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Peter Greene: The Perverse Incentives of School Choice

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2025 //
12

Peter Greene nails one of the many flaws of school choice. The choice movement hurtles forward despite its record of failure to fulfill any of its promises but one: It provides choice. Not necessarily good choice or better choice. Just choice.

Greene writes:

When researcher Josh Cowen is talking about the negative effects of school vouchers on education, he often points at “subprime” private schools— schools opened in strip malls or church basements or some other piece of cheap real estate and operated by people who are either fraudsters or incompetents or both.

This is a feature, not a bug. Because as much as choice advocates tout the awesomeness of competition, the taxpayer-funded free market choice system that we’ve been saddled with has built in perverse incentives that guarantee competition will be focused on the wrong things.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. Now, the marketing can be based on superior quality, but sometimes it’s just easier to go another way.

The thing about voucher schools is that quality is not what makes them money. What makes them money is signing people up.

That’s it. Voucher school operators don’t have to run a good school; they just have to sell the seats. Once the student is signed up and their voucher dollars are in the bank, the important part of the transaction is over. There is no incentive for the school to spend a pile of money on doing a good job; all the incentive is for the school to come up with a good marketing plan.

Betsy DeVos liked to compare the free market for schools with a row of food trucks, which was wrong for a host of reasons, but one was the market speed. Buy lunch at a food truck, and you become part of the marketing very quickly. Within minutes, you are either a satisfied customer telling your friends to eat there, or warning everyone to stay away. Reputations are built quickly.

But for schools, the creation of a reputation for quality takes a long time, time measured in years. The most stable part of the voucher school market is schools that already have their reputation in place from years of operation. But if you are a start-up, you need to get that money for those seats right now. If you are a struggling crappy private school with a not-so-great reputation, you don’t have time to turn that around; you’ve got to up your marketing game right now.

So the focus (and investment) goes toward marketing and enrollment.

Won’t your poor performance catch up with you? Maybe, but the market turns over yearly, as students age out and age in to school. And you don’t have to capture much of it. If you are in an urban center with 100,000 students and your school just needs to fill 100 seats, disgruntled former families won’t hurt you much– just get out there and pitch to the other 99,900 students. And if you do go under, well, you made a nice chunk of money for a few years, and now you can move on to your next grift.

This is also why the “better” private schools remain unavailable to most families holding a voucher. If a reputation for quality is your main selling point, you can’t afford to let in students who might hurt that record of success.

Meanwhile, talk to teachers at some of the less-glowing private and charter schools about the amount of pressure they get to make the student numbers look good.

Because of the way incentives are structured, the business of a voucher school is not education. The business of the voucher school is to sell seats, and the education side of the business exists only to help sell seats. Our version of a free market system guarantees that the schools will operate backwards, an enrollment sales business with classrooms set up with a primary purpose of supporting the sales department, instead of vice versa.

Charter schools? The same problem, but add one other source of revenue– government grants. Under Trump, the feds will offer up a half a billion dollars to anyone who wants to get into the charter biz, and we already know that historically one dollar out of every four will go to fraud or waste, including charter businesses that will collect a ton of taxpayer money and never even open.

“Yeah, well,” say the haters. “Isn’t that also true for public schools”

No, it is not. Here’s why. Public schools are not businesses. They are service providers, not commodity vendors. Like the post office, like health care in civilized countries, like snow plows, like (once upon a time) journalism, their job is to provide a necessary service to the citizens of this country. Their job should be not to compete, but to serve, for the reasons laid out here.

And this week-ass excuse for accountability– if you do a bad enough job, maybe it will make it harder for your marketing department– has been sold as the only accountability that school choice needs.

School choice, because its perverse incentives favor selling seats over educating students, is ripe for enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s name for the process by which operators make products deliberately worse in order to make them more profitable. The “product” doesn’t have to be good– just good enough not to mess up the sales. And with no meaningful oversight to determine where the “good enough” line should be drawn, subprime voucher and charter schools are free to see just how close to the bottom they can get. It is far too easy to transform into a backwards business, which is why it should not be a business at all.

If your foundational belief is that nobody ever does anything unless they can profit from it (and therefor everything must be run “like a business”) then we are in “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people” territory, and I’m not sure what to tell you. What is the incentive to work in a public education system? That’s a whole other post, but I would point to Daniel Pink’s theory of motivation– autonomy, mastery and purpose. Particular a purpose that is one centered on making life better for young human beings and a country better for being filled with educated humans. I am sure there are people following that motivation in the school choice world, but they are trapped in a model that is inhospitable to such thinking.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Education Industry, Ethics, Lies, Vouchers

The “DOGE Commission” and Its Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2024 //
14

Trump created an advisory group called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It is an advisory commission, not a “department.” It has no official mandate. Musk claims it will cut the federal budget by $2 trillion, though he hasn’t said whether that’s a cut in by the annual budget or a cut over years.

