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4,700 Charter Schools Closed in 24 Years!

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2026 //
2

Many parents choose charter schools with the expectation that the charter school will be a stable environment. Many parents are dazzled by promises that their children will be in a school where their success is almost certain.

The reality is quite different. Shawgi Tell reports that 4,700 charter schools went bust in 24 years, from 1998 to 2022. Parents who choose a charter school can’t be sure it will stay in business for long; in some instances, charters have closed in their first year.

This is not unusual in the business world. Major chain stores close and shift locations every year, depending on sales. Shoe stores, grocery stores, and restaurants come and go. We expect that churn in the world of commerce. It’s a new development–an innovation–in education.

He writes:

Charter schools have been around for roughly 35 years. The first charter school in the country, City Academy High School, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1992.

Data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows that 4,690 charter schools closed between 1998 and 2022; that is, nearly 4,700 charter schools have closed in 24 years. The real number of closures is likely higher. The same source says about 8,100 charter schools are operating today.

The Network for Public Education (NPE)  points out that “more than one in four charter schools close by the five-year mark. By year 10, the failure rate jumps to nearly four in 10; five years later, almost 50 percent have closed. We now have five cohorts at the 20-year mark with an average failure rate of 55 percent.”

The NPE goes on to say that

“Over the years, charter closures have broken their promises to more than one million children whose parents believed they had enrolled their children in a better, stable alternative to their local public school. In the marketplace model of schooling, when it comes to charter schools, it is buyer-beware. And in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very beginning.”

The top four reasons charter schools fail and close every week include poor academic performance, low enrollment, financial malfeasance, and mismanagement. Low enrollment takes the cake. This matters because we are often told that many charter schools have waiting lists. In reality, many charter schools do not meet enrollment quotas and requirements.

So, why are there so many charter school closures, especially if charter schools are supposedly superior to traditional public schools? Why are poor academic performance, low enrollment, financial malfeasance, and mismanagement so ubiquitous in the charter school sector?

It is worth recalling that charter school proponents see education as a business, a marketable product, a commercial transaction, a commodity. It is no accident that both non-profit and for-profit charter schools engage in profiteering. In this setup, students and parents are reduced to self-interested, fend-for-yourself consumers, while failure and success are viewed through a narrow, business-centric lens.

Charter school advocates do not see education as an integral part of history and society’s social fabric, let alone as a human right and social responsibility. Education is not viewed as a fundamental pillar of society organized to uplift all humans and advance society.

Instead, education is seen as a “free market” phenomenon, a commercial enterprise, where the survival-of-the-fittest ethos prevails. Such an arrangement extinguishes a public sense of collective identity, purpose, and responsibility.

Charter school proponents believe that, like a failing business, failing charter schools should be closed and replaced by “more successful” charter schools. Closing a school and abandoning parents, students, teachers, and principals is seen as natural, normal, and healthy. According to this commodity logic, if a school “fails,” it should be shut down. “This is how education should be,” say charter school promoters. This is supposedly “the natural course of things.”

But no one ever mentions the disastrous effects of charter school closures on parents, students, teachers, principals, and the community. Charter school advocates are consistently silent on this point. From a “free market” perspective, this destruction and chaos are “supposed to happen.” There are always  “winners” and “losers” in the market. The so-called “invisible hand” of the “free market” reigns supreme in this taken-for-granted outlook.

Education in a modern society is a public good, not a commodity based on market dynamics and profit-seeking. The marketization of education narrows its scope and lowers its quality. It treats education as an article of trade and deprives it of its deeper social and cultural meaning.

Because of the nature, structure, and function of charter schools, greater emphasis is placed on cost considerations versus the holistic well-being of teachers and students. This is what “efficiency” and the “business model” warrant.

The inherently chaotic, anarchic, and violent nature of the “free market” naturally produces thousands of charter school failures and closures that obliterate the integrity, purpose, expectations, and rights of parents, students, teachers, and principals every week. Shuttering a school and subjecting everyone to the turmoil of the “free market” is not accountability; it is destructive and irresponsible.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform

Peter Greene: The Ghost of Milton Friedman Haunts Us

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2026 //
16

Peter Greene, our brilliant champion of good sense and reason, writes about the specter that energizes the privatization movement. Milton Friedman, leader of unfettered capitalism, encouraged his followers to abandon public schools. We are living with the consequences of this disastrous ideology, funding failing charter schools, funding semi-literate home schools, funding intolerant religious schools, funding grifters and phonies whose only interest is profit.

