana Student Funding Alliance, whose website has no contact information or details about who or what it is.

According to Facebook’s ad library, the ads on the platform were paid for by the Institute for Quality Education, an Indianapolis nonprofit that advocates for charter schools and private school vouchers. The group’s political action committee, Hoosiers for Quality Education, is a major donor to Republican politicians. In 2022, it gave $22,500 to Behning’s campaign and $5,500 to Rogers’ campaign.

Open the link and finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Funding, Indiana

Peter Greene: The Business of Many Charter Schools Is Real Estate, Not Education

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2023 //
3

Peter Greene wrote in the Bucks County Beacon about the lucrative real estate deals that produce profits for charter schools. He reviewed the latest report from the Network for Public Education report Chartered for Profit II.

It would be easy to assume that charter schools are in the education business, but in fact, many charter school companies appear to be in the real estate business instead.

In its new report, “Chartered for Profit II,” the Network for Public Education lays out the techniques for running a charter for profit, even if it is nominally non-profit, including the use of real estate deals.

One of the most common techniques for running a charter school for profit is to have the non-profit company run by a for-profit charter management organization.

In some states, there is no need to keep those two companies strictly separate. For example, in North Carolina, the non-profit Torchlight Academy was led by principal Cynthia McQueen. The for-profit company hired to run the school was Torchlight Academy Schools, LLC, whose CEO was Don McQueen, Cynthia’s husband. In addition, McQueen’s daughter was hired as special education director, and their son-in-law was awarded the contract for cleaning services for the school.

Those kinds of insider deals can involve real estate as well; the left hand buys a building, and then rents it to the right hand. The NPE report outlines how Glenn Way, a former Utah legislator, set up a charter school empire in Arizona. He and his wife established the American Leadership Academy chain of charter schools. At the same time, Way ran several real estate outfits, including Schoolhouse Development, that built and developed charter school properties. Way, like many other real estate businessmen in the charter school business, was able to use his real estate business to collect rent from his charter school business—all of it paid with taxpayer dollars.

“When Craig Harris of the Arizona Republic asked Way if such profiteering from taxpayer dollars intended for children should be allowed, he responded, ‘It’s [charter schooling] no different than building a Walmart, CVS, or Walgreens.’”

Notes the report:

An investigation in 2018 by the Arizona Republicfound that Way’s real estate business collected roughly $37 million in taxpayer dollars passed through his ALA charter school chain.

Florida’s Academica is yet another example. The company is owned by real estate developer Fernando Zulueta, who opened his first charter school as part of a housing development he had constructed. He expressed no burning desire to get children a great education; he just figured a school would make the housing development more attractive.

Zulueta and his brother have launched what journalist Jessica Bakeman called “an empire of charter schools.” Their headquarters are the home address of over 100 active corporations linked to various family members. Within this maze of corporations, charter facilities are sold off in ways that allow one arm of the octopus to cash in on the sale while another arm keeps earning management fees for the school.

The Academica chain is rapidly expanding in Nevada and other states.

Please open the link and read the rest of this excellent review of an important study of charter profiteering.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Network for Public Education

Texas: Unmasking The Campaign to Privatize Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2023 //
8

Mimi Swartz, a writer for the Texas Monthly, explored the background, the funders, and the consequences of the well-coordinated campaign to privatize public schools—by defaming them and discrediting those who run for local school board seats. She focuses on the travails of one dedicated school board member, Joanna Day in Dripping Springs, Texas, who contended with insults and threats in her life.

The following is a small part of a long article, which I encourage you to read in full:

The motivations for these attacks are myriad and sometimes opaque, but many opponents of public education share a common goal: privatizing public schools, in the same way activists have pushed, with varying results, for privatization of public utilities and the prison system. Proponents of school privatization now speak of public schools as “dropout factories” and insist that “school choice” should be available to all. They profess a deep faith in vouchers, which would allow parents to send their children not just to the public schools of their choice but to religious and other private schools, at taxpayers’ expense.

But if privatizing public education is today cloaked in talk of expanded liberty, entrepreneurial competition, and improved schools for those who need them most, its history tells a different story. In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, a group of segregationist legislators in Texas, with support from retiring governor Allan Shivers, began concocting work-arounds for parents appalled by the prospect of racial integration of public schools. One idea: state-subsidized tuition at private schools. That never came to pass, but it was Texas’s first flirtation with vouchers.

