CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Colorado Skies Academy, a Centennial-based charter school with a focus on aviation and aerospace education, abruptly announced its closure on Friday, just 16 days before the start of the school year.
The announcement, which came in an email on Friday at 8:17 p.m., leaves parents scrambling to find alternative schools for their children.
The school cited financial challenges as the reason for the immediate closure. A spokeswoman for the Colorado Charter School Institute, which serves as the school’s authorizer, said there were “unanticipated financial developments” over the summer which, caused the school’s viability to “rapidly deteriorate.”
CSI acknowledged the sudden closure was not ideal, but said it supported the board’s decision to close now, rather risk closing mid-school year which would have been more challenging.
Still, the timing of the announcement has particularly frustrated parents, who received the closure notice hours after the school posted on Facebook about an upcoming back-to-school night event.
“They posted in the morning, come join us for back-to-school night. Then they send an email in the evening saying sorry, there’s gonna be no school at all,” parent Erin Hess said. Her son Connor was set to attend sixth grade at the 6-8 school.
Written by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, the report will be released in three sections. The first one, Decline, documents the startling halt in charter school growth. Once heralded as the salvation of American education, charter schools are no longer growing. Despite the lack of demand for new charters, the Trump administration recently increased the annual appropriation to the federal Charter Schools Program from $440 million every year to $500 million a year.
The report will be released in three parts: Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs. This is the first part.
Burris begins:
In 1992, City Academy — the nation’s first charter school — opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. Created and led by experienced teachers, it was designed as an alternative school for students struggling in traditional settings. With just 53 students, City Academy embodied the original vision for charter schools: small, teacher-run schools within public districts that tested innovative strategies to reach hard-to-teach kids.
When successful, those strategies would inform and strengthen public education as a whole.
That was the idea supported by American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker in 1988.
But by the early 1990s, Shanker had become disillusioned. As his wife Edith later explained, “Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent.
He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”
His warning proved prophetic. In the decades since, real estate investors, for-profit management companies, and corporate charter chains have taken over what began as teacher-led experiments. Today, more than fifty charter trade associations—some state-based, others national—lobby aggressively to block charter school oversight and resist any legislative reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported over $26.5 million in income in 2023, with more than $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association reported nearly $13 million in revenue that same year. These organizations are not only advocates but powerful lobbyists, intent on protecting all existing charters and promoting unlimited growth.
During the Obama years, federal initiatives like Race to the Top fueled charter expansion with strong bipartisan support. But that coalition has since un-raveled. While Republican enthusiasm for any alternative to public education— charters, vouchers, homeschools — has surged, Democratic support has eroded, particularly as concerns grow over transparency, equity, and privatization.
Today, the charter sector stands at a reckoning point. Growth has slowed.
For-profit models are expanding. The push to create religious charter schools has fractured the movement from within. Meanwhile, charters are now competing not just with public schools and each other, but with a growing network of voucher-funded private schools and publicly subsidized homeschools.
This report, released in three parts — Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs —examines the trajectory of the charter school movement. It contrasts the promise of its early days with its complex, often troubling reality today.
As the charter experiment enters its fourth decade, the question is no longer what charter schools were meant to be — but whether they can still be reformed in order to serve the public good….
Burris questions why the federal government–which claims to be cutting costs and cutting unnecessary programs–continues to send $500 million every year to a sector that is not growing and does not need the money. DOGE eliminated most employees of the U.S. Department of Wducation but left the federal Charter Schools Program untouched.
The charter school sector stands at a critical juncture. Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity, it is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures — often sudden and disruptive— are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.
As the data show, under-enrollment is the primary driver of failure. There is no crisis of unmet demand. Hundreds of charter schools, according to NCES data, can’t fill even a single classroom. The frequently cited “million-student waitlist” has been thoroughly debunked, yet continues to be invoked to justify ever-increasing taxpayer support.
Meanwhile, mega-charters and online schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy siphon vast sums of public dollars while delivering dismal academic outcomes. Others, like Highlands Community Charter School, have defrauded taxpayers and exploited students under the guise of second chances.