Greene wrote:

We’ve discussed, many times (e.g. here and here) Milton Friendman’s ideas for education, pretty simply described as “burn down public schools and replace them with a private free market for education.” Nancy McLean summed it up like this in 2021:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Friedman liked the idea of vouchers, but mostly as a way to get the free market mainlined into the nation’s education system. And to really understand what that means, we need to understand how Friedman saw the free market.

Many public school supporters (including me) have argued that Friedman’s free market love is misplaced because of course a free market would choose winners and losers in a system with multiple tiers. Don’t you get it, we have brayed lustily– A free market education system would result in all sorts in inequality for students in school and society at large.

The ghost of Milton Friedman replies, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

For Friedman, the free market was not a magical engine for equality and uplifting one and all. Instead, it was a system that perfectly suits a world that is– and ideally ought to be– filled with inequality between people.

Society is filed with winners and losers, and the free market is an excellent way to sort them out. Society is inevitably, and correctly, hierarchal and unequal. Friedman wrote in Free to Choose, “Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned,” without any sense that government might have had a hand in creating that unfairness. Nor could Friedman ever really grasp the notion that power imbalances were self-perpetuating by the system and not some sort of natural and just occurrences (Friedman never, ever came up with a convincing free market answer for racist elements of business and society).

That’s only the beginning. Please open the link and read it all. It’s an excellent description of the ideology that is undermining our public schools. Not to make society better, but to make it worse.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Privatization, Vouchers

Why You Should Attend the NPE Conference This Weekend!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
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Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, explains why this NPE conference will be stellar.

She writes:

A community governs its public schools. Neighbors elect a board, set a budget, and decide what their children learn. That is exactly what privatization threatens, and it is what NPE’s national conference is built to defend. Over two days, September 26–27, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe near Houston, more than 40 sessions take on the fight from every angle. Here’s a taste of what’s on the schedule.

Vouchers and charters. In “Beating Vouchers in Court,” Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel will walk through recent wins in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, where voucher programs were declared unconstitutional. They will also review the live challenges in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri. In “A View from the Trenches,” two Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher offer a candid account of what universal ESA vouchers have already done to how public education is funded and governed. And a session on the federal tax-credit voucher scheme, set to launch in January 2027, lays out what advocates in opt-in and opt-out states can do right now. 

In “Taxation Without Representation — Using a Conservative Argument to Combat Charter Schools,” Gregory Walace, Alison Chaplar, Betsy Flanagan, Daniel Marcano Jr., and Jennifer Simões will show how that framing sparked a grassroots movement, moved public opinion, and helped drive proposed legislation. “What’s Next for Charter Schools? A Review of Charter Strategies Across State Lines,” Patti Everitt, Gregory Walace, Carol Burris, and Dave DeMatthews lead an interactive look at how charters keep expanding in key states with few guardrails and little public engagement, which national initiatives fund that growth, and the research and messaging advocates can share across state lines to push back.

Takeovers are where democracy gets stolen outright. Houston high schoolers will describe how they organized against the HISD takeover. Parents from Houston (CVPE) and Fort Worth (FORT) share how they are fighting to win their voice back. An Indianapolis panel will dissect the sharpest trick of all — an elected board left in place, but stripped of control over buildings, transportation, and property taxes. “The Struggle to Govern Ourselves” will confront the research showing takeovers overwhelmingly target majority-Black districts, while organizers from New Orleans share hard-won lessons from years on the front lines. And in “The People’s Board,” presenters will take on Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the corporate model quietly sidelining elected members in board after board.

Follow the money. Maurice Cunningham, Mercedes Schneider, Mike DeGuire and David Armiak teach their best techniques for tracing dark-money networks back to the billionaires and foundations bankrolling privatization in two sessions. Other sessions map the private firms profiteering off vouchers and spotlight Wisconsin’s campaign to get voucher and charter costs printed right on taxpayers’ bills. 

The money grabs keep getting more creative. Texas advocates expose SB 1882 “partnership” charters as a fast-track privatization grift. Another panel takes on corporate tax breaks — energy-hungry data centers now the worst offenders — draining billions from schools. And with 17 states cutting or capping property taxes in 2024–25, national and state experts lay out how to defend the local revenue public schools depend on.

