The two most outspoken conservatives in Texas—Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott—are at odds in two races for the state legislature. Abbott is supporting the Republican incumbents. Cruz is supporting their challengers in the Republican primary.
The two grinches of the right are diverging because of one issue: school choice. Texas is already overrun with charter schools (mostly low-performing), but the legislature has opposed vouchers for private and religious schools for years.
“Sen. Cruz believes that school choice is the most important domestic issue in the country,” Cruz spokesperson Steve Guest said in a statement. “He doesn’t hesitate to endorse and support candidates in primaries that will fight for school choice across Texas.”
Some might think that climate change or the high cost of prescription drugs or high rates of child poverty was “the most important domestic issue in the country,” but not Senator Cruz.
His own children are enrolled at the elite St. John’s School in Houston, where tuition is about $30,000 annually. If Texas were to endorse vouchers, you can be sure that they wouldn’t be large enough for any student to attend St. John’s.
The broad concept of school choice is popular among Texas Republicans. In the March primary, 88% of voters approved of a ballot proposition that asked voters whether they agreed with the statement, “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.”
But the issue divides Republican lawmakers when it comes to school voucher programs, which would let parents use public money for private school education. Rural Republicans are often the most outspoken opponents, voicing concerns that such initiatives would hurt the public schools that are the lifeblood of their tightly knit communities.
The Texas House has long been a firewall against voucher proposals. During the last regular legislative session, the chamber voted 115-29 on a budget amendment to ban school vouchers, with a majority of Republicans siding with Democrats.
Our friends, Pastors for Texas Children, has led the fight against school choice, knowing that the vast majority of students in Texas are enrolled in underfunded public schools. PTC believes in separation of church and state, and they support public schools.
Conservatives used to be known as people resistant to radical change. In decades past, conservatives sought to conserve traditional institutions and make them better. That stance appealed to many Americans who were unsettled by radical ideas, opposed to big-box stores that would wipe out small-town America’s Main Street. Conservatives were also known for opposing government intrusion into personal decisions; what you did in your bedroom was your business, not the state’s. What you and your doctor decided was best for you was your decision, not the state’s.
Chris Rufo is the face of the New Conservatism, who wants to frighten the parents of America into tearing down traditional institutions, especially the public school that they and their family attended.
Rufo became well-known for creating a national panic about “critical race theory,” which he can’t define and doesn’t understand. But he seems to think that schools are controlled by racist pedagogues and sexual perverts. In his facile presentation at Hillsdale College, one of the most conservative institutions of higher education in the nation, he makes clear that America has fallen from its position as a great and holy nation to a slimepit of moral corruption.
He has two great Satans in his story: public schools and the Disney Corporation. The Disney Corporation, in his simple mind, is a haven for perverts and pedophiles, bent on corrupting the youth of the nation.
Rufo asserts, based on no discernible evidence, that the decline and fall of America can be traced to the failed revolution of 1968. The radicals lost, as Nixon was elected that year, but burrowed into the pedagogical and cultural institutions, quietly insinuating their sinister ideas about race and sex into the mainstream, as the nation slept. Rufo’s writings about “critical race theory,” which he claims is embedded in schools, diversity training in corporations, and everywhere else he looked, made him a star on Tucker Carlson’s show, an advisor to the Trump White House, and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote a profile of Rufo in The New Yorker and identified him as the man who invented the conflict over critical race theory, which before Rufo was a topic for discussion in law schools.
Before Rufo’s demonization of CRT, it was known among legal scholars as a debate about whether racism was fading away or whether it was systemic because it was structured into law and public policy. I had the personal pleasure of discussing these ideas in the mid-1980s with Derrick Bell, who is generally recognized as the founder of CRT. Bell was then at the Harvard Law School, after working as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He reached the conclusion that the Brown Decision of 1954 was inadequate to root out systematic racism.
At the time, I was a centrist in my politics and believed that racism was on its way out. Derrick disagreed. We spoke for hours, he invited me to present a paper at a conference he was organizing, which I did. Contrary to Rufo, I can attest that Derrick Bell was not a Marxist. He was not a radical. He wanted an America where people of different races and backgrounds had decent lives, unmarred by racial barriers. He was thoughtful, gentle, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. He wanted America to be the land it professed to be. He was a great American.
Was 1968 the turning point, after which the radicals took over our culture and destroyed our founding ideals, as Rufo claims? No, it was not. I was there. He was born in 1984. He’s blowing smoke, making up a fairy-tale that he has spun into a narrative.