With enrollment stagnating and oversight failing, taxpayers should ask: Why are we continuing to fund with federal dollars an expansion that isn’t happening? It is time for Congress and the Department of Education to reassess the Charter Schools Program. Federal dollars should no longer subsidize a shrinking and troubled sector. Instead, they must be redirected toward accountable, transparent, and student-centered public education.
Part II of this report, Disillusionment, to be published this fall, will further explain the reasons behind the sector’s decline.
When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gifted the IDEA charter chain with $225 million to expand, mostly in Texas. She expected that they would flourish, especially in El Paso, where they intended to open 20 charter schools.
IDEA’s first charter school in El Paso recently held its graduation ceremonies. Only half the students who were enrolled in eighth grade remained to graduate. The others had returned to the public schools.
As the first graduating class of IDEA Public Schools in El Paso donned caps and gowns mid-May, it was less than half the size that were in the school system in eighth grade four years earlier.
In 2021, IDEA’s first two El Paso campuses, Edgemere and Rio Vista, had a combined 256 eighth-graders, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Four years later, 124 seniors were enrolled in IDEA’s class of 2025 at graduation time, all set to continue their education in college.
IDEA contends that students return to public schools because IDEA’s curriculum is too rigorous. But IDEA students do not consistently outperform those in public schools.
IDEA boasts that all its graduates enroll in college. They do not mention that many students attend colleges that accept all applicants.
Jan Resseger writes here about the injustice of the budget for public schools passed by the Ohio legislature. Firmly in the control of hard-right Republicans, the legislature eagerly funds vouchers and charter schools while underfunding the public schools. As in every other state, the vast majority of Ohio students attend public schools. The only evaluation of the Ohio voucher program showed that most students who used the vouchers were already attending private schools; those who transferred from public schools fell behind the peers they left behind.
Ohio legislators know that vouchers and charters do not increase educational opportunity. They don’t care. Parents of public school students must inform themselves and act to protect their public schools.
She writes:
In the last week of June, two important events happened almost simultaneously in Ohio: A district court in Columbus found the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional, and the state legislature passed a budget that at the same time shorts the state’s public schools that serve the mass of our state’s children, significantly cuts the state income tax, and increases funding for private school vouchers over the next two years.
We all desperately hope the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit will save our public schools, but appeals of the case to higher courts will likely take several years, a period when the new budget’s underfunding of the Fair School Funding Plan, the effect of the income tax cuts and the diversion money to private school vouchers will inevitably continue to diminish the state’s investment in Ohio’s public schools.
In the new budget, the legislature technically phased in a new Fair School Funding Plan—a mathematical formula to ensure that the state will guarantee adequate and equitably distributed state school funding. However, after the House Speaker called the plan unsustainable, the legislature failed fully to fund the new formula’s provisions and thereby ensured the new formula’s ultimate failure before Ohio can even try it out.
The Ohio legislature’s income tax reduction along with lawmakers’ choice to permit continuing growth of publicly funded, universal EdChoice private school tuition vouchers emerges from a philosophy that government’s responsibility is to protect individual parents’ freedom. Solid support for the state’s public schools would instead embody a commitment to what we call the social contract, explained here by economist Joseph Stiglitz:
“A social contract defines the relationship between individuals and societies, much as an actual contract would, outlining the obligations of the parties to the contract and to each other. There is one big difference between the social contract and ordinary contracts. When an actual contract is breached, there are consequences both for the relationship and especially for the breaching party… But when the state violates what it is supposed to do, there is no corresponding mechanism for enforcing the social contract.” The Road to Freedom, p. 86)
Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution definesthe state’s responsibility to provide a strong system of public education as part of the social contract: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”
Here are three ways in which the new state budget undermines Ohio’s public education social contract.
The New Ohio Budget Does Not Commit the State to Equitable and Adequate Public School Funding.
The first slide of Policy Matters’ PowerPoint presentation summarizes the impact of the new budget for the state’s public schools: “Ohio lawmakers give a billion-dollar annual tax break to Ohioans earning six figures, underfund (public) schools by $2.86 billion, and leave behind students with the greatest need.”