Faith, nationalism, and the classroom. Sessions on building school–congregation partnerships and mobilizing faith leaders in hostile states sit alongside a hard look at Christian Nationalism and its playbook for defunding and reshaping public education.

The newest battlegrounds. Randi Weingarten joins experts to debate AI’s role in classrooms — cognition, privacy, mental health, and the environment. A separate panel takes on ed-tech overreach and the lawsuits challenging how it commercializes student data. And student organizers from SEAT share how they’ve carried the fight to school boards, the legislature, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The skill builder sessions are the reason you will leave with more than notes. Charles Siler, a former Goldwater Institute lobbyist who helped build the privatization playbook before turning on it, joins Manny Garcia to teach what messaging actually moves people. Rachel Coyle and Susan Spicka show how to win over hostile legislators. Others cover new-media strategy, gathering community input at scale, and getting real press traction beyond the press release. 

The keynotes anchor it all: Diane Ravitch and Texas AFT’s Zeph Capo open Saturday; Southern Education Foundation CEO Raymond Pierce speaks at lunch; investigative journalist Katherine Stewart headlines Sunday brunch; and Howard University’s Dean Emerita Leslie Fenwick closes us out.

You’ll meet the students, parents, teachers, clergy, researchers, and organizers who are actually winning in courtrooms, at statehouses, and on ballots. Privatizers have the money. We have the people, the passion and the plan. Register now here, book your room here in the hotel block, and join us in Conroe, Texas, right outside Houston.

I can’t promise that hotel rooms are still open but Carol will help you if you made a terrible mistake and forgot to sign up.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Childhood, Closing schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Parent Groups, Privatization, Religion, School Choice

Stephen Dyer: Charter Schools in Ohio Are Failing When Compared to District Schools. Does Anyone Care?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, a former legislator, keeps count. His blog is called 10th Period:

Ohio’s charter schools have underperformed for years, as compared to district public schools, but Republican legislators and state officials don’t care. Charter schools open, fail, close, and are replaced by more charter schools. Public money sustains them regardless of their poor performance.

Dyer wrote:

So if you’re paying $1.6 billion a year for an education sector whose graduates make 20% less upon graduation than public school graduates, can we really call that an option? Or is it just a waste of money. 30 years. $20 billion. And THIS is what we get in return? Outrageous.

I have now written this post in one form or another for 20 years.

Ohio Charter Schools get smoked on state report cards by Ohio School Districts.

I know, Charter School honks, you only want your performance to be compared with the Big 8 urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. 

See, here’s the problem: 53% of the kids in Ohio charter schools come from those 8 districts. 

That means 47% do not.

You can’t take $1.5 billion in state aid from kids attending all but a handful of school districts and then demand your performance be compared with 8 of those 607 districts — the 8 that are typically among the state’s lowest performing¹.

Here’s what this piss-poor Charter School performance looks like in charts:

The second chart kind of says it all. 

Even though Charters received less than 1 in 4 of all the stars given, they received 2 out of every 3 1 Stars (F), all of the 1.5 Stars (D-) and about 2 out of every 3 2.5 Stars (C-).

Meanwhile, districts outperformed their overall grade share in every A, B and C category. Just a horrific performance by Charter Schools, considering they’ve had 30 years, $20 billion, just a fraction of the government oversight and incredible legislative and gubernatorial protection to achieve these gawd awful results.

In only 3 categories are more than 40% of Charter School grades C or higher: Overall (53%), Gap Closing (52.2%) and Progress (79%). 

On the District side, the only categories where less than 86% of their grades are C or higher are Early Literacy (66%) and Progress (58%). That’s right. In all categories, the vast majority of School District grades are C or higher. 

Take it easy, Charter Honk. 

Just because Charters do better on the Progress rating² does not mean they’re better schools. Why can I say that with confidence? 

Because Charters do so fantastically worse on the 6 other measures, including a stunning 58% 1 Star ratings on College, Career, Work and Military Readiness!

That CCWMR rating seems to be keeping in line with my post from this morning outlining how Charter School graduates make 20% less over their lifetimes than traditional public school graduates, which costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Look, guys. All I can do is keep pointing all this out and hope that elected officials in Columbus stop drinking the Charter School Kool-Aid at some point.