In 1968, I turned 30. I had very young children. I was not sympathetic to the hippies or the Weather Underground or the SDS. I hated the Vietnam War, but I was not part of any organized anti-war group. I believed in America and its institutions, and I was firmly opposed to those who wanted to tear them down, as the Left did then and as the Right does now. I worked in the Humphrey campaign in 1968 and organized an event in Manhattan—featuring John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and a long lineup of “liberals for Humphrey”— that was disrupted and ruined by pro-Vietnam Cong activists. That event, on the eve of the 1968 election, convinced me that Nixon would win. (While my event was disrupted, Nixon held a campaign rally a block away, at Madison Square Garden, that was not disrupted.)
1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. It was a horrible, depressing year. America seemed to be falling apart.
Did the Weathermen and other radicals begin a long march through the institutions and eventually capture them? That’s ridiculous. Some became professors, but none became college presidents, to my knowledge. Many were ostracized. Some went to prison for violent crimes. Those who played an active political role in 1968 are in their 80s now, if they are alive.
Rufo’s solution to what he sees as the capture of our institutions by racists and pedophiles is surpringly simple: school choice. He hopes everyone will get public money to send their children to private and religious schools, to charter schools, or to home school them. If only we can destroy public schools, he suggests, we can restore America to the values of 1776.
Good old 1776, when most black people were slaves, women had no rights, and the aristocracy made all the decisions. They even enjoyed conjugal rights to use their young female slaves. Those were the good old days, in the very simple mind of Christopher Rufo.
Turning the clock back almost 250 years! Now that’s a radical idea.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, is an expert on the “Destroy Public Education” movement. In this post, he explores the oligarch money behind The City Fund and the cities it has targeted for privatization of their public schools.
He writes:
Born in 2018, The City Fund (TCF) is a concentration of oligarch wealth crushing democracy and privatizing the commons. John Arnold (infamous ENRON energy trader) and Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO and former California Charter Schools Association board member) claimed to be investing $100 million each to establish TCF. Their July 2018 announcement was delivered on Neerav Kingsland’s blog “Relinquishment” which recently started requiring approval to access.
The TCF goal is to implement the portfolio school management model into 40 cities by 2028. At present TCF says it is “serving” 14 cities: Oakland, Ca; Stockton, Ca; Denver, Co; Camden, NJ; Washington, DC: Memphis, Tenn; Nashville, Tenn; New Orleans, La; Indianapolis, Ind.; Atlanta, Ga; Fort Worth, Tx; San Antonio, Tx; Baton Rouge, La; and Newark, NJ.
The operating structure of the fund is modeled after a law firm. Six of the fourteen founding members are lawyers. They constitute the core of the team being paid to execute the oligarch financed attack on public education….
TCF has spent heavily to develop a local ground game in the communities of targeted cities. On their web site, they provide a list of major grants made by 12/31/2019; defining major grants as being more than $200,000. Many of these grants are to other privatization focused organizations like TFA and Chiefs for Change, but most of them are for developing local organizations like the $5,500,000 to Opportunity Trust in Saint Louis another TFA related business. The TFA developed asset, founder and CEO Eric Scroggins, worked in various leadership positions at TFA for 14 years. Table-1 below lists this nationwide spending.
In many ways, The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, Indiana was the model for this kind of development. A 2016 articlefrom the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) which is quite school privatization friendly covers its development from the 2006 founding by Democratic Mayor Bart Peterson and his right hand man David Harris until 2016. PPI noted,
“The Mind Trust convinced Teach For America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (now TNTP), and Stand for Children to come to Indianapolis, in part by raising money for them. Since then TFA has brought in more than 500 teachers and 39 school leaders (the latter through its Indianapolis Principal Fellowship); TNTP’s Indianapolis Teaching Fellows Program has trained 498 teachers; and Stand for Children has worked to engage the community, to educate parents about school reform, and to spearhead fundraising for school board candidates.”
The Mind Trust became a successful example of implementing all of the important strategies for privatizing public schools. As a result, the Indianapolis Public School system is the second most privatized system in America with over 60% of its students attending schools no longer controlled by the elected school board.
Stand for Children which the PPI referenced is almost entirely about funneling dark money into local school board races. These nationwide efforts are now being bolstered by the political action organization staffers at TCF created, Public School Allies. Public School Allies was founded as a 501 C4 organization meaning it can contribute to politicians; however contributions to it are not tax exempt.
Billionaire funded organizations like Public School Allies can overwhelm local elections. For example, in 2019 they provided $80,000 to the independent expenditure committeeCampaign for Great Camden Schools. In the first school board election since the 2013 state takeover of Camden’s public schools, the three oligarch supported candidates won with vote totals of 1208, 1283 and 1455 votes.
Gary Borden was the Executive Directorof the California Charter School Association 501 C4 organization before he became a Partner at TCF. Now he is the director of Public School Allies.
A TCF Partner sits on the board of many of the local political organizations they fund. Kevin Huffman is on the board of The Memphis Education Fundand Atlanta’s RedefinED. Partner Ken Bubp is on the board of New Schools for Baton Rouge. Gary Borden is on the board of The Mind Trust. He replaced David Harris who appears to have resigned from TCF. Harris was also on the board of San Antonio’s City Education Partners. Unfortunately, their new web page no longer lists the board members.