Privatization proponents have since switched up their rhetoric, pitching vouchers as an opportunity for poor urban families to save their children from underperforming neighborhood schools. That hasn’t worked out either. In various experiments across the nation, funding for vouchers hasn’t come close to covering tuition costs at high-quality private schools, and many kids, deprived of the most basic tools, haven’t been able to meet the standards for admission.

School funding in Texas is based largely on attendance—as the saying goes, the money follows the child. Considerable evidence suggests that vouchers would siphon money from underfunded public schools and subsidize well-to-do parents who can already afford private tuition. Critics frequently cite a program in Milwaukee, where four out of ten private schools created for voucher students from 1991 to 2015 failed.

“I don’t think that vouchers serve any useful purpose at all,” said Scott McClelland, a retired president of H-E-B who now chairs Good Reason Houston, an education nonprofit. Ninety-one percent of Texas students attend public schools. “There isn’t enough capacity in the private school network to make a meaningful difference in their ability to serve economically disadvantaged students in any meaningful numbers, and it will divert funding away from public schools.”

In Texas, an unusual alliance of Democratic and rural Republican leaders has for decades held firm against voucher campaigns. The latter, of course, are all too aware that private schools aren’t available for most in their communities and that public schools employ many of their constituents. But the spread of far-right politics and the disruption of public schools during the pandemic created an opening for activists to sow discontent and, worse, chaos. “If they can make the public afraid of their public school, they will be more likely to support privatizing initiatives. Then that puts us back to where we used to be with segregation of public schools,” says former Granbury school board member Chris Tackett, who, with his wife Mendi, has become an outspoken advocate for public education and a relentless investigator of the attempts to undermine it.

They have their work cut out for them. In the past, just a few right-wing legislators pushed for privatization and were routinely ignored. After all, the state constitution spelled out “the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.” But as times have changed, so has the interpretation of that guarantee.

Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s former Education Secretary, set up shop in Dallas with her American Federation for Children to push against “government schools” in favor of “school choice.” Political PACs such as Patriot Mobile Action, an arm of a Christian wireless provider in North Texas, continue pouring millions into school board races and book bans to promote more religious education. Patriot has joined other recently formed PACs with inspirational names such as Defend Texas Liberty and Texans for Excellent Education, all of which supposedly support better public schools but are actually part of the privatization push. But by far the most powerful opponents of public schools in the state are West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and the brothers Farris and Dan Wilks. Their vast political donations have made them the de facto owners of many Republican members of the Texas Legislature through organizations such as the now dissolved Empower Texans and the more recent Defend Texas Liberty, which the trio uses to promote restrictions on reproductive rights, voter access, and same-sex marriage. Almost as influential is the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn is vice board chair.

A November 2021 TPPF fund-raising letter, sent to supporters in advance of the Eighty-eighth Legislature convening, argued that “public education is GROUND ZERO” in the fight for freedom. “The policy team and board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) believe it is now or never,” it read, signaling that the long-standing and robust alliance against vouchers was unusually vulnerable. “The time is ripe to set Texas children free from enforced indoctrination and Big Government cronyism in our public schools.” The letter went on to herald a $1.2 million “Set the Captives Free” campaign to lobby legislators to save Texas schoolchildren from “Marxist and sexual indoctrination” funded by “far-Left elites for decades.”

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, generously backed by Dunn, the Wilks brothers, and their organizations, has long been a proponent of privatizing public education (and of starving it through reductions in property taxes). He has made vouchers a primary legislative goal of the current session. Mayes Middleton, of Wallisville, a Republican state senator and former chair of the TPPF-aligned Texas House Freedom Caucus, filed a bill to create the “Texas Parental Empowerment Program,” proposing education savings accounts that are essentially a form of vouchers. Representative Matt Shaheen, of Plano, who is a member of the Texas Freedom Caucus, has introduced a measure that would guarantee state tax credits for those who donate to school-assistance programs—such as scholarships for kids wishing to go to private schools.

Governor Greg Abbott, knowing all too well the political headwinds that vouchers have faced, has long been wary of publicly supporting them, so he has undermined public schools in other ways. While campaigning early last year, he promised to amend the Texas constitution with a “parental bill of rights,” even though most, if not all, of those rights already existed. By then, “parental rights” had become a dog whistle to animate opponents of public education. (As the Texas Tribune put it: “Gov. Greg Abbott taps into parent anger to fuel reelection campaign.”)