To recap, here’s all we’ve found out over the last couple weeks about these things:

  • They receive 2 out of every 3 of failing grades on the most recent state report card
  • More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.
  • More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.
  • About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.
  • More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.
  • They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.
  • They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.
  • They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.
  • They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).
  • They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.
  • Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.
  • That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.
  • More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.
  • More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.
  • They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.

Will any of this finally break through?

I guess we’ll find out in a couple months.

1.

I also don’t compare public school building performance with charters because the money for charters comes out of the same money pot meant for kids in districts. So the money comes out of the state aid to every building in a district — the lowest-performing and highest-performing ones. That’s why I’ve always only compared performance between districts and charters. Because if charters are going to be a worthwhile public policy endeavor, then they have to be worth taking state money away from kids in the state’s highest-performing buildings, not just the ones in the lowest-performing ones. I would argue that taking any state money from any public school kids, regardless of report card rating, to fund charters and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies is public policy disaster. But that’s another argument for another day. 

2.

About 43% of school district grades that are C or higher are Cs. Nearly 1/2 of all charter grades that are C or higher in Progress are Cs.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
7

Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.

He writes:

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.

Shocked. Absolutely shocked.

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.

For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.

The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.

As the Big Education Ape’s deep dive into school funding makes devastatingly clear, the playbook was never subtle:

Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.

The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.

Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:

Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.

Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told

Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion

Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated

The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.

That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.

Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.

Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.

To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.

The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:

  • Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
  • Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
  • Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data

They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.

As Big Education Ape’s piece on reading struggles frames it with characteristic bluntness: if you’re struggling to read this, you have some very rich friends to thank.

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.

The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:

  • Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
  • Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
  • Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.

The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.

The Bottom Line

The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.

Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.

The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.

Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Bruce Baker: How to Follow the Charter School Money Trail

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2026 //
3

Bruce Baker is an expert on school finance and a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University.

In this post, he explains the difference between public schools and charter schools in terms of where public money goes. This is one of the biggest differences between the two sectors. Whether you are a journalist, an auditor, or a taxpayer, you should be informed.

Baker writes:

Following public dollars through a traditional school district is, by comparison, straightforward. District budgets are public record. Board meetings are open. Every dollar of state and local revenue flows into a single governmental entity that files public financial statements, undergoes independent audits, and answers to elected or appointed boards bound by open-meetings and public-records law. You can follow the money because the law requires the money to be followable.

Charter school finance doesn’t work that way — not because it’s illegal, but because it’s structured differently from the ground up. A single public funding stream can pass through a nonprofit school corporation, a for-profit management company, a related real-estate entity, and a tax-exempt bond issuance — and at almost every hop, the entity receiving the money is under no obligation to disclose anything to the public. Some links in that chain file a Form 990. Some don’t file anything at all. The paper trail doesn’t disappear, but it moves from one regulatory regime to another — nonprofit tax filings, corporate registries, county property records, municipal bond disclosures — each with its own rules, its own audience, and its own blind spots. Tracing it means knowing which of several unrelated public filing systems to check at each step, and accepting that at some steps, no public filing exists at all.

Open the link to learn how to follow the charter school money trail.

Categories Charter Schools, Deregulation, Funding

CREDO: The Charter Research Project That Won’t Take “No Effect” for an Answer

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2026 //
3

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has positioned itself as the think tank that writes trustworthy evaluations of charter schools. In a sense, this is strange because CREDO’s leadership and its funding are not neutral on the subject of charter schools; they are decidedly pro-charter.

Freddie DeBoer argues on his blog that CREDO has consistently reported that charter schools find no gains for charter schools as compared to public schools. But it’s 2023 report was widely reported as the year of the Big Charter Breakthrough. He believes they are honorable in reporting their findings, but they pulled a fast one on the media and public by inventing a new metric that cannot be compared to other measures: “days of learning.”

DeBoer shows how the CREDO metric magnifies charter school results, which are actually small enough to be counted as “no effect.”