Ultican goes on to describe the philosophy of The City Fund and its spin-offs: “…democracy is bad and privatization is good.”
Modern “school choice” ideology promoted by many white billionaires is little different from the strategies of southern segregationist in the 1950s and 60s. It still increases segregation and creates an “inherently unequal”and racist education system…
Ultican concludes:
The giant quantities of money concentrated in such few hands are destroying democracy. How is a citizen of an impoverished neighborhood who is opposed to having her public schools privatized going to politically compete with oligarchs from San Francisco or Seattle or Bentonville? Organizations like Public School Allies regularly come in and monetarily swamp any political opposition. That is not democracy.
I am convinced that John Arnold who is opposed to people receiving pensions sincerely believes charter schools are better than public schools. Likewise his partner, Reed Hastings, truly believes that elected school boards are bad. And Alice Walton really does think that vouchers are a good idea. However, I believe they are wrong and that the idea of offloading some of their tax burden is much more important to their beliefs than they will admit.
Witnessing the oligarch fueled attacks on the commons; I am convinced that billionaires need to be taxed out of existence if we are to have a healthy democracy of the people, by the people and for the people.
It may seem easy to criticize billionaires because of the First Amendment. It’s not. Several years ago, I wrote a post about John Arnold, mentioning the fact that he had been a high-flying energy trader at Enron. A few days later, I got notice from an Arnold spokesperson that he would sue me if I didn’t delete the post. Not wanting to fight a billionaire in court, I backed down. Good luck to Tom Ultican.
Billionaire Reed Hastings claims to be a Democrat, but he loves charter schools and despises public schools. In his efforts to promote privatization, he has funded some extremist Republicans. In Missouri, he funded the Republicans intent on eliminating abortion services for women, while giving a pittance to Democrats in the Missouri legislature..
In Indiana, Reed Hastings is the sugar daddy of a very rightwing Republican Party that wants to expand charters and vouchers. Hastings is a man without principle. He doesn’t care about evidence. He doesn’t care about charter financial scandals. He wants to win, and he will fund anti-abortion zealots in Missouri and rightwing extremists in Indiana, so long as it undermines public schools.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has given another $700,000 to a pro-charter-school Indiana PAC, which has funneled a big chunk of the money to supporting Republican legislative candidates.
The PAC – called, without apparent irony, Hoosiers for Great Public Schools – reported only one contribution in its 2022 pre-primary campaign finance report, covering Jan. 1 to April 8: the one from Hastings, a California resident with a net worth estimated between $4 billion and $6 billion.
Hoosiers for Great Public Schools then gave $100,000 to another PAC, Hoosiers for Quality Education, which favors school choice in all its forms, including private school vouchers. Hoosiers for Quality Education has made over $600,000 in contributions this year, all to Republicans. Most has gone to GOP House candidates who are favored by caucus leaders and are in contested primaries.
Hoosiers for Quality Education, with ties to Betsy DeVos, the U.S. secretary of education in the Trump administration, didn’t just get money from Hoosiers for Great Public Schools. It got $425,000 this year from Walmart heir Jim Walton, along with several smaller donations.
Hastings also gave Hoosiers for Great Public Schools $700,000 in 2020. It also got $200,000 that year from John Arnold, a Texas billionaire. The group has never received a penny from an actual Hoosier.
But it does have a Hoosier connection. Bart Peterson, who heads the operation, was mayor of Indianapolis from 2000 to 2008. He was a Democrat then. I don’t know what he considers himself now, but he has become a primary source of out-of-state cash for Indiana Republicans.
Peterson told me in 2020 that he was “an unabashed supporter of charter schools” and was making the contributions to improve funding for the schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. (His day job is president and CEO of Christel House International, which operates charter schools in Indianapolis and schools for underprivileged children around the world).
Whatever the motivation, the campaign contributions helped bolster the Republican supermajority in the Indiana General Assembly. In the 2022 legislative session, that supermajority: 1) repealed the law requiring Hoosiers to have a permit to carry a handgun; 2) made it much more difficult for poor people to be released from jail on bail; and 3) stoked phony outrage over schools teaching “critical race theory.”
Reed Hastings and Betsy DeVos. Hastings, funder of the anti-abortion crusade. Hastings, funder of the phony war against honest teaching about racism (aka “critical race theory.”)
Bob Shepherd is a regular reader and commenter who has been an assessment developer, a textbook writer and editor, and a teacher, among other things.
In the following post, he reviews the Hillsdale College “1776 Curriculum,” which took its name from Donald Trump’s short-lived “1776 Commission.”