Musk has billions in federal contracts, so his participation in this exercise raises questions about his conflicts of interest and whether he will injure his competitors.

Three ethics experts wrote an article for MSNBC about the conflicted role that Musk has. They are: Virginia Canter, chief anticorruption counsel, State Democracy Defenders Fund, Richard W. Painter, MSNBC Columnist and Gabe Lezra, policy director for State Democracy Defenders Fund.

The so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” is officially a mere advisory commission. But DOGE is nevertheless poised to help restructure the federal government and perhaps upend decades of regulation of everything from vehicle safety to space exploration. Co-chair Elon Musk is one of the most politically powerful private citizens in the country, as evidenced by his role in the recent budget crisis in Washington. Through his wealth and his ownership of X, he has enormous influence over President-elect Donald Trump, lawmakers in Congress and the national narrative.

Musk’s clout and his role as DOGE co-chair are even more significant given the billions of dollars in federal contracts held by his various companies and the array of federal agencies that regulate those companies. Americans are entitled to know about his communications and activities with the federal government before he and Trump go about overhauling it. That’s why our organization, the State Democracy Defenders Fund, has begun our inquiry into DOGE by filing Freedom of Information Act requests across the federal government.

As leaders of a federal advisory committee, Musk and his co-chair, Vivek Ramaswamy, plan to serve as “outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. As such, they will not be bound by conflict-of-interest law binding federal employees. But the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 says that such groups must operate with transparency and allow public participation. Our inquiry about Musk’s interests before the federal government is part of the transparency that is required for DOGE to instill public confidence rather than sow distrust.

In announcing the creation of DOGE, Trump wrote that the commission would pave the way for his administration to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Musk’s companies receive billions of dollars in government contracts. DOGE’s broad mandatecould give Musk vast sway over the very same agencies that administer those contracts, as well as agencies investigating his companies.

The scope of the potential problem we are facing is immense. Musk’s companies have been the subject of more than a dozen federal investigationsor reviews with various agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, among others.

Most recently, Musk reportedly failed to secure from the Air Force “high-level security access” due to “potential security risks,” and he and SpaceX reportedly “triggered” at least three federal reviews for noncompliance with federal reporting protocols in place to ensure the protection of state secrets. Accordingly, we’ve sent our requests for records to all of these agencies — and the agencies with which he or his companies appear to have (or have had) contracts, including NASA, the U.S. Space Force, the Department of Defense, the Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The possible conflicts of interest are too many to enumerate. The “de facto monopoly” that Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX has on rocket launches should raise flags at the Federal Trade Commission — an agency that is already in Musk’s crosshairs. Even minor changes in an agency’s enforcement priorities or procurement policies could cost — or make — Musk tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. And given the sheer array of Musk-owned companies, decisions affecting competitors are almost inevitable. Earlier this month, Ramaswamy said that DOGE is already looking at a Department of Energy loan to one of Tesla’s rivals, Rivian Automotive.

The mere appearance of conflict in government can quickly undermine the public’s confidence in its government.

A series of press reports indicate that Musk and Ramaswamy have already begun work on DOGE: They’ve been meeting with government officials, developing DOGE’s priorities and targets, and recruiting other technology executives to join the department. They’ve even launched a podcast. Musk has solicited applications on X (formerly Twitter) to join DOGE, with applicants expected to put in 80-hour weeks doing “tedious work…& compensation is zero.”

That is why we are beginning our investigation now, a month before the beginning of the new Trump administration. Presidential transitions have extensive contacts with the agencies the new administration will be taking over. If Musk, Ramaswamy or their agents are beginning to work on projects that could benefit them, the public must know.

The mere appearance of conflict in government can quickly undermine the public’s confidence in its government. Absent strong ethics controls and adequate oversight mechanisms, Musk’s participation in regulatory and other executive policy decisions could lead Americans to question whether his recommendations are truly in their interest — or in his financial interest.

If DOGE’s work has indeed begun, transparency must begin as well. Its leaders’ and agents’ communications with federal agencies are obviously in the public interest. They offer the first glimpse into how Musk and Ramaswamy may use DOGE to attempt to restructure the government — and the extent to which those plans may benefit DOGE’s leaders. Without these records, the public will remain in the dark as Musk and Ramaswamy begin this project, and will therefore not be able to assess whether DOGE will serve the nation — or the interests of a privileged few.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Corruption, Ethics, Musk, Elon, Trump

McKenzie Scott Gives $65 Million to Md. Group Focused on Affordable Housing

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2024 //
5

While her ex-husband Jeff Bezos gave $5 million to help house the homeless in central Florida, McKenzie Scott gave $65 million to an organization in Maryland aiming to solve the affordable housing crisis. Four years ago, she gave the same organization $50 million.

Think of it: he helps with a small (by his standards) gift to house the homeless. Scott makes a gift more than 12 times larger to address the problem of homelessness.