In Slide 3, Policy Matters compares the amount of public school funding allocated in the new state budget to the amount the new Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) would have awarded to each school district if the legislature had, as the formula requires it to do, correctly factored in the district’s current costs instead of old cost data from FY 2022. “Under the enacted plan, 74% of Ohio’s school districts will receive less than what the FSFP says they need to meet the costs of an adequate education.”
In a recent Hannah News Service publication, Howard Fleeter, Ohio’s well known school finance expert, explains¹ exactly how the legislature robs school districts of what they had expected under the Fair School Funding Plan: “One of the most important features of the Fair School Funding Plan is its utilization of an inputs-based approach to determining adequacy, which results in a base per-pupil amount which can vary across districts based on the number of students and their distribution across grade levels… In order to not just fully phase in the funding formula but to adequately fund it, the base cost in FY 26 should be based on FY 24 input data and the base cost in FY 27 should be based on FY 25 data.” However, this year the legislature used old, FY 2022 cost data, thereby failing accurately to measure school districts’ costs. In other words, the state should recognize that school district expenses rise year after year due to inflation, and the formula should recognize that school districts have to keep up or risk losing teachers and services.
In Policy Matters’ Slide 5, a bar graph demonstrates that in the new budget, legislators leave farthest behind the school districts serving concentrations of the state’s poorest students. These school districts will fall 107% behind what the FSFP would have brought them in state funding. Their school funding is actually being cut this year.
Part of the loss to school districts serving masses of poor children comes from a recalculation of Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid. Slide 7 explains that the legislature used “direct certification, a process of identifying low-income students by relying on public benefits data that will lead to fewer low-income students being counted in the system and fewer DPIA dollars going to the places that desperately need them.” Why has the legislature chosen to base DPIA on a data set that will, “cut more than $200 million in DPIA funds over the next biennium, from FY 2025 levels of support”?
Slide 7 adds, as a preface to Slide 8, that the new budget, “appears use that money to offset the ‘performance’ supplement which is estimated to cost $215 million over the biennium.” What is the Performance Supplement? Slide 8 explains: “The Performance Supplement would rely on (each district’s) state report card data, increasing funding by $13 per student times the number of stars on their state report card or progress report… Report card scores are built on testing performance as well as factors like chronic absenteeism, and the ‘breadth of coursework available in the district.’ ”
Policy Matters Slide 8 clearly identifies the injustice embedded in the Performance Supplement: “Low scores on these indicators should signal to policymakers that the school and the community it serves are devalued, under-resourced, and in need of more help, not less. It explicitly reverses course on closing opportunity and education gaps, which would help schools improve.” In Slide 8, we also learn that the budget adds a $225 per student Enrollment Growth Supplement for the fastest growing suburban school districts. While the supplement will help meet the costs of serving new students moving to these districts, it is important to remember that these are districts serving wealthier families.
In the brief itself, you can link to your own school district’s profile to see how your district fares under the new budget here.
The New Budget Reduces Ohio’s State Income Tax—Undermining the State’s Capacity to Raise Its Share of Public School Funding.
The Plain Dealer‘sAnna Staver explains: “Lawmakers eliminated the state’s top income tax bracket, collapsing Ohio’s tax structure from two rates to one. It’s the last step in a decade-long push for a flat tax —and this final move amounts to a $1.14 billion cut.” Signal Ohio‘s Andrew Tobias adds: “That new top tax rate of 2.75% is lower than any surrounding state and lower than any time in the past five decades… About 96% of the $1.1 billion in annual lost revenue… will stay in the pockets of those earning $138,000 or more….” Policy Matters Ohio’s Slide 10 depicts the legislature’s new flat tax diverting a billion dollars of essential state revenue to wealthy individuals and away from the state’s social contract. The new budget exacerbates a long trend of tax slashing in Ohio. Last fall, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams tracked two decades of Ohio tax cuts that have progressively reduced Ohio’s capacity to support the needs of the public and to support the system of common schools promised in the Ohio Constitution.
The New Budget Allows Private School Vouchers to Continue Eating Up School Revenue.