He writes:
According to the Nashville Tennessean, Governor Bill Lee, a proponent of charter schools, is planning a partnership with fundamentalist Christian Hillsdale College to open 50 new charter schools in the state. These would use the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum. Hillsdale bills itself as promoting Classical education.
I’ve just been reading through this stuff from Hillsdale, which is supposed to be a combination American History and Civics curriculum. It’s basically a guide to fundamentalist, nationalist indoctrination.
The first thing to notice about this curriculum, in comparison to existing K-12 American History and Civics programs, is that it is quite short. You can read through it in an afternoon. If your goal is to use history to indoctrinate students in a Christian fundamentalist nationalist mythology, it’s best to keep the discussion at the 50,000-foot level and deal mostly in abstract jingoism, with a few exempla thrown in. This is the sermon as textbook. If you get too much into the details, you are going to run into all kinds of messy events that don’t exemplify the mythology you are promulgating–the Mystic Massacre; the disenfranchisement at the dawn of the country of all but propertied white males; the Fort Pillow Massacre; slave auctions where trade in girls and young women was saved to the end of the day because such human property was particularly prized (guess why?) by good Christian white, male slaveowners; the Wounded Knee Massacre; a century of lynchings and Jim Crow and voter suppression and white citizens councils and the KKK and U.S. federal housing policy designed to keep black people from home ownership, the primary means by which ordinary people build generational wealth; the Eugenics and Nazi Bund movements in America; Trump furious that he couldn’t order to military to fight BLM protestors and the Border Patrol to shoot innocent asylum seekers; and so on ad nauseam.
One of the reasons why Fascism appeals to semiliterate mobs is that it makes everything simple. All complexity is burned away. And that’s just what the Hillsdale American Exceptionalism Curriculum does. (The successor to the 1930s pro-Nazi German American Bund called itself The America First Party, using the America First phrase that Dog-whistle Donald picked up for repetition at his rallies. Where was Leni Riefenstahl to film these?) This need to keep things simpler than they are is why, soon after seizing power, all Fascist governments establish complete control over publishing, the media, and schools and find pretexts for exterminating intellectuals and burning books and artwork.
The President of Hillsdale College, Larry Aarn, introduces his curriculum by saying that the purpose of education is to produce citizens, from the Latin civitas, or city, who can use language to distinguish the good from the bad, and that in history instruction, the way to do that is to concentrate on the lives of great persons. So, at the outset, everything is cleaved into “the good” on the one hand and “the bad” on the other (in other words, this is going to be a curriculum that deals in absolutes), and an avowed program of hero worship is advanced.
When you get into the heart of this comic book curriculum, you find that what its authors have done is choose a few “great” men and carefully excerpt from their writings short selections that support tenets of fundamentalist nationalism (manifest destiny, Christian religious belief, opposition to immigration, states’ rights, supply side trickle-down Laissez-faire economics, opposition to a big, bad federal government, etc.), and these become the subjects of lessons, the takeaways from which are rightwing doctrines and dogmas. So, the history of immigration becomes a few paragraphs from Alexander Hamilton saying that he is against it and accusing Jefferson, via quotations from Jefferson’s own writings, of having flip-flopped on the issue. (NB: Right-wingers only hate big government when it’s not their big government; if it’s Trump trying to bar people who practice a particular religion from the U.S., they are fine with that.)
So, this is all about replacing History and Civics education with comic book/Cub Scout-style mythologized, simplified indoctrination. (The Scouts were created by Robert Baden-Powell for the overtly stated purpose of producing young men willing to fight and die in British imperialist wars. It caught on in a big way in the United States.) Btw, for most of its history, Romans used the noun urbs to refer to the city and civis to refer to a citizen of an urbs. It was only late in Roman history, when Rome was falling apart, that a derivative of the word for citizen started being used to refer to a city itself. But if you are a proponent of education as propaganda, like Aarn, then you want to keep things simple: America good. Foreigners bad. Rome good. Barbarians bad. Classics education = learning to emulate being a true citizen of the Empire.
Doubtless, the Fascist government that the Republicans will put in place should they win both houses in the midterms and the presidency in 2024, will appropriate, in the manner presciently described by Orwell, traditional American concepts and iconography, distorted in a funhouse mirror and presented as a New, Stronger, Tougher, Truer American Exceptionalism.
Remember George Bush, Jr., aka Shrub, who ran on what he called a “kinder, gentler Conservativism” and then gave us 200,000+ Iraqi civilians dead in his illegal war, perpetrated on a false pretext and in violation of the UN Charter? In a similar manner, the Nazis appropriated ancient pictographs, used by cultures worldwide to represent the sun and lightning, and made of these abominations, and the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm proclaimed that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others [are].”
When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” goes the observation falsely attributed to Sinclair Lewis but very much in keeping with Lewis’s themes. Yup. Got that right.