DeBoer begins:

In 2023 the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, released its third national study of charter schools. The research covered 1.8 million students across twenty-nine states plus Washington D.C. and New York City. CREDO’s study purported to offer the most definitive evidence yet about the relative school quality of charter schools as compared to traditional public schools. Certainly our media, political establishment, and the nonprofit sector have acted as though what CREDO has to say is definitive; the 2023 study is, I believe, the most-cited piece of charter research in existence. Every pro-charter politician reaches for it, your Jonathan Chait neoliberal “reform” types treat its findings with near-mythic reverence, people who otherwise have no exposure to educational research wave at it as the final word on the subject. When the average person talks loosely as though there’s some sort of generic charter advantage, they’re usually referencing CREDO research, even if they don’t know they are.

This is all rather surprising, given that CREDO has not produced robust evidence in favor of charter schools, not in the 2023 study or its precursors. As we shall see, even if we assume that CREDO has solved the problem of the fundamentally non-random samples inherent to the task of comparing charter to public – which we should not, because they have not – the evidence supplied by CREDO in the favor of charter schools is so marginal and so noisy as to be meaningless from a policy perspective. And yet the message that the media took and shared from that report – the good news!, the vindication!, the headlines in Education Week and the New York Post!, the press releases from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools! – was that the typical charter student was the beneficiary of a meaningful learning boost compared to their traditional public school counterpart. Why did this message spread so widely and resonate so loudly, if I’m right that even CREDO’s own numbers show very modest differences? Because of a remarkably savvy bit of marketing in how CREDO’s numbers were presented. The report did not show its findings in terms of effect size differences between charter and public, which would be the field’s standard way of sharing results. Rather, the outcome that was shared again and again was that a typical charter school student in the dataset had gained sixteen additional “days of learning” per year in reading and six in math. For a few months there you couldn’t read educational media without running into those numbers: sixteen additional days of learning in reading per year, six in math. It became a bit of holy writ in the endless quest to make bad students good with ACCOUNTABILITY and market reforms.

Now, me, I immediately gravitate to that last bit: what on Earth is a “day of learning,” and since when is that a statistical measure?
“Days of Learning”: A Jury-Rigged Metric Invented for the Purpose of Inflating the Effect
If you share my confusion over that metric, don’t blame yourself. “Days of learning” is not merely an unusual measure of student performance; it’s a boutique metric that CREDO invented themselves for their charter studies. It’s like YouTube changing how views are counted so the numbers look bigger.

This should raise a number of red flags, most importantly when it comes to comparison with other research. We have standardized metrics in social science research for a reason. One core reason among them is mutual interpretability, the ability to compare outcomes involving different interventions that are measured with different instruments and in different units. That’s why effect size exists, and various expressions of effect size have served as the dominant measure of interest in all manner of human research for decades precisely because effect size enables ease of comparison. If you want to compare the influence of the same intervention when one study uses grades as the DV and another used test scores, effect size enables you to do that. If you want to compare two different types of intervention, effect size enables you to do that too. There are some caveats, as there always are, but the basic, elegant logic of effect size makes the measure remarkably flexible and portable: effect size tells us how a given intervention moves average outcomes along the distribution of outcomes. If you want to know more there are plenty of simple explainers of effect size out there; here’s mine. There are some fields where effect size is used less often (economics, for example) but the interpretability and flexibility of effect size metrics like Cohen’s d are powerful advantages. Not surprisingly, then, it’s the dominant reported measure in education research.

So if effect size is both useful and common, and is in fact the dominant measure of interest in the relevant field, why would CREDO come up with its own boutique measure? Why invite the potential for confusion with such consequential research? Occam’s razor suggests a simple answer: because CREDO is a pro-charter organization that’s intent on convincing stakeholders that charters have meaningfully superior outcomes when compared to traditional public schools… and their own research demonstrates the opposite. Their own numbers, in fact, suggest that the returns on charter schools are meager even if we ignore the selection problems that continue to plague charter advocacy.

This is a much longer post about the inadequacy of research on charter schools. It’s well-written and thoughtful. Please open the link and finish reading.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Data, Research

Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
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Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.

Did it make a difference?

Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.

But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.

Jeff writes:

It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…

At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.

I had read  multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.

Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.

….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…

The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.

What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”

“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.

“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”

A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”

“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.

Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…

The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.

For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.

Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.

“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.

A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.

In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.

“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.

As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.

As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”

Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.

“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”

But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”

The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.

We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.

We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.

We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.