In his June 27th On the Money¹ school funding expert Howard Fleeter describes another primary drain on state revenue: private school tuition vouchers will continue to eat up an increasingly large chunk of the new state budget. Fleeter compares the legislature’s investment in public school funding to the legislature’s investment in private school vouchers. Fleeter calculates, “that state foundation funding for Ohio’s traditional school districts—spread across the state’s 609 local school districts—will increase by $281.9 million over the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 biennium compared to current funding levels.” He continues: “Voucher funding is slated to increase by $327.1 million over the FY26-27 biennium…. This increase is $45 million more than the increase slated for the traditional K-12 districts over the biennium, despite the fact that K-12 districts educate roughly 8 times as many students as do private schools.”
In the New Budget, Legislators Shift the Responsibility for Funding Public Schools More Heavily onto Local School Districts.
We continue to hear a lot from our legislators about the danger of rising property taxes, but ironically, by reducing the state’s investment in public education, the legislature itself has made it necessary for school districts to increase reliance on local property taxes or cut programs and teachers. Howard Fleeter concludes¹ that, in the current fiscal year (FY 2025) under the budget that passed two years ago, the state is paying 38.4% of public school funding in Ohio. In the new budget, in which the legislature has failed to update the cost data in the formula, has cut the state income tax, and has kept on letting an uncapped voucher program grow,“the average state share (of total public school funding) will drop to 35.0% in FY 26 and to 32.2% in FY 27….”
When a state violates the social contract by reneging on its responsibility to fund public schools, the funding burden falls more heavily and more inequitably on local school districts.
¹Howard Fleeter, “On The Money,” Hannah News Service, June 27, 2025, (available free in many public library research collections).
A former charter school director in Madera County has been indicted for allegedly embezzling funds from a program that was federally funded, acting U.S. Attorney Kimberly A. Sanchez announced Tuesday.
On July 17, a federal grand jury returned a sealed indictment against Nicholas A. Retana, 67, from Madera. The indictment was unsealed on Monday and Retana was arraigned in federal court in Fresno.
According to court documents, Retana was the executive director and founder of a kindergarten through eighth grade charter school in Madera County until early 2020.
While not named in the news release, Retana’s co-founded and led Ezequiel Tafoya Alvarado Academy from 2005 until 2019.
An audit conducted for the Madera County Superintendent of Schools found evidence of corruption. The potential misuses of public funds totaled more than $1.06 million, according to the audit.
Prosecutors allege that during Retana’s time in that role, he used school funds to pay for personal expenses for himself, his family and associates.
Among the alleged misuses of funds were the purchase of two new Ford F-150 trucks for his sons, who were employed by the school. He also allegedly paid a woman $12,000 who was described in court documents as a self-proclaimed sex worker turned relationship coach, with whom he had a personal relationship.
The audit found that this person was paid for conducting life coaching workshops for eight graders despite not having any relevant licensure.
Retana is accused of mislabeling the expenses in school records and misrepresenting them when questioned. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.
Most attention has focused on the horrible cuts to Medicaid and food assistance (SNAP) in the bill just passed by the GOP majority in the Senate. It has some differences with the version passed by the GOP House, so there will be changes and compromises.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Educaruon, wrote this update on the education portion of the Senate bill that passed, called the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA). She refers to the Big Ugly Budget Bill as BBB.
She writes:
Despite the efforts of Democratic senators to get the Parliamentarian to override ECCA entirely, ECCA was significantly weakened in the Senate BBB and is no longer a universal voucher program.
The $4 billion cap for total contributions was removed. It is now unlimited. However, it is no longer a tax shelter for stocks, making contributions far less attractive. The maximum credit has been reduced to $ 1,700.
States, as well as the Treasury, can now regulate the program; therefore, states without a voucher program are not mandated to have one. Additionally, the credits are only available to individuals residing in a state with an approved Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO).
Because the bill allows public school students to access scholarships and the list of allowable activities includes tutoring, payment for courses, and payment for tests (for example, AP exams), I am trying to determine whether states without vouchers could create SGOs for public school students only.
BBB needs to go back to the House, so all of this will likely change again.
Republicans’ tax-and-spending megabill would give the school-choice movement a major, long-sought victory—and deliver an unusually generous tax break to wealthy taxpayers.