During the recent intensifying crisis on the border, Abbott publicly floated a challenge to the state’s constitutional obligation to give all Texas children, including undocumented ones, a publicly funded education—a step his Republican predecessor, Rick Perry, had denounced years earlier as heartless. Then last spring, Abbott made headlines with his first full-throated public endorsement of a voucher program.

So here we are, with distrust in public schools advancing as fast as the latest COVID-19 variant. The forces behind the spread of this vitriol are no mystery. Those who would destroy public schools have learned to apply three simple stratagems: destabilize, divide, and, if that doesn’t work, open the floodgates of fear

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Republicans, School Choice, Texas, Vouchers

Carol Burris on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Horrible Education Plan

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2023 //
26

Carol Burris is the executive director for of the Network for Public Education. in this post, which she wrote exclusively for the blog, she reveals the details of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ plan to defund and destroy the public schools in her state.

Burris writes:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of Baptist minister and former Governor Mike Huckabee, missed learning the 9th commandment that prohibits telling a lie. As press secretary to Donald Trump, her distortions of the truth resulted in the editor of Forbes warning corporations against hiring Sanders and other Trump “propagandists,” writing, “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

 

Now she is the Governor of Arkansas. On her first day in office and in her response to Biden’s State of the Union, she parroted the old “education is the civil rights issue of our time” line that has been used to justify horrible policies from school closures to charter schools and vouchers. However, the disconnect between what she says and what she does quickly became apparent. On her first day in office, she issued an executive order prohibiting “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools” and another banning the term “Latinx” from being used in state documents. State authorities are investigating AP African American Studies at Little Rock Central High School, where the majority of students are Black.

If we need further proof that this self-proclaimed champion of Civil Rights is more aptly described as a champion of Civil Wrongs, look at her recently leaked ed reform plan.

Here are its features:

 

The Privatization of Public Education:

· Her voucher plan is a universal ESA—the plan now favored by the far-right. These plans have few rules and no family eligibility requirements. They have become Entitlement Spending Accounts–cash going into the pockets of private school families regardless of income. The leaked plan does not say how taxpayers will pay for it. But everyone will be eligible by 2025. It includes Voucher funding for homeschools. The only restrictions will apply to vendors, so those who enroll their children in those recently uncovered Neo-Nazi homeschools can find ways to cash in.

· Increased tax credits for contributions to an existing voucher program.

· Local School Boards can contract with an open-enrollment charter school or private company to run a school campus at risk of state takeover due to low performance—and if they do, they get a financial incentive.

· Establishment of a charter-school construction fund for new charters and expansion.

· Elimination of the cap on charters.

· Charter school applications no longer need to be reviewed and approved by the local school district board of directors.

· All students attending a public school can take courses and earn credit for classes not offered in their school. By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, students attending a public school that receives a letter grade of “C”, “D”, or “P” from the Arkansas School and District Accountability System may take their required courses (i.e. math, English, etc.) through the course choice program. Bet your bottom dollar that these courses will be online, with vendors like Stride K12 making a fortune.

Censoring and Controlling Curriculum

· K-3 literacy evaluation will be aligned with the “science of reading.”

· Before grade 5, teachers cannot provide classroom instruction on the following topics: sexually explicit materials, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

· School districts must implement an age-appropriate child sexual prevention program for grades K-12, allowing parents to preview materials and exempt their children from instruction. (I have no idea what a child sexual prevention program even is.)

· The Secretary of Education will review the Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

· No school employee or student must attend training on prohibited indoctrination or Critical Race Theory.

 

Harmful Policies for Students

· 3rd-grade retention based on deficits in reading proficiency.

· An accountability system for pre-school education that includes student data.

· Literacy testing three times a year for all students in K-3.

· Curriculum tracking in Grade 8.

· Community service requirements, which may, for some students, be challenging to meet.

· Mandated cops on campus.

· Career-ready pathways in partnership with local business and industry leaders” translate workforce training programs to track students into low-paying and middle-wage jobs.

Punitive Policies for Teachers

 

· Elimination of due process in dismissals.

· Base salaries will no longer increase by years of experience or for Master’s degrees.

· Bonuses based on VAM.