Let’s be clear: in a better society, large social and economic problems would be addressed by government, not by philanthropists. But Republicans oppose any attempt to help people who are unable to help themselves. They block all efforts to expand the role of government. They cling to the belief that everyone should take care of themselves; those that can’t should turn to church, family, or local charities, they believe. In the age of Trump, the organizations that help others are likely to get less or no government support.

Scott divorced Bezos in 2019. Since then, she has given $19.2 billion to charitable groups. She is still worth more than $30 billion, based on the Amazon stock she received in her divorce. She’s determined to give away a substantial amount every year.

She represents the very best of philanthropy. No one applies for help. She has a team to research possible recipients. When she decides who are the lucky winners, they get a call from out of the blue telling them the size of their reward. The winners are free to use the money as they see fit.

Entrepreneur magazine reported:

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, 54, donated $65 million to Enterprise Community Partners last month, a national nonprofit based in Maryland that aims to address the U.S.’s shortage of affordable housing.

The surprise donation left the organization shocked, reps said in a statement.

“Some of us probably wanted to cry for joy,” Janine Lind, president of Enterprise’s community development division, told the Baltimore Banner. “This came at a moment where the affordable housing sector certainly is being put to test and is struggling.”

It’s Scott’s second gift to the 42-year-old organization—the first was $50 million in 2020. The organization noted in a press release that Scott’s gift is “one of the largest reported gifts to an affordable housing organization.”

Categories Billionaires, Competition, Creativity, Philanthropy

Tom Ultican: Denver Charter School Study Is Shoddy Research

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2024 //
3

Tom Ultican is a retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics. Before joining the teaching profession, he worked in the corporate sector.

He writes here about a shoddy piece of research on charter schools in Denver.

Ultican writes:

Another education study financed by Arnold Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation blurs education reality. Their 2022 model did not pass the laugh test so “researchers” from the University of Colorado Denver tried again. Unfortunately their claims still confuse correlation with causation. This error seems purposeful.

The study of school reform in Denver was conducted by the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). They state, “For the past three years CEPA has partnered with the Center on Reinventing Public Education to consider a paradigm-shifting approach to family and community engagement efforts in school districts.” It is a study apparently to justify and promote the portfolio model of school management, a system first proposed in 2009 by the founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Paul Hill.

In their 2022 study, this same team also used state testing data from years 2004/5 through 2018/19. They explained that the first 4-years of the research employed pre-reform data and the final 10-years were from the portfolio model reform period. The authors reported, “During the study period, the district opened 65 new schools, and closed, replaced, and restarted over 35 others.” (Page 7)

The National Education Policy Center contracted with Robert Shand to review the 2022 Denver study. Dr. Shand is Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at American University and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Shand also did a review of the new 2024 study.

In his 2022 review, Shand agreed that the test scores for Denver Public Schools had gone up but he noted a few reasons why claiming these gains were because of the portfolio model was unreasonable:

  • Demographics shifting to a larger percentage of white students in Denver coincided with the reforms.
  • Per-student revenues increased in Denver by 22% but only 13% across Colorado.
  • Student-to-teacher ratio in Denver dropped from 17.9 to 14.9.
  • DPS was already showing academic improvement before implementation of the portfolio reforms.
  • Black and Hispanic/Latinx students were growing at approximately 0.06 standard deviations per year pre-reform and 0.03-0.04 standard deviations per year post-reform. (Page 7)

The 2024 Redo

Professor Shand’s summary response to the 2024 report states:

“While the new report does convincingly demonstrate that the gains are not significantly due to changing demographics, it fails to address other critiques of the prior study, including (1) that the portfolio model was undertheorized, with unclear mechanisms of action and insufficient attention to potential drawbacks; and (2) that circumstances, events, and resources besides the portfolio reform and student demographics were changing concurrently with the reform. Additionally, the report’s sweeping conclusion—that Denver’s reform is the most effective in U.S. history—is unsupported. The improved outcomes in Denver during this time period are impressive, but the authors seem overly determined to cite a package of favored reforms as the cause.” (Page 3)

While Shand agrees that demographic changes are not the whole reason for the improved test scores, they are a significant input. The chart above from USAFacts.org shows the typically higher scoring groups Asians and Whites going from 54.2% of the population to 58.9% in the 14 years from 2005 to 2019. During the same period, the Hispanic and Black population shrunk from 42.9% to 38.1% which resulted in a 9.5% shift in the population from a lower scoring to a higher scoring racial mix.

An even bigger impact on the scoring in Denver was the change in economic circumstances. Standardized testing is useless because the results are dependent on one variable, family wealth. Statisticians assign r values between -1 and +1 to results tested. Plus 1 signifies certainty, zero shows no influence and -1 indicates certainty in the opposite direction of expectations. The only input ever found with more than 0.3 r-value is family wealth at 0.9 r-value. The median family income in Denver is up significantly.