He added an example:
Let me give one example of the general 1776 curriculum approach: The treatment of the disagreement about slavery between Abraham Lincoln and Stephan Douglas is presented as one against absolute moral principles attributed to Lincoln) versus the “moral relativism” attributed to Douglas. This is completely anachronistic. Lincoln, of course, famously disliked slavery but asserted that the important thing was preserving the Union, with or without slavery. Sounds pretty relativistic, doesn’t it? The takeaway from the Hillsdale treatment of this topic is that those who do not support absolute principles (e.g., like those of Christian fundamentalists) are “moral relativists,” bad people who are akin to Stephen Douglas, with his support of slavery.
This is using American history classes to teach that there is an absolute moral order in the universe, established by God, that should be enforced by the state. Note that this is in keeping with the earlier teaching, in this curriculum, that the founding principles were about natural law deriving from God. But, of course, the philosophical Deism of many of the founders was a far cry from absolutist Christian fundamentalism and is, in itself, highly debatable.
And again and again, this is how the Hillsdale Curriculum works. It takes events in American history as occasions for advancing right-wing principles–economic libertarianism, nationalism, fundamentalist religious belief, states’ rights, restrictions on immigration, etc.
The American Federation of Teachers released the following statement about the U.S. Department of Education’s proposals to reform the federal Charter Schools Program, which grants $440 million annually to open or expand charter schools. Authorized in 1994, when there were a small number of charter schools, the CSP has never been reformed in its nearly three decade history. The industry captured the program and glossed over widespread waste, fraud, and abuse in federally-funded charter schools.
The AFT wrote:
For Immediate Release Wednesday, April 20
Contact: Andrew Crook 607/280-6603 acrook@aft.org AFT Responds to Department of Education on Charter School Regulations
WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sent the following letter to the U.S. Department of Education responding to proposed regulations on Charter Schools Program grants.
The text of the letter follows, and it can be read online with additional footnoting and formatting here.
~April 11, 2022
Ms. Porscheoy Brice
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202-5970
Dear Ms. Brice,
The American Federation of Teachers welcomes the opportunity to comment on the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations to the Charter Schools Program grant programs. These proposed regulations represent a positive development for America’s children, and if fully implemented, these improvements to the Charter Schools Program grant applications will not only advance equity, but also move to restore charter schools to their original purpose by integrating them into the broader education community.
We applaud the department’s proposed regulations, which seek to improve community integration of charter schools. We also applaud the department for taking steps to prevent for-profit charter schools—which studies have shown underperform, compared with both public schools and their nonprofit counterparts—from receiving charter school grants. These steps will undoubtedly improve educational outcomes for children in both charter and traditional public schools. As a union of 1.7 million educators, healthcare workers and public service workers, including educators at more than 250 charter schools, we appreciate that the department is seeking to increase collaboration between charters schools and traditional public schools
The AFT strongly supports the department’s collaboration priority:
We appreciate that the department is recognizing the need for collaboration between charter schools and district schools. Charter schools were originally intended to be vehicles for experimentation and collaboration, not walled gardens within our education system, and these proposed regulations reflect that the charter industry has strayed from that original intent. As a union of education professionals, we have concerns over the pervasiveness of noncompete and nondisclosure agreement practices in charter schools and the chilling effect that such agreements are already having on charter-district collaboration.
We recommend that the Charter Schools Program grant applications be modified to have applicants certify that they will void all such noncompete/nondisclosure provisions, if they exist, during the life of the grant.
Noncompete clauses, which prevent charter teachers from taking jobs in traditional public schools for a set period of time (or within a geographic region proximate to the charter school), are obvious barriers to the department’s proposed priority of fostering district-charter collaboration. For example, according to Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian’s recently released book The Privatization of Everything, Summit Academy Schools of Ohio sued 50 teachers in three years for violating noncompete clauses.
There have been repeated suggestions that, beyond chilling collaboration, nondisclosure agreements prevented charter school teachers from blowing the whistle on fraud and malfeasance occurring at their schools.
We would ask that, in support of this priority, the CSP grant application be modified to include a certification by applicants that they either 1) do not utilize nondisclosure agreements and/or noncompete agreements at their schools, or 2) will void all such agreements for the life of the grant.
Collaboration between district schools and charter schools would be enhanced by putting district schools and charters on the same footing with respect to enrollment requirements:
Practices at certain charter schools have the effect of filtering out some subpopulations of students, leading to the concentration of higher-needs students in district schools. This behavior includes the counseling out of special education students; the use of entrance barriers that disincentivize enrollments of English language learners, low-income students and students with disabilities; and a reluctance to backfill when students leave the charter school. Charter schools that create enrollment barriers for ELLs, students with disabilities and low-income students are often already doing so in violation of federal law, but other disparate policies are not currently unlawful. The interests of district-charter collaboration would be furthered by asking applicants to disclose whether they engage in discriminatory enrollment practices.