The bill includes a new way for taxpayers—whether they are parents or not—to direct tax dollars to private-school scholarships instead of the Treasury. There is an extra twist: It could deliver virtually risk-free profits to some savvy investors.
The proposal has excited school-choice advocates, infuriated public school leaders and stunned tax experts.
“Overnight, this would give millions of students access to the school of their choice,” said Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, an advocacy group pushing the provision. “This is a revolution within the tax code.”
The American Federation for Children is the far-right wing group created by Betsy DeVos to promote charter schools and vouchers.
The incentive is structured as a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit. Give to a charity known as a scholarship-granting organization and you would get the same amount subtracted from your federal tax bill.
It is equivalent to redirecting your taxes to a scholarship-granting organization (SGO), with the benefit capped at 10% of adjusted gross income or $5,000, whichever is greater. That is a far better deal than what is offered by normal charitable donations, which generally just reduce your taxable income and only if you itemize deductions….
For people with appreciated stock, the proposal could be even more attractive than a dollar-for-dollar credit, potentially creating net profits.
Consider someone who bought a stock for $100 that is now worth $1,100. Selling that stock would trigger capital-gains taxes of up to $238. But under the bill, he could donate the $1,100 stock to an SGO. The government would give $1,100 back and he wouldn’t pay capital-gains taxes.
He could then buy the same $1,100 stock on the open market. The result? He’s better off than when he started, spending nothing to erase a potential capital-gains tax liability.
“In terms of something that is deeply offensive to basic tax logic, it’s hard to beat this,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a law professor at Duke University who expects donors to line up every Jan. 1 to take advantage. “Unless you actively hate the charity, you would want to do it…”
A federal program would expand private-school tuition subsidies into states such as New York and California that have resisted school choice programs….
The House bill caps credits at $5 billion annually, which would climb by 5% in subsequent years if the program is heavily used. That bill would run from 2026 through 2029. The Senate version released Monday includes $4 billion annually, starting in 2027 but without an expiration date.
The credit would mark a significant injection of resources to private education as the Trump administration separately seeks to cut federal grants for public schools. Still, it would pale in comparison to funding for public schools, which receive several hundred billion dollars annually, mostly from state and local governments.
Democrats hope the breadth of the policy changes will prompt the Senate parliamentarian to determine that it’s out of bounds for the budgetary fast-track process Republicans are using.
Public school advocates say the program would benefit better-off families at religious private schools. “The federal government needs to fund the neighborhood school that serves children from every walk of life,” said Sasha Pudelski, a lobbyist with the school superintendents’ association.
Opponents also say the idea has been rejected by voters. In November, three states voted down school-choice ballot measures.
Note: not only were vouchers defeated in three states last November, voters have rejected vouchers in every state referendum since 1967.
The new tax credit could become a model for Congress to direct money to other causes through the tax code, said Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive group that criticizes the plan.
Civil rights laws prohibit certain forms of discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, but it isn’t likely this would apply to private schools that benefit from the proposed tax credit, said Kevin Welner, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. The House bill includes a provision barring discrimination against students with disabilities in school admissions; the Senate version doesn’t.
State voucher plans do not bar discrimination in voucher-receiving schools. They can and do discriminate at will. Some require that families are members of their faith. Some bar LGBT students and families. Some bar students with disabilities. Some bar students with low test scores.
Trump’s funding of school choice is the fever dream of Christian nationalists. With one blow, they eliminate the separation of church and state, they get funding for religious schools, and they gut civil rights laws that barred discrimination.
It also permits the revival of school segregation, under the once-discredited banner of school choice. White Southerners who don’t like “race mixing” have dreamed of this day since May 17, 1954.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of high school physics and advanced mathematics in California, has been keeping close watch on the billionaire-funded efforts to promote privatization and demean teachers. In this post, he reviews an opinion piece that advocates the resuscitation of failed policies of the past.