Two sources show how strongly Denver’s family income has grown. Neilsberg research shares that between 2010 and 2020 the median income grew from $61,394 to $82,335, a 25% growth. City-Data states:

“The median household income in Denver, CO in 2022 was $88,213, which was about the same as the median annual income of $89,302 across the entire state of Colorado. Compared to the median income of $39,500 in 2000 this represents an increase of 55.2%”

This kind of wealth growth over the 14 years the Denver researchers studied was bound to have a significant impact on testing results, but they ignored it. Add this to the 9% greater revenue for Denver schools and three less students per teacher compared to the rest of the state and of course Denver’s student made comparative testing gains.

Professor Shand mentions the damage caused by school turnaround efforts and closing schools noting the research indicates these are especially harmful events for students in low income or marginalized neighborhoods. (Page 6 and 7)  Shand concluded:

“In sum, this report provides some additional supporting evidence in favor of the tentative conclusion that Denver’s portfolio reform was positive. Importantly, the report also grossly exaggerates both the magnitude of the success and certainty behind the evidence for it. The findings should thus be interpreted with extreme caution. (Page 8)

He is being nice. He should have concluded that this report is school choice propaganda.

About the Report Authors

The lead author, Parker Baxter, is Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University Of Colorado Denver School Of Public Affairs. He previously was Director of Knowledge at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Parker is also a Senior Research Affiliate at the CRPE, where he worked on the District-Charter Collaboration Compact Project and the Portfolio School District Project. He is a former alumnus of Teach for America.

Anna Nicotera is a Senior Researcher at Basis Policy Research specializing in quantitative and qualitative applied research methods. She worked six years as Senior Director, Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Nicotera was a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Center on School Choice, Vanderbilt University for four years.

David Stuit holds a Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University. He is a former Emerging Education Policy Scholar at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice (Rebranded EdChoice), and member of the American Enterprise Institute’s K–12 working group. He began his career as a classroom teacher in Denver, Colorado.

Expecting an unbiased piece of research from this group is like learning about the dangers of smoking from Phillip-Morris.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Denver, Education Reform

Rick Wilson: Trump in “Paradise Lost”

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2024 //
4

Rick Wilson was one of the founders of The Lincoln Project and one of the leaders of the fallen-away Republicans. He posted this remarkable comparison of Trumpworld to hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost. I didn’t post it all. To finish reading, open the link.

Yesterday, Simon Heffer’s piece in The Telegraph nailed it: Milton’s Paradise Lost reads like a grim prophecy for our current era of authoritarianism and right-wing spectacle. 

I promise, this isn’t too much of a classics rabbit hole. 

Inspired, I dusted off my old, heavily annotated copy and dove back in. The pages hadn’t seen the light of day in 3 decades. It’s a bit of a slog for modern readers—Milton wasn’t writing for a TikTok audience—but the timeless truths cut through like a knife.

The opening act of Paradise Lost is a strategy meeting in Hell, led by Satan himself and attended by a rogues’ gallery of fallen angels. It’s a masterclass in manipulation, sycophancy, and passive-aggressive ambition—all wrapped in enough rhetorical flourish to choke a camel. Sound familiar? 


If you’ve ever suffered through a senior-level government meeting, you’d feel right at home. Except this one is in Pandemonium, the capital of Hell—a place I imagine would look like the worst Trump Transition meeting, complete with gilded tackiness and the faint stench of sulfur. (Or mildew, if you’re at Mar-a-Lago.)

The debate? Oh, it’s a lively one. Some fallen angels suggest making Hell a bit more livable—think “evil gentrification.” Others want to launch a full-frontal assault on Heaven, declaring war on an unbeatable opponent. 

Then comes the actual meeting: targeting God’s shiny new creation—us. The idea of corrupting humanity, God’s most beloved project, becomes the chosen strategy. And who volunteers for the job? Satan himself, of course. It was always his plan. When a direct assault on Heaven fails, attacking mankind becomes the ultimate revenge. As Satan puts it:

“To waste his whole creation, or possess
All as our own, and drive, as we were driven,
The puny habitants, or if not drive,
Seduce them to our party, that their God
May prove their foe, and with repenting hand
Abolish his own works.
This would surpass common revenge, and interrupt his joy.”

Does this sound a little… familiar? 

It should. The parallels to today’s politics are as subtle as a sledgehammer. The fallen angels in this story aren’t just characters—they’re prototypes. Swap out Beelzebub and Belial for the MAGA brain trust, and you get the same toxic mix of ambition, incompetence, and amorality.

The MAGA operatives, family sycophants, billionaire bootlickers, scamfluencers, and D.C. operatives dreaming of internment camps and deadly revenge which are lining up for Trump’s Cabinet will make Milton’s Hell look like a model of compassion and efficiency. 

These are people whose qualifications are as dubious as their morals and whose plans are as dangerous as they are chaotic. Their guidebook for wrecking the American system? 