Practices that exclude certain students from charter schools create divisions between district and charter teachers and administrators. In our experience, the prevalence of these practices varies significantly across the country and is unfortunately common in some states. The ACLU examined charter school enrollment barriers statewide in both Arizona and California, finding that more than 20 percent of California charter schools and 50 percent of surveyed Arizona charter schools utilized exclusionary enrollment practices.
These practices included denying applicants on the basis of prior academic performance, requiring application fees, capping special education enrollments, discouraging immigrant applicants and requiring parent volunteer hours.
While many exclusionary charter application practices amount to violations of the letter or spirit of the law (or both), charter schools are permitted under federal law to decline to backfill student vacancies created as a result of a student withdrawal or expulsion. When charter schools refuse to backfill vacancies, it both compounds existing student population disparities between district and charter schools and creates new ones. Student mobility is associated with lower student performance, so limiting midyear entrants gives charter schools an advantage that comes at the expense of the district schools that are required to accept all enrollments.
To preserve the department’s proposed priority of fostering district-charter collaboration, we suggest amending the proposed regulations to request that charter school applicants disclose information about their application, selection, turnover and backfilling practices. Specifically, applicants should certify that application materials are available in all languages spoken in the community; that they do not cap the number of students with a disability (or the type of students with a disability they accept); and that they do not charge a fee for applicants. If applicants currently operate charter schools, they should disclose annual student turnover figures for the past five years. The regulations should also be modified so that charter school applicants disclose whether they use admissions tests, consider past academic or behavioral issues during admissions, and backfill vacancies either midyear or between school years, and they should require applicants to disclose how they have recruited students from diverse populations across their catchment areas.
Unions can help facilitate a collaborative school atmosphere, and regulations should be modified to reward applicants who pledge to support their workers’ right to organize:
Collaboration between district school and charter school teachers would be easier if both groups were on the same professional footing. Unfortunately charter school teachers are often underpaid, and turnover in the industry is alarmingly high. Some charter schools operate with teaching staffs that are largely uncredentialed. Many operators in the charter school industry seem to have abandoned any attempt at employee retention, choosing instead to focus on building recruitment “pipelines” to solve the rapid turnover of their teaching force. The department’s laudable goal of fostering collaboration between district and charter schools will be difficult in high-turnover conditions and where significant disparities exist between district school and charter school staff.
We have seen, however, how beneficial it can be when charter and district teachers belong to the same union. In Chicago, several charter schools in the city are organized with the Chicago Teachers Union, with charter and district teachers belonging to the same union. The Chicago Teachers Union QUEST Center brings together both charter and district teachers for professional development courses. Unions can be the space where collaboration across district schools and charter schools can occur—but when charter teachers want to organize a union, their school management often stands in the way. In furtherance of the department’s stated goal of district-charter collaboration, as envisioned within these proposed regulations, we submit that the proposed regulations should be modified to reward schools that pledge not to interfere with teachers who wish to exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively.
The AFT respectfully requests that language be inserted into the grant application to allow applicants to make a good-faith certification that they will remain neutral in any union organizing effort for the term of the grant award.
We applaud the department on the introduction of a community impact analysis and recommend a few minor improvements:
The AFT supports provisions that would have applicants analyze the impact of charter expansion on the schools that the applicant is, or would be, drawing students from. The focus on preventing charter school expansion from undermining district desegregation efforts is a welcome metric, and we are pleased to see it included in the impact analysis. We would suggest that the regulations be expanded to include an analysis on the fiscal impact of proposed charter growth.
Charter school growth is universally understood to negatively affect the financial condition of the sending districts. Credit ratings agencies and academia have reached a consensus on this point. The ratings agency Moody’s has opined that charter school growth can drag down the finances of their host districts, writing that “charter schools can pull students and revenues away from districts faster than the districts can reduce their costs.” Districts, being unable to reduce costs as quickly as they lose funding for charter schools, are left with diminished resources for students in their public schools. That finding has been bolstered by academic research, which has endeavored to estimate the net fiscal impact of charter school growth on district finances.
While charter school proponents have suggested that charter competition will improve district resources, academic and credit rating agency opinion has coalesced around the opposite conclusion.
Moody’s has said that “A city that begins to lose students to a charter school can be forced to weaken educational programs because funding is tighter, which then begins to encourage more students to leave which then results in additional losses.’’ University of Michigan researcher David Arsen has conducted research in Michigan that supports this conclusion, noting that “contrary to expectations, Michigan school districts respond to charter competition by devoting a smaller share of their spending to instructional services.”6 Faced with decreased revenues, which “decline more rapidly than costs in districts losing students to charter schools,” school districts are simply unable to free up the resources needed to improve education for the students remaining in traditional public schools.