As I wrote in my 2013 book Reign of Error, merit pay has been tried again and again, and it has never worked. There and in my last book, Slaying Goliath (pp. 244-245), I cited powerful evidence that paying teachers based on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores was a disaster: The Gates Foundation awarded $575 million to three school districts and four charter chains to evaluate teachers by test scores and peer evaluators, in hopes of getting the best teachers to transfer into the neediest schools. Gates hired top firms Rand and AIR to evaluate the program over six years. They concluded that it wasted resources that might have been better spent on reducing class sizes or raising teachers’ salaries. The program did not raise test scores, did not affect graduation rates or dropout rates, andddid not change the quality of teachers. Yet Hanushek and Macke advocate for the revival of this failed practice.
Ultican writes
It was “déjà vu all over again” when Eric Hanushek and his wife Macke Raymond shared their views in the Washington Post. They cited Michelle Rhee and Mike Miles as exemplary education leaders, merit pay as good education policy and turned to A Nation at Risk for support. Governor Abbott took over Houston’s schools and installed Miles as superintendent but here Hanushek and Raymond were referencing his long ago stint in Dallas.
I am no longer a reader of the Washington Post. When Bezos decided his newspaper would not endorse a candidate for president, I cancelled my subscription. However, a friend felt I needed to see this article and sent me a copy.
Billionaires like Bezos are destroying America and all of its venerable institutions. Hanushek and Raymond are Stanford based billionaire tools.
While working on her PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester, Macky fell in love with her much older professor, Eric Hanushek, and eventually married him.
Today, Raymond is the director of CREEDO. Her 2015 Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile says in part, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” Are the billionaires guarding the hen house?
Rhee and Miles
The Hanushek and Raymond opinion piece states:
“In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.”
This is a totally bunkum statement and is followed by another world of bunkum claim:
“Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.”
The linked evidence in the Dallas claim is to an Education Next article written by Hanushek and friends. In it, he claimed, “In the four years after Dallas adopted new performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation systems, student performance on standardized tests improved by 16 percent of a standard deviation in math and 6 percent in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat.”
Sixteen percent of a standard deviation of growth in math after 4 years sounds weak and 6% of a standard deviation growth in reading does not seem much more than noise in the data.
Hanushek gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This played well with billionaires from the Walton family but had no relationship with reality. The history of crazy pants unsupported statements like this have long caused me to seek verification for whatever he says.
Hanushek and Raymond claim that both Dallas and Washington DC saw comparatively superior testing outcomes than other urban areas in the US. The evidence they provide is a link to the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (tuda). I graphed 4th and 8th grade math tuda data between 2009 and 2024 for the Large City composite, Dallas, DC, Baltimore and San Diego. Nothing substantive popped out in my graphs.
I decided to subtract the 4th grade scores from the 8th grade scores to get a sense of how the students were progressing. The results graphed below stunned me with their clarity. Baltimore, which traditionally has low scores, San Diego, which traditionally scores well and the Large City composite had fairly consistent increases of about 40 points. Dallas and DC both fell below a 30 points increase.
Billionaires Take Over
Michelle Rhee came out of Teach for America (TFA) where she taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school. She returned to New York, TFA and Wendy Kopp to help found the New Teachers Project which is now known as TNTP. New York Chancellor of Public Schools, Joel Klein, who worked for multi-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recommended the 37-year-old Rhee to be Washington DC’s new superintendent.
During Rhee’s three year reign of terror, she replaced half of DC’s teachers and a third of its principals. She was consumed with raising test scores and scorned those who did not share her devotion to standardized testing. Her relentless pressure to raise test scores brought some early gains and produced a major cheating scandal.
DC principal, Adell Cothorne, lost her job for insisting upon increased test security when she learned that teachers were violating testing protocols. I had lunch with Adell at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. She struck me as a proud Black woman with poise, immense courage and profound character.
After Rhee left DC schools, she started StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote school choice. Billionaires and their friends provided her organization with millions of dollars. (Reign of Error, Pages 145-155)
Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. Two of the three incumbent school board trustees up for reelection ran unopposed in 2011.
Writing for In These Times, George Joseph explained the political change, “But since the beginning of 2012, hundreds of thousands of Super PAC dollars from Dallas’ richest neighborhoods began flowing into nearly all of the district’s school board elections.”
Once the new 2012 board was seated, it fired Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and replaced him with Mike Miles, a graduate of billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy.