The infamous Project 2025. Remember that? They denied it, of course—counting on the credulous to buy their lies—but it’s as real as Satan’s envy in Paradise Lost.

And speaking of Satan, let’s not tiptoe around it: Trump is the Prince of Darkness in this particular drama. He wants nothing more than to destroy everything in his path. It’s not always coherent, but it’s always him.

His advisors inside and outside his transition —Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Stephen Cheung, and the rest of his court—mimic the infernal chatter of Moloch, Belial, and Beelzebub. Like their hellish counterparts, their rhetoric is a corruption of America, their plans for an endless era of cruel spectacle, and their motives are rooted in hatred for the good. Just as Satan hated God and Heaven, Trump despises the institutions, norms, and values that have long preserved this country.

He’s backed by a parliament of Cabinet members and advisors dreaming of a post-American, post-republican, and post-democratic world. (Yes, the lowercase “r” in Republican and “d” in Democratic was deliberate.) Trump’s attention span may be short, but their ability to execute the commander’s intent will be boundless. They, and he, hate this country as it exists today. 

What does he love? 

Power. Obedience. Subjugation. Wealth. Immunity from consequences. These are the dark desires of every dictator, tyrant, and abuser in history. And Trump revels in them. His demonic minions—think Elon Musk as Moloch—are already busy concocting spectacles of suffering and chaos across America.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck debating the quality (or lack thereof) of Trump’s Cabinet picks and whether Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter makes him Worse Than Trump. (Spoiler: it’ doesn’t.)

Almost none of them would survive scrutiny in a rational world. But here’s the thing: their very terribleness is the point. Trump’s goal isn’t just to govern badly—it’s to corrupt every institution they touch. By forcing Americans to accept criminals, incompetents, and lunatics as leaders, he’s marking this country indelibly. This is his revenge, his legacy: a nation bent to his will and broken beyond repair.

Categories Competition, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Trump

John Thompson: How the Federal Mandate for Testing Destroyed Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
24

John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He remembers the time before George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” took control of the schools away from educators. Data-driven accountability, he writes, polluted the culture of learning. After more than two decades of failure, educators and students need a better way forward.

He writes in Oklahoma Voice:

When I first walked into John Marshall High School in 1992, I was stunned by the exceptional quality of so many teachers.

It had never occurred to me that such great teaching and learning was being done in high schools. Yes, there were problems, but each year, our school would make incremental improvements.

Then, the Oklahoma City Public Schools system (OKCPS) would bow to pressure and implement disastrous policies that would wipe out those gains — or worse.

I remember when OKCPS was first forced into policies that were later dubbed “corporate school reform.”

The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002 by former Republican President George W. Bush, increased the federal government’s influence in holding schools accountable for student performance.

During the first years after the passage, local and state leaders often had some success in minimizing the damage done by school “choice” and high stakes testing. But, as in the rest of the nation, that resistance angered market-driven reformers who then doubled-down on harsher, more punitive policies.

They ordered everyone to “be on the same page,” and even today press educators to “teach to the test.”

I quickly discovered that this one-size-fits-all philosophy was disastrous for schools, teachers and students. And decades later, it still remains so.

It doesn’t take into account the difference between situational and generational poverty. It ignores that some students are seriously emotionally disturbed and/or burdened by multiple traumatic experiences, now known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). And, it fails to factor in that children, who may have reading or math disabilities, have the potential to become student leaders.

The tipping point for me was when school staffing became driven by a primitive statistical model that could not distinguish between low income students and children of situational poverty receiving free and reduced price lunches as opposed to children living in extreme poverty with multiple ACEs.

Because of the additional costs of providing services for the most emotionally disturbed students, teachers in “regular” classrooms were assigned up to 250 students.

I had classes with 60 students.

Data-driven accountability pollutes our learning cultures.

School segregation by choice combined with test-driven accountability creates a culture of competition, winners and losers, and simplistic policies that ignore poverty and Adverse Childhood Experiences.

It is a policy imposed mostly by non-educators who ignore educational and cognitive scientific research.

As these quick fixes failed — just like educators and social scientists predicted they would — the “blame game” took off, fueling an exodus of teachers and driving out the joy of teaching and learning. The change in culture particularly affected the poorest children of color.

In order to improve our learning environment and our children’s outcomes, we must first get back to building on our strengths rather than weaknesses.

For instance, if we agree on a culture where we use tests for diagnostic purposes, rather than determining winners and losers, we could go back to the time when our curriculum committees included teachers, assistant principals, and parents.

Those meetings frequently ended in compromises that brought out the best in all sides and made our schools a desired place to learn and work.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Curriculum, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Thom Hartmann: Republicans Are the Party of Cruelty

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2024 //
74

Thom Hartmann is a keen observer of American politics. A prolific writer, he sees issues in historical perspective. He knows that your grandfather’s Republican Party was conservative and imbued with a sense of devotion to community and tradition. Conservatives conserve, not destroy. That party today is devoted to disruption, to destroying communities and their public schools, to protecting the billionaires, and to mocking the weak. It is not your grandfather’s Republican Party.