For far too long, the Charter Schools Programs grant programs have ignored the economic reality of charter school growth and its impact on the resources available to traditional public school students. When charter schools expand, traditional public school students are left with fewer resources. We urge the department to amend its community impact analysis guidelines to ask applicants whether a credit rating agency has identified charter school growth as a credit negative for the sending district(s) from which the proposed (or current) school intends to draw its students.
We appreciate the proposed regulations’ increased attention to the problems of the for-profit charter school industry: The proposed regulations’ focus on tightening disclosure regulations around education management organization contracts is well-warranted and consistent with ensuring that CSP funds are allocated to high-performing charter schools. The for-profit charter school industry is disgraceful, and charter operators should not be able to evade the eligibility requirements of the Charter Schools Program by utilizing complex organizational structures and service contracts.
Research shows that for-profit virtual charter schools—which comprise a significant portion of all for-profit schools—are poorly serving America’s students. Additionally, a recent National Education Policy Center study found that for-profit virtual charter schools underperform compared with their nonprofit and publicly run counterparts, suggesting that profit-seeking itself undermines educational success.
We appreciate the department’s proposed regulations:
We thank the Department of Education for these proposed regulations, which will significantly improve outcomes for students in both charter and traditional public schools. While this comment contains some minor suggestions we feel would make these proposed regulations more robust, the substance and spirit of the proposed regulations are a welcome indication that the department is serious about unifying a fractured education system and improving educational outcomes for all children, regardless of the type of public school they attend.
Sincerely,
Randi Weingarten
President, American Federation of Teachers
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The American Federation of Teachers is a union of 1.7 million professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do.
Randi Weingarten Fedrick C. Ingram Evelyn DeJesus PRESIDENT SECRETARY-TREASURER EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT
American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO Communications Department • 555 New Jersey Ave. N.W. • Washington, DC 20001 • T: 202-879-4458 • F: 202-879-4580 • www.aft.org
This third issue, state responsibility, starts with the acknowledgement that the pursuit of market-based approaches in the United States has exacerbated inequity and segregation in many contexts. A different course for public education provision could include investing in full-service community schools. According to J4J Alliance, these schools would have engaging, culturally relevant and challenging curriculum, educator roles in professional development and assessment design and use, and wrap around supports such as health and other care for students needing those services. Overall, the U.S. case provides an important and instructive example that other countries should examine before scaling up similar education approaches.
This brings us to a final international point about policy, politics, and influence. While the GEM Report does call attention to the myriad actors and political acrimony that divides opinion on the role of markets and governments in education, the report does not go far enough in naming the power asymmetries in terms of finance and access of different constituencies (e.g., technology companies and venture capital funds having orders of magnitude more resources and policy influence than civil society). To that end, I would add a third question to the report – Who chooses? Who loses? And who benefits? – to interrogate how non-state actors derive profit from the education sector and to help us remember that students should remain the recipients of our education expenditures and resources.
Kris Nordstrom of the NC Policy Watch notes the loud whining by charter advocates who are outraged by the common sense reforms proposed b6 the Biden administration’s Department of Education. They are whining, writes Nordstrom, because they are guilty of every malpractice that the reforms aim to cure.
Nordstrom begins:
Advocates for charter schools have long justified the existence of charters by claiming they serve as laboratories of innovation for traditional schools. They have claimed that operational flexibility and exemption from regulation allows them to operate more efficiently than traditional public schools. And they have claimed that they are not only willing – but better suited – to serve students from families with low incomes.
These premises have been disproven over the course of North Carolina’s nearly 30-year-long experiment with charter schools. There are no examples of charter school innovations that have offered new approaches for traditional schools (after all, traditional schools can’t follow the example of “successful” charters that garner high test scores by pushing out struggling students). Nor have charters delivered efficiency gains. Charters spend substantially more on administration than their traditional school counterparts. Most North Carolina charters outspend their neighboring traditional schools while serving a more advantaged student population and delivering weaker academic outcomes. Meanwhile, North Carolina charters continue to exacerbate racial segregation and raise costs for traditional inclusive public schools.
Charter advocates have long disputed the overwhelming evidence of their ineffectiveness. But now, they are making the case themselves.
At issue are recent changes to the terms of the federal Charter School Program (CSP) grant programs. The CSP provides money to states to run grant programs, “to open and prepare for the operation of new charter schools and to replicate and expand high-quality charter schools.” North Carolina was awarded these federal grant funds specifically to support charters, “focused on meeting the needs of educationally disadvantaged students.”
Unfortunately, the program run by North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction has failed to meet these goals. Much of the federal funding has been awarded to schools with a history of serving as white flight charter schools and that enroll substantially fewer students from families with low incomes than nearby inclusive public schools. Incredibly, Torchlight Academy was awarded a $500,000 grant in 2020. Just two years later, this school has had its charter revoked for rampant corruption and poor student results…
Are high-quality charters unwilling to operate if they can no longer divert as much money as possible into the pockets of corporations? Are charters unwilling to serve as laboratories for innovation that work with traditional public schools to expand promising practices? Are charters unable to craft community impact statements because they are unable to demonstrate community benefits? Are they unwilling to commit to greater school integration efforts because they’d rather effectively pick and choose who their students are?