“Miles’s reforms included a new principal evaluation process which led to large turnover. He also instituted a merit pay system for teachers and hired Charles Glover a 29-year-old administrator of the Dallas TFA branch to be Chief Talent Officer in DISD. After just under three years, he had managed to alienate the black and Hispanic communities as well as many experienced teachers and principals.”
Like Michelle Rhee, he also believed in standardized test based accountability and merit pay.
Concluding Information
Reporting for NPR’s 35 anniversary of A Nation at Risk, Ana Kamenetz discovered, “They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.”
A decade before Ana’s report, Florida education professor, James Guthrie, noted, “They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”
In 1990, Sandia engineers set out to add weight to A Nation at Risk. They disaggregated the data by race and sex and were surprise to find that every group advanced during the 1963 to 1980 period. The growing numbers of SAT test takers was driven by poor, minority and female students, causing the test averages to drop.
A Nation at Risk was a fraudulent paper and America’s students were actually healthy and doing well, which means public schools were healthy and doing well.
Merit pay is a Taylorist scheme that appeals to many American business leaders, but has a long history of employee dissatisfaction and output quality issues. Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied merit pay for teachers and found no significant gains in testing data and in New York researchers documented negative results.
Unfortunately, billionaires own the media and publish opinion pieces by hired frauds like Hanushek and Raymond.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor for North Alabama. She writes an important blog called Civil Discourse, where she usually explains court decisions and legal issues. Today she turns to education.
Today I’m recovering from the graduation tour, one in Boulder and one in Boston in the last two weeks, and getting back into the groove of writing as I continue to work on my book (which I hope you’ll preorder if you haven’t already). The graduations came at a good moment.
Watching my kids graduate, one from college and one with a master’s in science, was an emotional experience—the culmination of their years of hard work, sacrifice, and growth, all captured in a single walk across the stage. They, like their friends, my law students, and amazing students across the county, now enter society as adults. Even beyond the individual stories of hardships overcome and perseverance, witnessing these rites of passage makes me feel profoundly hopeful. The intelligence and commitment of the students—many of whom are already tackling big problems and imagining new, bold solutions—gives me a level of confidence about what comes next for our country. In a time when it’s easy to get discouraged, their commitment and idealism stands as a powerful reminder that they are ready to take on the mess we have left them.
The kids are alright, even though they shouldn’t have to be. Talking with them makes me think they will find a way, even if it’s unfair to ask it of them and despite the fact that their path will be more difficult than it should be. Courage is contagious, and they seem to have caught it. Their educations have prepared them for the future we all find ourselves in now.
As students across the country prepared to graduate this year, Trump released his so-called “skinny budget.” If that’s how they want to frame it, then education has been put on a starvation diet—at least the kind of education that develops independent thinkers who thrive in an environment where questions are asked and answered. Trump pitches the budget as “gut[ting] a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security.” Defense spending would increase by 13% under his proposal.
The plan for education is titled, “Streamline K-12 Education Funding and Promote Parental Choice.”Among its provisions, the announcement focuses on the following items:
“The Budget continues the process of shutting down the Department of Education.”
“The Budget also invests $500 million, a $60 million increase, to expand the number of high-quality charter schools, that have a proven track record of improving students’ academic achievement and giving parents more choice in the education of their children.”
As we discussed in March, none of this is a surprise. Trump is implementing the Project 2025 plan. In December of 2024, I wrote about how essential it is to dumb down the electorate if you’re someone like Donald Trump and you want to succeed. A rich discussion in our forums followed. At the time I wrote, “Voters who lack the backbone of a solid education in civics can be manipulated. That takes us to Trump’s plans for the Department of Education.” But it’s really true for the entirety of democracy.
Explaining the expanded funding for charter schools, a newly written section of the Department of Education website reads more like political propaganda than education information: “The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it has reigned [Ed: Note the word “”reigned” is misspelled] in the federal government’s influence over state Charter School Program (CSP) grant awards. The Department removed a requirement set by the Biden Administration that the U.S. Secretary of Education review information on how states approve select entities’ (e.g., private colleges and universities) authorization of charter schools in states where they are already lawful authorizers. This action returns educational authority to the states, reduces burdensome red tape, and expands school choice options for students and families.”