Thom Hartmann writes:

During the 1950s, Republicans were the party that promoted labor unions, Social Security, and a top 91% income tax bracket and 70% estate tax on the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower successfully campaigned on what we’d call a progressive agenda for re-election in 1956.

During the Reagan years, Republicans embraced Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism with its free trade, opposition to unions, ending free college, and tax cuts for the fat cats. They called themselves “the party of new ideas.” They may have done more harm than good, but for most Republicans it was a good-faith effort. 

Today, they’ve pretty much given up on all of that.  All they have left is cruelty.

When Governor Tim Walz gave his heartwarming acceptance speech Wednesday night here at the DNC in Chicago, his son Gus was caught on camera proudly proclaiming, through tear-streaked eyes, “That’s my dad!” 

The response from Trumpy Republicans was immediate: Ann Coulter wrote, “Talk about weird.” Rightwing hate jock Jay Weber posted, “Meet my son, Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.” Trumpy podcaster Mike Crispi ridiculed Walz’s “stupid crying son,” adding, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.” Another well-known podcaster on the right, Alec Lace, said, “Get that kid a tampon already.”

Compassion for a learning-disabled child is dead on the right: all they have left is cruelty.

Ronald Reagan helped shepherd through Congress the most consequential border bill in American history, and when it needed updating Oklahoma’s Republican Senator James Lankford worked with Democrats to update it in a meaningful way. Trump demanded Republicans kill the legislation, invoking the memory of his tearing over 5,500 babies away from their mothers and trafficking them into fly-by-night “adoption” schemes (around 1000 are still missing) and his demand that the border patrol shoot immigrants in the legs.

Trump’s acolytes in Congress don’t even pretend any more to have a border policy: all they have left is cruelty.

President George HW Bush worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to unwind the USSR in the hope of creating a democratic Russia. Neither expected Vladimir Putin to turn that nation into a virtual concentration camp where gays are routinely murdered, child pornography is legal (and they’ve kidnapped over 700,000 Ukrainian children), and dissenters are tortured, poisoned, and sent to brutal Siberian gulags. Donald Trump celebrates Putin, calling his invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “savvy,” handing Putin’s ambassador a western spy and top-secret information in his first month in office, and trying to abandon America’s traditional role as a moral leader in the world.

Trump’s GOP has abandoned our founding principles: all they have left is cruelty.

During the 2020 election, Trump followers tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas, threatening to kill the occupants (which they believed included Kamala Harris). A crazed Trump supporter broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Trump tweeted a picture of the bus being attacked, writing below it, “I LOVE TEXAS!” and repeatedly makes jokes about the attack on Pelosi, as if to encourage future attacks on the families of other Democratic politicians.

Not a single elected Republican (as best as I can find with a pretty thorough web search) has condemned either: all they have left is cruelty.

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis turned down federal money that would have fed 2.1 million low-income children in his state; he was one of 13 Republican governors to do the same, in a nation where one in seven children — over 11 million every year — go to bed hungry.

We are literally the only developed country in the world with a massive child hunger problem because all Republicans have left is cruelty.

When President Obama succeeded in passing and signing the Affordable Care Act, it offered every state funds to expand Medicaid to give healthcare coverage to all their low-income citizens with the federal government covering 90% of the cost. To this day, ten states under Republican control have refused to accept the money, leading to millions of preventable illnesses and early deaths.

Republican states could have joined all the Blue states and every other developed country in the world by providing universal healthcare, but refuse to because all they have left is cruelty.

 When a 10-year-old girl was raped and impregnated, Republicans like Congressman Jim Jordan, Governor Kristi Noem, Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Jesse Waters, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost ridiculed the claim. When the rape and pregnancy were proven and the girl fled Ohio to a state where abortion was legal to terminate the pregnancy, Indiana’s Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita promised to launch an “investigation.”

Rokita didn’t investigate the rape, however: he instead went after the physician who performed the abortion. Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, he sent a violent mob against the US Capitol. As they tried to murder the vice president and speaker of the house, covered the walls of the building with feces and defaced priceless paintings, Trump gleefully watched on live television for over three hours while refusing to call in the national guard or take any other meaningful action.

Five civilians and three police officers died as the result of his sending that murderous mob because all he and his GOP have left is cruelty.

This week Americans saw Democrats display compassion, care, respect, and reverence for our democracy. We saw the best of this country, hope for the future, and actual plans to improve the lives of Americans.

Last month, in sharp contrast, we watched the Republican convention and saw, instead, a cavalcade of anger, bile, grievance, hate, and, of course, cruelty.

Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.

Note to Thom:

Some things you didn’t mention.

The red states that have repealed or loosened their child labor laws so that teens can work in hazardous jobs at younger ages.