By opposing the CSP rule changes, charter supporters are implicitly answering the above questions in the affirmative. Their protests affirm the arguments made by charter critics that such schools are overly focused on profit-hoarding, unable to serve as collaborative partners in developing and scaling instructional innovation, exacerbate budget challenges, and contribute to segregation.
The proposed CSP rule changes do not in any way undermine charter schools. They simply ask charters seeking supplemental federal funds to try to live up to the promises made by charter advocates. The protests of charter advocates indicate that – as many of us have been arguing for years – charter schools are largely unable to live up to these promises.
And if charters are – as they now admit – unable to meet these promises, then policymakers should question not just whether they deserve supplemental federal funding through the CSP…but whether such schools are deserving of public funding at all.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges against a Hmong woman who had made extravagant promises to investors, then defrauded them.
On April 13, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against Wisconsin resident, Kay Yang, for “conduct[ing] a fraudulent investment scheme targeting members of the Hmong-American communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota.”
Schneider goes into the details, and she points out that the same financial advisor counseled a Hmong charter school to invest the school’s endowment in a risky fund. Unfortunately, they took her advice, although the school leaders violated Minnesota law by making a risky investment with the school’s funds.
There is another twist in Yang’s story, one that the April 13, 2022, Twin Cities Pioneer Press captures as it alludes to Yang as “having ties to a St. Paul (MN) charter school board”:
Kay Yang has been described in a separate legal matter as a “close personal friend” of Christianna Hang, founder and former superintendent of Hmong College Prep Academy, one of Minnesota’s largest charter schools.
Hang was looking to invest some of the school’s money in May 2019 when Yang referred her to Woodstock Capital LLC, a hedge fund based in London.
That fall, Hang wired Woodstock $5 million in school funds, in violation of state statutes that limit what schools may invest in. Eighteen months later, just $700,000 remained.
Woodstock called the loss a matter of bad timing, saying the coronavirus pandemic made it “possibly the worst time in recent world history for investments such as those made by hedge funds in general.”
Hang and her husband, chief operating officer Pao Yang, resigned from the school at the end of last year with a combined $350,000 in separation payments.
No criminal or civil enforcement charges have been filed in the charter school matter.
The school gambled away its $5 million
Wow.
Through her foolishness, Hang lost $4.3Mof the $5M of HCPA’s money.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote about the letter that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut sent to Secretary of Education Cardona. Congresswoman DeLauro is chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee:
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, issued a blistering reproach of how “the national trade organization representing for-profit EMO’s is running a well-funded misinformation campaign” to stop the proposed regulations of the U.S. Department of Education to provide more accountability and transparency in the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP).
Although Chairwoman DeLauro does not mention the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) by name, that organization has been leading the campaign telling President Biden and Secretary Cardona to #backoff. “In 2019, the NACPS Hall of Fame winner was Fernando Zulueta, the founder and owner of the largest for-profit chain in the United States, Academica. Zulueta served on their board for years,” according to Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education. NPE issued a report last year on the for-profit charter industry, entitled “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain.”
Burris continues, “The campaign of misinformation waged by NACPS at defeating sensible reforms in CSP regulations has been relentless. Wild and untruthful claims made include that the Department does not believe rural charter schools and culturally affirming charter schools should exist, that public school districts would need to approve new charter schools, and that the regulations would override state law. Each of these outrageous false claims are intended to do one thing–frighten parents who send their children to charter schools to oppose the regulations in order to ensure that for-profit run charters and white flight charters can still get CSP funding.”
According to the Chair’s press release, which you can find here, this is not the first time that the same organization has used misinformation in order to protect the for-profit charter industry. The “trade organization” , presumably the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, led a similar campaign of misinformation last summer, according to Chair DeLauro.
“In July 2021, House Democrats passed the fiscal year 2022 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill which included a landmark provision prohibiting federal funding to charter schools run by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs),” wrote Chair DeLauro. “Predictably, the for-profit charter EMOs were not pleased with this legislative development. In response, their national trade organization led a well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming that the provision would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service.”
Chair DeLauro goes on in the release to praise the Education Department’s CSP reforms. “I applaud the Department for its efforts to introduce greater accountability and transparency in the CSP program. Further, I urge the Department to disregard bad faith arguments from self-interested organizations that misrepresent these important proposals.”
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools received a CSP grant of nearly 2.4 million dollars in 2018, as did other charter school trade and lobby organizations who are joining the #BackOff campaign.
Diane Ravitch's blog 