There are already 37 lawsuits related to Trump’s changes to education. Uncertainty is no way to educate America’s children. Cutting funding for research because you want to score political points about DEI or climate change is no way to ensure we nurture future scientists and other thinkers and doers…
I am reminded again of George Orwell’s words: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The historians among us, and those who delve into history, will play a key role in getting us through this. Our love and understanding of history can help us stay grounded, understanding who we are, who we don’t want to become, and why the rule of law matters so damn much to all of it….
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The Grand Canyon Institute has been tracking the growth and cost of vouchers and charter schools in Arizona for several years. The vast majority of students who take vouchers (almost 3/4). But this year, a larger share were drawn from district schools and charter schools.
The report contains a number of excellent graphics. Open the lin to see them.
This is the Grand Canyon Institute release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Cost of Universal ESA Vouchers
Contact: Dave Wells, Research Director, dwells@azgci.org or 602.595.1025 ex. 2.
Summary of Findings
73% of Universal ESA voucher enrollees have never attended district or charter schools (including adjustments for students entering Kindergarten).
In FY2025, however, net new Universal ESA voucher enrollees primarily came from charter and district schools.
While the total cost of the overall ESA program in FY2025 is expected to be $872 million, the net cost after adjusting for where students would have otherwise attended is $350 million for those in the universal ESA voucher program. This represents a slight increase from the $332 million estimated by the Grand Canyon Institute last year.
The Grand Canyon Institute (GCI) estimates a $350 million net cost to the state’s General Fund in FY2025 (July 2024-June 2025) for the universal component of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) voucher program based on a student’s school of origin. This represents a slight increase over the estimated FY2024 cost of $332 million. The estimate assumes basic student funding weights.
The Joint Legislative Budget Committee currently estimates the total annual cost of the ESA program to be $872 million, which includes the original targeted program and the universal component. Because student-level data on the universal program is not separated out by the Arizona Dept. of Education, GCI must estimate the origin of universal program enrollees. GCI’s estimate reflects the net cost the state would have incurred if the universal ESA voucher program did not exist. Almost every single child in the original targeted program had to attend a district or charter school for at least 45 days before enrolling in the program. GCI uses historical data on where the targeted students had come from previously, dating back to FY2017, along with current data on where all ESA students have left district or charter schools to estimate the distribution of students across district and charter schools for the original targeted program and the remainder are allocated to the universal program.
In FY2025, the net growth in the universal ESA vouchers was 7,660 of the total enrollment of 61,688. GCI estimates that 73% of ESA universal voucher recipients never attended a district or charter school, slightly lower than the rate of 80% in FY2025. This includes estimates for kindergarten students using ESA universal vouchers.
The primary driver of the change in FY2025 was a significant increase in the portion of net new enrollees from district and charter schools. GCI examined the marginal changes since last year and estimates that nearly half the net gain in universal participants of 7,660 from FY2024Q2 to FY2025Q2 came via Kindergarten. Analyzing changes in the portion of students previously attending a district or charter school, GCI estimates that less than 10% never attended (or would have never attended for Kindergarten) while half came from charter schools and just over 40% came from districts.
This change helped lessen the growth of the net cost of the program. GCI presumes that Kindergarten students do not have a record of prior attendance but would mirror the same distribution. Given that charter school enrollment is about one-fourth of district enrollment, charter schools have been significantly disproportionately impacted by the Universal ESA program.
Despite the change in FY2025, the majority of participants in the universal ESA program never attended a district or charter school should be self-evident. For FY2025, the Quarter 3 Executive and Legislative ESA report identifies that of the total 87,602 students enrolled in the ESA voucher program (targeted and universal), regardless of when they first enrolled, only 33,942 students moved from charter or district schools to an ESA. Virtually all targeted participants must first enroll in a district or charter school first. The universal program does not require prior attendance.
The Grand Canyon Institute, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization, is a centrist think tank led by a bipartisan group of former state lawmakers, economists, community leaders and academicians. The Grand Canyon Institute serves as an independent voice reflecting a pragmatic approach to addressing economic, fiscal, budgetary and taxation issues confronting Arizona.
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