The red states that overturned local laws requiring regular water breaks for laborers working outdoors in hot weather.

The red states that are defunding their public schools.

The red states that have abolished all gun laws and allow open carry of guns without a permit.

The red states oppose free lunches for children.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Closing schools, Competition, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Republicans

Milwaukee: Three Decades of Charters and Vouchers Produced No Gains for Kids

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2024 //
7

A major, nonpartisan review of Milwaukee schools over the past three decades produced a dismal result: No improvement.

Backed by millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, voucher advocates promised that competition would produce gains for all sectors. It didn’t.

Milwaukee has a significant number of charter schools and voucher schools. About 55% of all students are enrolled in traditional public schools. The public schools enroll a disproportionate share of students with disabilities.

Rory Linnane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:

Three decades since their beginnings in Milwaukee, publicly funded private school programs and independently run charter schools now enroll over 40% of the city’s students.

Reflecting on the city’s shifting education landscape, a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum examines enrollment, financing and academic outcomes for Milwaukee schools in every sector, including traditional public schools, private schools and charter schools…

‘Transformed system has not transformed outcomes for children,’ researchers say

Milwaukee in the ’90s was “widely seen as the epicenter of ‘education reform’ in the country,” the forum noted, as state lawmakers opened the door for private operators to start their own schools. Proponents argued that the free-market competition would push all city schools to improve.

In 1990, state lawmakers created the country’s first “voucher” program in Milwaukee, providing public funding for students to attend private schools. Soon after, Minnesota lawmakers were the first to write legislation for charter schools, allowing teacher-led nonprofits to operate schools. Wisconsin was one of the first states to follow in 1993, but without the requirement that teachers lead them.

Thirty years later, the forum noted there is “little evidence … that the average Milwaukee child receives a higher quality education today.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Education Industry, Failure, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Thrilling Event at the Olympics!

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2024 //
20

Ok, this clip is neither about education nor politics, but I watched it four times and loved it. Think of it as a testament to discipline, determination, and training. The guy who was heavily favored to win came in second.

Categories Competition, Discipline, Joy

Chicago: Community Schools Are a Better Strategy than “Education Reform”

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2024 //
31

Jeff Bryant, veteran education journalist, writes here about the success of community schools in Chicago, in contrast to the failed ideas of “education reform.” The latter echoed the failed strategies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top: testing, competition, privatization, firing staff, closing schools, ranking and rating students, teachers, principals and schools based on test scores. So-called “education reform” created massive disruption and led to massive failure.

Bryant describes the evolution of community schools in Chicago, led by grassroots leaders like Jitu Brown, where parents are valued partners.

Bryant writes:

“Until now, we haven’t even tried to make big-city school districts work, especially for children of color,” Jhoanna Maldonado said when Our Schools asked her to describe what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and his supporters have in mind for the public school system of the nation’s third-largest city.

Johnson scored a surprising win in the 2023 mayoral election against Paul Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and education was a key issue in the race, according to multiplenewsoutlets. Maldonado is an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which is reported to have “bankrolled” Johnson’s mayoral campaign along with other labor groups, and Johnson is a former middle school teacher and teachers union organizer. What Johnson and his supporters are doing “is transforming our education system,” Maldonado said. There’s evidence the transformation is sorely needed.

For the past two decades, Chicago’s schools experienced a cavalcade of negative stories, including recurring fiscal crisis, financial scandals and mismanagement, a long downward slide in student enrollment, persistent underfunding from the state, the “largest mass closing [of schools] in the nation’s history,” and a seemingly endless conflict between the CPS district administration and CTU.

Yet, there are signs the district may be poised for a rebound.

“The people of Chicago have had enormous patience as they’ve witnessed years of failed school improvement efforts,” Maldonado said. “And it has taken years for the community to realize that no one else—not charter school operators or so-called reformers—can do the transformation. We have to do it ourselves.”

“Doing it ourselves” seems to mean rejecting years of policy and governance ideas that have dominated the district, and is what Johnson and his transition committee call, “an era of school reform focused on accountability, high stakes testing, austere budgets, and zero tolerance policies,” in the report, “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All.”

After experiencing more than 10 years of enrollment declines between 2012 and 2022, losing more than 81,000 students during this period, and dropping from its status as third-largest school district in the nation to fourth in 2022, CPS reported an enrollment increase for the 2023-2024 school year. Graduation rates hit an all-time high in 2022. The number of students being suspended or arrested on school grounds has also declined significantly. And student scores on reading tests, after a sharp decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, have improved faster than most school districts across the country. Math scores have also rebounded, but are more comparable to other improving districts, according to a 2024 Chalkbeat article.

Johnson and his supporters have been slowly changing the district’s basic policy and governance structures. They are attempting to redefine the daily functions of schools and their relationships with families and their surrounding communities by expanding the number of what they refer to as “sustainable community schools.” The CPS schools that have adopted the community schools idea stand at 20 campuses as of 2024, according to CTU. Johnson and his transition committee’s Blueprint report has called for growing the number of schools using the sustainable community schools approach to 50, with the long-term goal of expanding the number of schools to 200.