There are a few likable initiatives in her plan, such as paid maternity leave for teachers, but if she makes districts fund them even as she drains their funding with charter schools and voucher expansion, a good initiative will be one more financial pressure on already underfunded schools.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ education plan is a hodgepodge of all the awful and ineffective ideas proposed since No Child Left Behind. The fingerprints of JEB! and the Walton family are over the leaked legislation.

Despite its hodgepodge nature, one thing is clear—its ultimate intent is to destroy public education in the state by slamming a fist down on students, public schools, and their teachers while propping up a wild and largely unaccountable privatized system.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Ohio GOP Wants to Expand Vouchers, Pooh-Poohs Online Nazi-Homeschooling Group

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2023 //
11

Ohio has poured taxpayer dollars into charter schools, even though public schools consistently outperform charter schools. Ohio has poured more than $1 billion into virtual charters, even though the biggest of them (ECOT, or The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) had the lowest graduation rate in the nation and declared bankruptcy rather than pay back $67 million to the state for large numbers of phantom students. But despite its dismal statistics, it collected $1 billion over its 20 years in business. Vouchers were evaluated by a researcher chosen by a pro-choice think tank, and the report said that voucher students were falling behind.

Given this long history of school choice failure, wouldn’t you think the state would step back and evaluate its commitment to failure?

Of course not. The GOP dominated Legislature wants to expand vouchers.

Why does the Ohio GOP invest in failure?

Morgan Trau of News5Cleveland explains:

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/politics/ohio-politics/as-some-lawmakers-debate-nazi-home-schooling-scandal-others-propose-expansion-to-school-voucher-program?_amp=true

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A bill to expand the school voucher system and provide more money to home-schoolers has been proposed in Ohio as the Department of Education is investigating a Nazi home-schooling scandal. This is not the first Holocaust education issue the state has had in one year.

Ohio’s public schools have been pushing for consistent funding for decades.

William Philis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, has spent his career fighting against the voucher system.

“We don’t have a constitutional system and they’re exacerbating the unconstitutionality of the system by draining money out of the public school system,” Philis said.

A new bill introduced to the state Senate will continue to leave public schools behind in favor of supporting private schools, he added.

Senate Bill 11 is expected to use taxpayer money to give $5,500 to elementary and middle school students and $7,500 to high schoolers so they can attend any public, community or charted nonpublic school. Ashtabula Republican Sen. Sandra O’Brien introduced the bill because, “Ohio should act now to put parents, not government, in control of their children’s education,” she said in sponsor testimony Tuesday.

Eric Frank, president of School Choice Ohio, believes the legislation allows children to get the best education possible.

“Primarily, what those do is they target scholarships to families that either live in what we typically refer to as under-performing public school areas, not necessarily districts, but buildings within districts and also low-income families,” Frank said.

The bill would expand the current EdChoice Scholarship to give universal eligibility to all students in the state of Ohio.

There are two sections of the current program:

  • EdChoice Expansion, which the state reported had 17,152 students participating in fiscal year 2021, requires income verification. Eighty-five percent of these students were below the 200% poverty rate.
  • Standard EdChoice, which the state reported has 33,129 student in FY 2021, does not require income verification. More than 75% of the students utilizing this program were not low-income qualified.

Of the total 50,281 students, 25,180 are low-income qualified, with 25,101 that are not. This means that half of the students utilizing taxpayer money to go to a private or charter school are not designated as “needing government assistance.”

This is not to say that people who aren’t in that designation don’t struggle to have to pay the full price of the tuition — but it just means it is unknown if they do struggle to pay or not.

“Most people are really happy with their public schools,” Frank added. “But families that aren’t, they should have another option.”

Philis strongly disagreed.

“I’d say that’s pure poppycock,” Philis said. “I don’t get a voucher for a backyard swimming pool because I don’t want to go to the public pool.”

Even if a student takes a voucher, private schools choose who will be admitted, the advocate said.

“What we’re doing in Ohio right now is that we’re funding segregation,” he stated. “We are funding, with taxpayer money, White Flight.”

The Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP), was somewhat attempted to be put into place for fiscal year 2021-22. It was supposed to change how the state delegates funding for school districts.

Starting in the 2021 FY, lawmakers added hundreds of millions of state dollars in both direct funding and tax credits to subsidize families sending their children to private and charter schools. Critics, like Ohio Education Association, said this makes taxpayers pay for these for-profit schools and diverts money away from public education, which desperately needs it.