We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Connecticut: A Hedge Fund Billionaire Redefines the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
2

David Sirota’s The Lever posted an important article about a hedge fund billionaire who hopes to redefine the Democratic Party. I thought I had heard of all the billionaires who were trying to remodel education to their own specifications, but I had never come across Steve Mandel.

Like many other billionaires, Mandel’s great passion is charter schools. He has poured millions of dollars into political campaigns, trying to elect candidates who share his values. His great hope appears to be to block candidates who are progressives and who are pro-union.

The article, by Katya Schwerin and Luke Goldstein, traces Mandel’s rise, from his elite schooling at

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Reform

Indiana: Republicans Have Systematically Undermined Public Schools, Where 87% of Students Are Enrolled

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
2

Indiana once took pride in its public schools. Not any more. Since the Republican Party took charge of state government, public schools have been neglected and underfunded.

Veteran educator Vernon Smith was elected to the state legislature after his retirement. He wrote this article, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

He wrote:

Sixteen years ago, Republicans assumed full control of Indiana’s state government, holding the governor’s office and winning majorities in the House and the Senate. Since achieving this trifecta, the Republican supermajority has systematically cut funding and programs that made this state work for the people who live here.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than the state’s complete neglect of public schools for nearly two decades. Since taking power, the Republican supermajority has done everything in its power to undermine public education, and Indiana’s children are worse off for it.

Let me explain where years of Republican education policy have gotten us. Last month, the Network for Public Education released a report revealing Indiana ranks 45th out of 50 states in support of public education. Last year, only 31.2% of students showed proficiency on both the math and ELA sections of the ILEARN test. More than half of fourth graders can’t read proficiently, and nearly seven-in-ten eighth graders aren’t proficient in math.

A record number of school districts across the state — nearly 40 — have turned to ballot referenda to secure the money they need this year because the state won’t properly fund them and has cut their local funding sources. These are the results of Republicans chipping away at Indiana’s public school funding for years.

Consider where their priorities lie. More than 87% of Hoosier children attend traditional public schools. Yet year after year, the supermajority pours its energy and political capital into expanding charter schools and private school vouchers for the children of families who were, in most cases, never going to need the state’s help in the first place. The legislature has made it clear: they have no issue abandoning working-class Hoosiers in favor of giving an extra leg up to the most fortunate among us.

When Indiana first opened the door to charter schools and voucher programs, lawmakers sold it as a lifeline for children of color and children in poverty whose assigned schools were failing them. But once the door was propped open, my Republican colleagues expanded it year after year, extending vouchers to families making well over six figures. If this were truly about rescuing kids who’d been failed by the system, it would have stayed targeted at the kids who needed rescuing. Instead, it grew into a subsidy for everyone but the working-class families the program was designed to serve.

None of this is by accident. The supermajority was warned by Democrats, education professionals and concerned Hoosiers of the consequences that their policies would inflict on our schools. It is the direct, foreseeable and self-inflicted result of almost two decades of choices made by men and women who have mistaken their own supermajority for a mandate to neglect the children they were elected to serve.

Districts across the state are being forced to ask voters to approve referenda to raise their own local property taxes just so schools can keep the lights on and pay their teachers. Let’s not pretend this educational belt-tightening is born of necessity. Indiana has nearly $4 billion in surplus and reserve funds, which is more than enough to return to our previous, robust support of public education. Our schools and the children attending them are being asked to make do with less while the state sits on more money than it knows what to do with.

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I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it out of partisan loyalty. I say it as a man who spent nearly 20 years as a school principal and six years as a teacher before I ever spent a day in the Statehouse. I have seen firsthand what happens when a school has what it needs, and I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

I am telling you, plainly: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has had 16 years to prove it knows the difference too. It does not. If it did, we would not rank 45th in the nation for public school support. We would not be watching our children fall further behind their peers in other states while the people entrusted with fixing it offer nothing but superficial, special-interest-backed policies that don’t address the underlying issues.

This is where years of unchecked Republican domination have gotten us: two decades of failure and of backs turned on the generation that makes up the future of this state, this nation and the world beyond.

For 16 years, they have stood before us and promised that this would finally be the year public education in Indiana gets fixed. And for 16 years, they have failed to deliver on that promise. The only question left is how much longer Hoosiers are willing to take their word for it and allow more children to fail academically

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Indiana, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers
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