The call to have more CPS schools adopt the community schools approach aligns with a national trend where several school districts, including big-city districts such as Los Angeles and New York City, are embracing the idea.

Community schools look different in different places because the needs and interests of communities vary, but the basic idea is that schools should address the fundamental causes of academic problems, including student health and well-being. The approach also requires schools to involve students and their families more deeply in school policies and programs and to tap the assets and resources available in the surrounding community to enrich the school.

In Chicago—where most students are non-white, more than 70 percent are economically disadvantaged, and large percentages need support for English language learning and learning disabilities—addressing root causes for academic problems often means bringing specialized staff and programs into the school to provide more academic and non-academic student and family services, often called wraparound supports. The rationale for this is clear.

“If a student is taken care of and feels safe and heard and has caring adults, that student is much more ready to learn,” Jennifer VanderPloeg the project manager of CPS’s Sustainable Community Schools told Our Schools. “If [a student is] carrying around a load of trauma, having a lot of unmet needs, or other things [they’re] worrying about, then [they] don’t have the brain space freed up for algebra. That’s just science,” she said.

“Also important is for students to see themselves in the curriculum and have Black and brown staff members in the school,” said Autumn Berg, director of CPS’s Community Schools Initiative. “All of that matters in determining how a student perceives their surroundings.”

“Community schools are about creating a culture and climate that is healthy, safe, and loving,” said VanderPloeg. “Sure, it would be ideal if parents would be able to attend to all the unmet needs of our students, but that’s just not the system we live in. And community schools help families access these [unmet] needs too.”

Also, according to VanderPloeg, community schools give extra support to teachers by providing them with assistance in all of the things teachers don’t have time to attend to, like helping families find access to basic services and finding grants to support after-school and extracurricular programs.

But while some Chicago educators see the community schools idea as merely a mechanism to add new programs and services to a school’s agenda, others describe it with far more expansive and sweeping language.

“Community schools are an education model rooted in self-determination and equity for Black and brown people,” Jitu Brown told Our Schools. Brown is the national director of Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of Black and brown-led grassroots community, youth, and parent organizations in more than 30 cities.

“In the Black community, we have historically been denied the right to engage in creating what we want for our community,” Brown said.

In Chicago, according to Brown, most of the schools serving Black and brown families are struggling because they’ve been led by people who don’t understand the needs of those families. “Class plays a big role in this too,” he said. “The people in charge of our schools have generally been taught to believe they are smarter than the people in the schools they’re leading.”

But in community schools, Brown sees the opportunity to put different voices in charge of Chicago schools.

“The community schools strategy is not just about asking students, parents, and the community for their input,” he said. “It’s about asking for their guidance and leadership.”

It Started with Saving a Neighborhood

Chicago’s journey of embracing the community schools movement has been long in the making, and Brown gets a lot of credit for bringing the idea to the attention of public school advocates in the city.

He achieved much of this notoriety in 2015 by leading a hunger strike to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School in Chicago’s predominantly African American Bronzeville community. Among the demands of the strikers—Brandon Johnson was a participant in the protest when he was a CTU organizer—was for the school to be reopened as a “hub” of what they called “a sustainable community school village,” according to Democracy Now.

The strike received prominent attention in national news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But Brown’s engagement with the community schools approach started before the fight for Dyett, going back almost two decades when he was a resource coordinator at the South Shore High School of Entrepreneurship, a school created in 2001 when historic South Shore International College Preparatory High School was reorganized into three smaller campuses as part of an education reform effort known as small schools.

Brown was responsible for organizing educators and community members to pool resources and involve organizations in the community to strengthen the struggling school. He could see that the school was being “set up,” in his words, for either closure or takeover by charter school operators.

“School privatization in the form of charter schools was coming to our neighborhood,” he said, “and we needed a stronger offer to engage families in rallying to the school and the surrounding community.”

Brown pushed for the adoption of an approach for transforming schools that reflected a model supported by the National Education Association of full-service community schools.

That approach was based on five pillars that included a challenging and culturally relevant curriculum, wraparound services for addressing students’ health and well-being, high-quality teaching, student-centered school climate, and community and parent engagement. A sixth pillar, calling for shared leadership in school governance, was eventually added.

After engaging in “thousands” of conversations in the surrounding historic Kenwood neighborhood, where former President Barack Obama once lived, Brown said that he came to be persuaded that organizing a school around the grassroots desires of students, parents, teachers, and community members was a powerful alternative to school privatization and other top-down reform efforts that undermine teachers and disenfranchise families.

Brown and his collaborators recognized that the community schools idea was what would turn their vision of a school into a connected system of families, educators, and community working together.

Open the link to continue reading this important story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Community Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Failure, Innovation, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling), Vouchers
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