The bill would also expand the home-school tax credit from $250 to $2,000, which raises concerns.

Ohio’s Nazi Education Problem

The Ohio Dept. of Education is investigating a family in Upper Sandusky after it was revealed that their home-school program was allegedly a Nazi propaganda school, where children were taught how to love Hitler and become a “wonderful Nazi.”

Logan and Katja Lawrence were the alleged creators of the “Dissident Homeschool” group which had 2,500 members on its Telegram channel when they were exposed in a late January article from VICE News.

“We need to ensure that home-schooling is not an opportunity for parents to systemically teach their children hatred,” state Sen. Catherine D. Ingram (D-Cincinnati) said. “Senate Bill 1, which is pending in Education Committee, weakens home-schooling requirements. The legislature must protect our children from instruction fueled by racism and intolerance.”

News 5 asked Sen. President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) if there should be oversight over the home-school program, which he said “absolutely,” but there are specific rules and regulations.

“I hope we’re long past the point in our society where we take the actions of one person or a small group of people and paint the entire group as though somehow they’re participating in that,” Huffman responded.

The Department of Education should be figuring out what is going on, he added.

“I hope, frankly, that people will not try to take some political advantage or policy advantage… basically trying to decide that a couple of sociopaths somewhere in Ohio who are doing strange things that… somehow should affect the policy of the rest of the state is anathema to me,” the GOP leader said (anathema means something that a person hates).

Democrats have already been jumping at making sure a situation like this does not happen again.

There are only two Jewish members in the Ohio House — Democratic Reps. Casey Weinstein of Hudson and Dani Isaacsohn of Cincinnati.

Weinstein consistently tweets about antisemitism, including a recent post advocating for more home-schooling regulations. Republican state Rep. Riordan McClain, who represents the area in which the alleged Nazi-group resides, responded to him.

“Let’s not take freedom away from all for the terrible ideas of a few,” McClain said. “I can tell you as a home-educating parent from Upper, I’ve never heard of these people.”

In a statement to the press, McClain condemned the Nazi-based teachings and “racial hatred.” He, however, acknowledged that “differing opinions exist in a free society and our job as community members is to have robust ongoing debates.”

“Get the public system out of the way, give the parents the money — we’re going to have a school that involves the Ku Klux Klan mentality,” Philis said.

Frank argued back.

“There are 50,000 families in Ohio that are home-schooling their kids,” Frank said. “And my guess is 99.9% of them probably do a good job and they are their kids, and so it’s their right.”

News 5 continues to search to find out if the Lawrence family has received any funding from the state.

This is not the first time Ohio has dealt with a Holocaust-related scandal in the past year.

Back in March of 2022, News 5 aired an exclusive report about comments made by one of the primary sponsors of a bill to ban schools from teaching “divisive topics” — H.B. 327. The report stemmed from an interview exchange between state Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur (R-Ashtabula) and News 5 Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau.

During the interview, Fowler Arthur was asked about the financial aspect of the bill. While attempting to talk about funding, she brought up the Holocaust, saying that students needed to hear the massacre from the perspective of the “German soldiers.”

After the exclusive story went international, the original divisive concepts bill had been renamed the “both sides bill” or the “both sides of the Holocaust bill.”

Former Speaker of the Ohio House Bob Cupp (R-Lima) responded to a question about the lawmaker’s comments on the Holocaust, saying they were “inappropriate remarks, they were uninformed remarks.”

The bill swiftly died, despite Fowler Arthur’s repeated efforts to bring it back to life, a records request by News 5 showed. Also in the records were dozens of angry emails to the lawmaker.

She was previously on the state Board of Education but has never participated in the public education system as a student or a parent. She was home-schooled and did not attend college.

In the new General Assembly, the lawmaker will have more power than she has ever had. News 5 shared in January that Fowler Arthur will be the primary and secondary Education Committee’s vice chair.

“I think that in terms of the committee makeup, is it concerning to me that that individual has been given a leadership position on an education committee? Absolutely,” Minority House Leader Allison Russo (D-Upper Arlington) told News 5 in a one-on-one interview.

Luckily, Russo said, the vice chair shouldn’t have a huge role in leading the direction of a committee.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on Twitter and Facebook.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Miami Herald: Legislature Holds Special Session to Clean Up After DeSantis Blunders

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
7

Time and again, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has exceeded his authority by one-man stunts, created to win national publicity and demonstrate that he’s more fascist than Trump.

Now, his puppet legislature is meeting in special session to clean up the mess DeSantis left behind.

The Miami Herald editorial board excoriates his authoritarian control of weak-kneed legislators.

With Gov. DeSantis’ iron-fisted control of the legislative process in Florida, it’s not elected officials who must conform to the limits of the law; it’s the law that gets modified according to the whims of elected officials.

If you pass a half-baked bill in vengeful haste, someone will clean up your mess. When you get sued for allegedly violating your own migrant-relocation program, no worries, your friends in the Legislature will expand that program and give you ample power — and cash — to make it “right.” When you tout illegal voting arrests of people who the state allowed to vote, and it turns out you might have chosen the wrong prosecutors to bring those charges, you simply change the law.

That’s the story of the special legislative session that began this week in the Florida Capitol. The urgent matter the Republican-controlled Legislature must address is cleaning up the governor’s most controversial policies. Lawmakers couldn’t even wait another month until their regular two-month session that starts in March.

To be fair, there are other valid issues being discussed: providing relief for Hurricane Ian victims and expanding a law that allows college athletes to sign endorsement deals. But this is no ordinary special session. The bulk of it is about giving DeSantis more — and unchecked — power.

Take the law that tried to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida last year. Created in the 1960s, the special taxing district is controlled by Disney and serves as the governing body for the Walt Disney World Resort. Was it time to revisit this unusual arrangement that ceded so much power to a private company (the district can even build its own nuclear power plant)? Maybe, but good governance wasn’t really top of mind. The Legislature, egged on by DeSantis, was retaliating against Disney for opposing the parental-rights law critics nicknamed “Don’t say gay.”

When lawmakers passed a bill to dissolve Reedy Creek last year, they didn’t hash out what to do with Disney’s $1 billion debt that, without the company’s ability to tax itself, would fall on the residents of Orange and Osceola counties.

There’s no mea culpa on the part of Republicans, though they did give themselves until June 1 to make changes to the law. They now want to maintain the district under a different name, take away Disney’s power to control it and give it to our almighty governor, who would nominate the five people who make up the district’s board. We suppose there’s one silver lining: The board would lose the authority to build a nuclear plant.

House Bill 5B and Senate Bill 6B are another gift to the governor from lawmakers. The state is defending a lawsuit filed by a Democratic state senator challenging the taxpayer-funded flights of mostly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. Those migrants were duped into believing they would find jobs and resources on the island.

The lawsuit centers on a key component of the relocation program lawmakers funded last year at DeSantis’ urging: that it relocate migrants from Florida, not other states.

Republicans want to get rid of that fine print and give DeSantis the unchecked authority to relocate migrants from anywhere in the country as long as they have been released by the federal government pending the resolution of their case. He also would get $10 million and the possibility to access $500 million in emergency funds because he signed an executive order declaring an immigration emergency in January, the Herald reported.

This gives DeSantis the ability to tap into millions of dollars to target any voter-rich Republican primary state in his expected presidential run, courtesy of taxpayers. The premise of the program is that the border crisis presents a threat to Floridians, but whether or not those migrants would ever make it to the Sunshine State is inconsequential at this point.

The other legislative clean-up relates to the state’s new election-crimes office, created by the Legislature after Donald Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election became a major plank in the Republican Party platform. Last year, DeSantis proudly boasted the office had arrested 20 felons who voted illegally.

Those voters told the Herald and other news outlets they were given voter registration cards by their local election offices. DeSantis’ own administration didn’t flag them as ineligible. Some cases were dismissed by judges who found that the statewide prosecutors who filed the charges didn’t have the jurisdiction to do so.

The Legislature’s first order should be to prevent more ineligible voters from slipping through the cracks. Instead, its solution is to make it easier to prosecute them after they have already cast ballots. Legislation would clarify that the Office of Statewide Prosecution can investigate voting-related crimes. The office reports to a Republican, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and is a safer way for DeSantis to score wins than going through Florida’s 20 states attorney, prosecutors who are elected locally.

One-party control of Florida’s government is nothing new. What’s new is that the Legislature has become just another arm of the governor’s office. Its role isn’t to serve as a check on the executive power anymore, but to rubber stamp and inflate the man whose ambition and thirst for the spotlight have turned governing into a power-grabbing spectacle.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Vouchers
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